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|In: Career Management|Last Updated:

Leadership. The word is inspiring. Even those who run away from decisions as if they were rabid wolverines utter it in reverential tones.

Leadership, for the benefit of those who haven’t read Leading IT: <Still> the Toughest Job in the World, is the art of getting others to follow, and requires competence at eight tasks: Setting direction, making decisions, staffing, delegating, motivating, managing team dynamics, establishing culture, and communicating (which consists of four sub-tasks — listening, informing, persuading, and facilitating).

The subject is technology leadership — how IT can identify promising new technologies, incubate them, and incorporate them into how we do business around here. It’s technology leadership whether the technologies are new and emerging or just haven’t been put to use in the business IT supports.

But it’s always about leadership, which is to say getting the rest of the company to follow — not a traditional role for mainstream IT management, which is often so fearful someone will accuse it of squandering the company’s scarce financial resources on technology for technology’s sake that suggesting the company explore something new, different, and potentially useful is as intimidating as proposing a hefty assessment to pay for roof replacement at a townhouse owners association meeting.

So the starting point for technology leadership mirrors the first message in Leading IT, which is, it’s okay to lead. Not only is it okay, the business leaders I talk to are, for the most part, hungry for it. They want to have conversations about how they can use information technology to (1) get their work out the door more effectively; and (2) do something entirely new, different, innovative, and most important, profitable. Sadly, as discussed last week, few in IT are even equipped to have these conversations.

To be fair, plenty of companies, and I’m including many of those who undertake formal strategic planning exercises, aren’t equipped for them either. Their strategic plans are tepid, fearful things. These companies don’t think in terms of gaining marketplace advantage, beating the competition … you know, how to grow. Technology leadership can’t happen in these companies because no leadership can happen in these companies.

When decisions are rooted in fear, the outcome is stasis or retreat, not innovation and progress. If you lead IT in an environment like this, unless you’re close to retirement and just coasting along your best move is to find a better place to ply your trade.

Or, your company might be poised to become an aggressive leader in your industry. Its executives might want to try something more exciting and competitive than a stock buyback. They just don’t have better ideas about how to invest the company’s spare cash. All it might take is the suggestion from you that (for example) adding intelligence to the company’s products might make them more desirable.

(Speaking of stock buybacks, an irrelevant question: If a company buys back enough of its own stock, can it become autonomous … self-owned? As corporations are people too, perhaps we should encourage this. It would be equivalent to Roman slaves earning enough to buy their freedom. I look forward to your irrelevant answers.)

So … last week started a list of factors that must be in place if IT can be successful in providing technology leadership:

  • Awareness: If you don’t know it exists you can’t recommend it.
  • Relationships. If they don’t know and trust you, they won’t be open to your ideas.
  • Astuteness. If you can’t envision the new thing in practical, day-to-day use, you’re blowing smoke.
  • ETAM (enterprise technical architecture management). The alternative to colonizing a new “island of automation” that results in re-keying-based integration and redundant business logic to maintain.

It’s hardly a complete list. This week’s discussion leads to two more:

  • Receptive audience. Without at least one influential executive who wants to try something new and innovative, your attempts at technology leadership will lead to nothing but frustration. Unless they lead to immediate unemployment.
  • Long EHL: EHL, for those who haven’t been with us long enough, is the epiphany half life — how much time must elapse for the enthusiasm for a new idea to decay to half its original level. If you want to provide technology leadership to your company you’ll need persistence — the ability to maintain your enthusiasm in spite of the inevitable organizational roadblocks you’ll encounter.

How does EHL fit into the discussion? Audiences don’t always start out receptive. Sometimes you need to persuade them — not an instantaneous process. If you don’t have a long EHL, the organizational depressives who surround you, trying to persuade you it will never happen here — will wear you down and wear you out.

They’re easy to recognize. They’re the ones who call themselves “realists.”

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|In: Career Management|Last Updated:

When I talk with CEOs about what they want out of IT, technology leadership is high on their list. When I talk with CIOs about technology leadership, I see an occasional wistful smile, quickly replaced by a grimaced, “Where’s the budget for that?”

The theoretical answer: All around them … in the hands of all the other C-level executives who might benefit from new technologies if the CIO could clearly explain how they might benefit from it, and what would be required to give it a try.

It isn’t that simple, though, because as Clayton Christensen explained in The Innovator’s Dilemma back in 1997, few organizations invest in radical innovations, because there’s always a higher-ROI use for the funds, namely, improving the business in its current form.

Helping other parts of the business get better at what they do right now might not be easy, but it’s straightforward. Helping them figure out new and different things they might do? That sounds like a lot of personal risk, and long hours and hard work besides.

Also, most business leaders understand how things work right now, and by the way, they’re working well right now, or at least well enough. They’ll welcome improvements. Many can’t even envision something radically different, let alone want to make it happen.

And besides, a little-recognized transformation has taken place in industry: R&D has been replaced by M&A. The executives of most large corporations have figured that, compared to the cost and risk of developing innovations themselves, it’s a lot safer to let small, venture-funded startups take on the risk. When the technology and techniques have matured enough to be of practical use, they can acquire one of the successful ones, license their technology, or outsource its use to them at a fraction of the cost and risk of in-house R&D.

Oh, and it’s a whole lot safer to wait until some other company has figured things out than to be the figure-it-outer. Sure, we might lose a couple of years to a competitor, but on the other hand, now we get to adopt “best practices,” never mind that “best practice” means “what our competitor was doing last year and we’ll manage to start doing next year.”

To be fair, being second one into the pool can make a lot of sense. Sure, the IT punditocracy still makes a big fuss about the “first-mover advantage,” the proposition that whoever introduces an innovative product first has such an astounding advantage that everyone else might as well pack their bags and go home. But this is a zombie idea — one that refuses to die, even though the only evidence is counter-examples.

So letting someone else make the mistakes, but with all the preparation that lets you pounce six months later, just might be the winning strategy for a lot of opportunities. The problem is, this strategy easily turns into an excuse to not make those preparations.

Now you’re an also-ran, because, as has been pointed out in this space once or twice, mirror-chess is a losing strategy.

Technology leadership is starting to look pretty complicated, isn’t it? The phrase falls trippingly off the tongue, as the Bard might have said, but actually doing it in a way that works requires more than vision and boldness.

It requires:

  • Awareness. Not all business leaders are readers, but all business leaders need to be readers. Including you, because if you don’t read, you won’t know what’s going on, let alone have any idea whether or not it matters.
  • Relationships. Implementing a new technology is a collaborative effort. IT’s leaders in particular, but really everyone in IT needs to know people throughout the company, well enough to know how they think and what they care about. What — you think you can approach a total stranger with evidence and logic and have any influence?
  • Astuteness. “This will transform the company!” has drama. “Here’s how this fits into what you’re doing,” has plausibility. Guess which wins.
  • ETAM (that’s enterprise technical architecture management). Not initially — for pilot projects you can use a big hammer if that’s the only tool you have to connect new technology to what you already have in place. But to scale beyond a pilot you need a mature enterprise technical architecture management function in place.

This isn’t going to be easy. But consider the alternative. If you don’t take this on, your CEO is likely to bring in people like me.

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