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In all the world, there’s nothing more irritating than someone stating obvious, widely accepted, and often wrong or misunderstood conventional wisdom as something profound.

“People need to take personal responsibility for their actions!” I recently heard an acquaintance declaim to a group of us in terms that left no doubt this was a Highly Original Thought (HOT).

Other statements that are currently HOT:

“We should build this application using a thin-client architecture.” (Usually said by people who have no idea what a thin client really is.)

“The mainframe is just the biggest server on the network.” (No, that’s just one of its roles, unless you no longer run batch jobs on it.)

“Our technology investments will be driven by business needs … we’re not going to invest in technology for technology’s sake.” (Gee, do ya think?)

This last statement usually comes from technophobes who wouldn’t recognize the business benefits of technology if those benefits were listed as a line-item on the profit and loss statement, or by defensive technologists conditioned to cringe by years of dealing with the aforementioned technophobes.

And the fact is, it isn’t a very smart statement to make.

It isn’t that the statement is wrong, exactly. Often, inefficiencies or changes in strategy really do lead a businesses to recognize the need for new technology. On rare occasions, that need can drive vendor innovation, as opposed to simply causing IS to buy existing technologies. It can happen.

What this view ignores, however, is that usually new technologies create opportunities for process efficiencies, for improving customer relationships, or for defining whole new markets and marketplaces within which your company can do business, and these aren’t opportunities business executives foresee.

Let’s take a simple and obvious example. In the mid-1970s, world business didn’t approach any of the fledgling PC hobbyist groups saying, “You know, if one of you would just create an electronic spreadsheet program for us, we’d buy millions of personal computers just to run it.”

More recently, Tim Berners-Lee adapted SGML, sponsored by the Department of Defense to facilitate creation of electronic documentation, to the needs of the international physics community. By doing so he invented the World Wide Web and a new multibillion-dollar vehicle for commerce. Business executives didn’t drive the creation of the Web. Most have responded to it nervously, as something they don’t particularly like but probably can’t entirely avoid. Even now only a visionary few recognize it as a huge, still-to-be-defined opportunity.

Chances are high that the requests you get for new technologies and information systems from heads of departments or business units will lead to business improvement if you execute well. That’s important, and not to be taken lightly. It’s only part of the story, though — the part where your company follows others who are the industry leaders. In other words, investing in technology in answer to business requirements is a survival response, not a growth strategy.

A similar principle holds on a macroeconomic scale, by the way. For evidence I offer an extensive analysis in the September 28, 1996 issue of the Economist, which says, “… per-capita growth in output is doomed to be zero — unless the economy is making technological progress.” (Thanks to reader Linda Donaghue for directing me to this fascinating article.)

Business doesn’t drive technical innovation. It only pays for it. Business people usually can’t envision the value of something they’ve never encountered before. That’s why CIOs who wait for the rest of the company to ask for a new technology earn their reputation as sand in the gears of progress.

Yes, technical innovations must create business value. And no, not every technical innovation will create value for your business. You have to be able to recognize what’s really HOT.

That’s what makes the job interesting.

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This New Year’s column marks my second anniversary with InfoWorld. When I started writing the IS Survival Guide in 1996, my biggest worry was running out of topics. My editors worried that I’d run out of ManagementSpeak.

Don’t worry. Every week readers send me more strange things managers say than I have room to print. It’s one of my perks. And because managers are such interesting critters, and management is such an interesting subject, I’m not likely to run out of topics any time soon either.

This week’s topic: A New Year’s retrospective — something of a tradition for columnists. Although the IS Survival Guide isn’t in the predictions business, I did make a few. For example, I predicted the non-success of the NC. Pundits now discuss the NC as a 3278 replacement, not as an enterprise desktop architecture. Next year will nail it. (And no, the NC isn’t a thin anything, since NC code execution is on the desktop.)

In the same articles I predicted that Java wouldn’t maintain its cross-platform portability. Sun is currently trying to keep the … well, the sun from setting, to coin a phrase. Proprietary platform-specific extensions already exist.

And then there’s the risky one: I stuck my neck way out once last year, predicting that because Microsoft has stretched itself so thin, within a couple of years it will experience serious reversals. We’ll make the millennium my deadline. (Of course, it won’t matter because by then the world really will have ended.)

But enough remembering past futures. It’s time for new predictions. So …

Prediction No. 1: The triumph of American culture … in America. Although the Internet is a global network, it has a peculiarly American flavor to it — anarchic, unfettered, and individualistic. This terrifies American authorities, but it’s too late.

Other countries are trapped, as well: Keep the Internet out to preserve your “cultural purity” and you damage your economy. Let it in and voila! Americanization.

Prediction No. 2: The globalization of American culture. Staying down on the farm will be hard when we have the world at our fingertips. An unsettling example: Digital Detective Services estimates that as many as 25% of all American workers store erotica on their computers. I’ll be sexist and assume most are male, which means nearly half of all males not only enjoy erotica but act on the impulse.

American culture keeps this impulse in the closet, as it were. We worry in public about porn on the Internet. We claim it’s to protect our children, who ought to be seeing more wholesome fare like Robocop, since the depiction of harmful, painful, and illegal actions is far healthier and more wholesome than watching two people having fun. Other cultures take a far different view of erotica. At some point, Americans may find those perspectives invading our cultural space.

Prediction #3: The PDA market takes off. I got a bunch of e-mail from my column bemoaning the loss of the personal computer. In it, I described how PDAs could become the next PC, and described the characteristics they’d need to do so. From what InfoWorld‘s readers tell me, the Palm Pilot and current generation of Apple Newtons have all of those features between them, although neither has them all. It looks like we’re one generation away from getting truly personal computers back in our hands. By the way, who decided to call PDA Windows “WinCE”? An apt name.

New ideas for 1998

Enough prognostication. Now I’d like your help with something.

I generally write about topics that make me cranky. It’s cheaper than psychiatry and better than St. John’s wort. I want to help you too, though, so lie down on the couch over there and let me know your biggest issues, concerns, and causes of heartburn.

Think of it as group therapy.

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