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|In: Career Management|Last Updated:

An old bit of folk wisdom warns you to be careful what you ask for, because you might get it.

Those of us who have worked in the trenches of PC support have fallen into this trap. Up to our eyeballs in frustration with end-users who want to know no more about how PCs work than they do about their cars, we wish they’d become just a bit more technically literate., and actually want to know about the remarkable technology we’ve put in front of them.

And what do we do when we get our wish? Complain about those irresponsible power users who insist on loading lots of non-standard software packages onto their computers, making support a nightmare while creating huge numbers of undocumented departmental applications we “just know we’re going to be asked to support”.

As the White Queen said in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, “Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” So do we, Alice.

So you’re a PC analyst and you think you have problems? Let’s take it up a few levels and see how the same situation plays out at the executive level. CIOs have griped for years that company executives don’t want to understand technology, don’t want to know about it, don’t view it as a strategic resource, and don’t want to understand why IS costs so much. We’ve begged senior executives to become more technically literate.

Well guess what, sports fans … we got our wish. According to a recent A.T. Kearney survey, the vast majority of CEOs feel comfortable dealing with technology issues, most have a working knowledge of the ones in use within their companies, and nearly half spend up to a half day each week learning about “relevant technologies”.

Life just isn’t fair. After years of CIOs believing business knowledge is more important than technical literacy, along come these “Power-User Executives” (PUEs) running in the opposite direction. (And does this mean an EIS must sport a PUE GUI?)

I’m guessing quite a few companies have PUEs with a better handle on how technology can advance their business strategy than their Technically Illiterate CIO (TICIO).

PC analysts can give TICIOs some good advice on how to handle this challenge.

When a PC analyst interacts with a power user, the analyst has to simultaneously respect the power user’s knowledge – business and technical – and to demonstrate dimensions of expertise beyond what the power user knows. “What you’re doing with Excel is really very good,” you might say. “Have you considered converting it to Access? This looks like it would work even better as a database. You could turn it into something that’s really cool, and that the whole department could share.”

CIOs need to do the same thing with PUEs. Respect their insights and knowledge of technology: “You’re right – Domino would be a great tool to help us communicate more effectively with our business partners. Projects like these get complicated in three areas: figuring out the intercorporate networking, agreeing on content responsibilities across the two separate company structures, and actually changing everyone’s behavior so they use it. Let’s start pulling a team together to look at how to make it happen.”

You have to both acknowledge your user’s expertise and extend it. Otherwise you’re just a bottleneck, getting between executives and the resources they need to get their projects done. And they’ll wonder how you can be leading IS when they know more than you do about technology.

Everyone in leadership manages relationships in four directions: up (to the boss), down (to staff), left (to service recipients), and right (to peers). Most of us master only two of these. If you’re focused on career advancement, you usually look up and to the right. If, on the other hand, you’re looking to actually succeed at your job you look down and left.

As CEOs gain sophisticated understanding of technology, the technically illiterate CIO will find him or herself trapped in a shrinking circle of organizational irrelevance, creating no value in any direction.

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|In: Career Management|Last Updated:

Do you love technology? Is it really cool stuff, or just a tool for the business, like a screwdriver or bandsaw?

Northwest Airlines undoubtedly logged the flight as an on-time departure, because we left the gate within 15 minutes of the original schedule. Of course, we sat on the tarmac for an hour and a half, but nobody tracks on-time take-offs or arrivals. That’s the problem with choosing poor performance measures: you get what you measure, not what you want.

Because I had the extra time, I read Fortune and Forbes, instead of the history and science fiction I prefer (really the same subject, pointed in opposite temporal directions). Much to my surprise I struck gold, in the form of a Forbes story about Chrysler, currently the hottest performer in the automotive industry.

And that’s why I asked if you love technology. The Bobs who run Chrysler (Eaton and Lutz) love cars, and expect their whole team to love ’em too. “If you don’t have an almost irrational passion for cars and trucks,” says Eaton, Chrysler’s CEO and president, “we don’t believe you’ll jump ahead of the pack.”

Lutz, the vice chairman, adds this: “Let’s face it, the customer [is] just a rearview mirror … When it comes to the future, why, I ask, should we expect the customer to be the expert in clairvoyance or creativity? After all, isn’t that really what he expects us to be?”

I keep hearing we’re supposed to be businesspersons first, which I guess means we’re supposed to all scurry around with yellow legal pads, computing returns on investment and accounting for budget variances while making sure those nasty techies who work for us don’t fritter their time away playing with some new toy on the company’s nickel.

Go away. Maybe my wait on the tarmac has just put me in a mood, but go away. Please. Today, I don’t have any patience for this nonsense.

If you can’t conjure up any passion for what you do … if you don’t think personal computers, and networks, and the Internet, and giant data warehouses, and using computers to control your telephone, and … if you don’t think this is all just awesome … why on earth are you doing this?

Sure, you need to understand how this all fits your business. If it doesn’t fit it will fail, and then you won’t get to play anymore. And besides, technology lacks sex appeal until you see other people using it. You have to be a businessperson or you won’t understand just how cool it can all be.

Early last year I wrote about an unsavory sales tactic: the losing sales team meets with the decision-maker and his or her manager. The sales team tries, in the meeting, to discredit the decision, and especially to provoke some display of emotion. Then they get to say, “Clearly, Clyde has become too emotionally involved in this to be making a good business decision.”

Here’s the proper response (from Clyde’s manager): “I damn well hope he’s emotionally involved in it. I don’t want anyone on my team who doesn’t take it personally when some salesman challenges his professionalism, and I sure don’t want anyone on a project who’s apathetic about the result. Now get out.”

The Internet snuck up on a lot of CIOs. I’ll bet every one of them was a businessperson, not a technology hobbyist. Those who love technology breathed a sigh of relief – they’d been waiting for the right moment to bring the Internet to their company’s attention. Finally, they could stop waiting.

How about your company’s business? You should have just as much passion for it as you do for technology, and for the same reasons. So here’s the best of all possible worlds: you find your employer’s business just as awesome as you find technology.

Now there’s a job you’re perfect for.

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