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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And besides, a little-recognized transformation has taken place in industry: R&D has been replaced by M&A. The executives of most large corporations have figured that, compared to the cost and risk of developing innovations themselves, it’s a lot safer to let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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|In: Industry Commentary|Last Updated:

They just waved their wands and magical things happened.

Don’t be concerned. There is an IT point to this, although we won’t get to it for a while.

My daughters, children when I wrote the first of these missives, are allegedly adults now. (Excuse me for a moment … AIYEEEEEEEEEEEEE! Sorry.) I say allegedly because when we took a few days of vacation in Florida together a couple of weeks ago, Harry Potter World at Universal Studios was at the top of their list.

Top on my own list was the Kennedy Space Center where, among other treats, we heard retired astronaut/Deputy NASA Administrator Fred Gregory recount how his career happened.

Most people who talk about themselves are tiresome. Colonel Gregory was never tiresome. Two bits: (1) He gave his parents a lot of the credit, in particular because, he said, no matter what he wanted to do as a child, they said yes, and (2) his entire career plan was to have fun and have an impact. Seemed to work out pretty well for him.

We also got close to the business end of a Saturn V rocket — the booster used for the Apollo missions, which required something like four million bits and pieces of technology, all of which had to work flawlessly. NASA engineers understood how each and every one of them was designed and put together because NASA engineers pretty much had to invent each and every one of them.

In the Harry Potter books, and most books in which magic is an important part of the plot, magic doesn’t involve millions of carefully designed and integrated bits and pieces. It’s more a matter of opening your mind and exerting your will.

Which brings us to Harry Potter World. Give Universal credit — whether or not you like this kind of thing, Universal skimped on nothing. The attention to detail was phenomenal, right down to selling butter beer (the preferred beverage among young witches and wizards at Hogwarts, I was informed). Which meant someone on the design team had to (1) recognize that selling butter beer would enrich the experience for Harry Potter fans; (2) persuade the budget-meister that formulating a recipe for butter beer and building places to buy it would be worth the investment; and (3) actually formulate a beverage that was palatable and had a flavor that tasted how something called butter beer ought to taste.

They also sold magic wands. Okay, they sold a lot of stuff — merchandising is part of the theme park equation — but at least they sold it in realistic (if that word makes any sense in this context) Diagon Alley shops. In one, a master wand maker purveyed his wares.

Unlike in the books, exerting one’s will and shouting something Latinish is optional. These wands have hidden circuitry and an infrared (I presume) tip. At various places in the park, if you stand in the right place and wave the tip at a discreetly positioned sensor in a shop window, something magical happens.

Nice touch. Huge crowds. The children (including my adult children, and, I confess, me too — my kids bought me a wand so I could enjoy being a warlock for a day) got a kick out of it.

I’m willing to bet each and every visitor knew the effects were the result of technology, not magic, and could probably explain how it worked, at least in broad terms. Certainly, the park’s designers would have known that once they described what they wanted, the engineers would have no trouble making it happen.

We aren’t all members of the ETG (embedded technology generation if you haven’t been paying attention) but we’re all so accustomed to being enmeshed in technology that for the most part we only notice it when it isn’t working right.

This is what’s wrong, and right, with IT in a lot of companies — as a matter of fact, not blame or root causes. First, there’s no butter-beer budget, to make sure users have a natural-seeming experience. And second, unlike Harry Potter World’s designers, business managers in many companies have little or no confidence that if they describe what they’re trying to accomplish, IT will have no trouble delivering it.

But, most IT shops now do score well on the Invisibility Index — the only metric that matters for IT operations. That is, in most companies business users are so accustomed to everything working right that they only notice when it isn’t.

That’s no small accomplishment. And there’s no magic involved.

Just a lot of hard work coupled with careful engineering.

And, if we took the time to count them all, millions of bits and pieces of technology.

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