I did an interview yesterday for a podcast on webteks.com that will be up in a week or two but the subject was important enough that it deserves some comment and that is the relationship between technology and strategy.
This is a huge subject but the critical point here is that one can no longer think about business strategy without technology being integral to both the vision of where a company should go and the strategy of how to get it there. Technology is now inseparable from both vision and strategy.
An example: Anyone who has been to Bentonville, Arkansas has seen the windowless concrete cube that must be seven stories on a side. That is Wal*Mart's data center although data bunker might be a more apt description. If you are a vendor and subscribe to their service, you can watch your products going over the scanners in every store in their system in real time. Could Wal*Mart exist without technology? How could mere human beings keep track of $300+ billion worth of goods and the payroll details of over a million employees without technology? Not remotely possible.
Marketing (webinars, email campaigns, social networking), administration (workflow, document management), sales (CRM, videoconferencing), operations (GPS, ERP, RFID), finance (accounting, electronic banking, EDI), HR (online recruiting, learning management, human resources information systems, intranets), purchasing (extranets, EDI) are just a few of the ways that technology is infiltrating and transforming everything we do in business.
But here's the challenge. Most of the leaders of our companies can remember a time when they didn't have a PC on their desk. Many grew up at time when typing was something secretaries did, certainly not executives. The personal computer was something that got bolted on to their lives and careers, not built in. In many cases they don't have an intuitive grasp of technology. It's worth remembering that many of the younger entrepreneurs among us (and perhaps your competitors) cannot remember a time when there wasn't a PC in the house.
Another reality is that technology is a tool. Some people get tools and some don't. It is some kind of brain thing. You can watch someone who gets tools pick up any tool and just see how they are processing its capabilities and applications just by studying it's form. No judgement implied here. In his ground-breaking book Frames of Mind
, Harvard professor and MacArthur Fellow Howard Gardner postulated at least six types of intelligence. So lack of instinct for tools only means that other types of intelligence are likely to be present. However, in a technological world, the ability to grasp the strategic importance and potential applications of technology cannot be overstated.
, Harvard professor and MacArthur Fellow Howard Gardner postulated at least six types of intelligence. So lack of instinct for tools only means that other types of intelligence are likely to be present. However, in a technological world, the ability to grasp the strategic importance and potential applications of technology cannot be overstated. It is critical that business leaders do a rigorous self-assessment. If technology is not your strong suit, then you must find people to team with who really get both technology and business. If you have internal IT people, in too many cases they will not be strong business or strategic thinkers. Even if you do have strategic level people who get technology, it will behoove you to team up with an outside firm that is relatively product agnostic to offer a second opinion. Technology is like anything else, people have their tastes, biases and experience that shapes their opinions, not always objectively.
If you do have an interest in and aptitude for technology, as a business leader, you need to:
- Stay current with the technology press. Subscribe to E-Week, Information Week or InfoWorld. They are likely to seem more geeky than might be desirable, but it will give you a feel for what is going on. You will also get a very visceral feel for how fast it's all moving.
- When going to your trade association or other conferences, seek out the technology workshops and vendors and grill them for what the bleeding edge people are doing. You may not want to be taking on bleeding edge projects until the technology has proved itself, but you need to know where people are pushing the envelope.
- Pay attention to technology in the popular press. It is difficult to know how Web 2.0 will wind up affecting business (and if you don't know what Web 2.0 is then you've got some homework to do) but when you consider that MySpace gets more clicks per day than Google, that there are multiplayer role playing games out there with 110 million members worldwide, these are numbers way to big to ignore.
Every leader's job is to be constantly enriching the tapestry that is his/her worldview. We can't always know the implication of any individual thread in that tapestry. But with things changing as fast as they are in today's world, the risk of winding up in an evolutionary dead end is just too great not to be pulling in information from every dimension of life.
Technology is a challenge conceptually, culturally and economically. Management luminary Peter Drucker once chastised business for being too dependent on computers. What even he failed to grasp is the real power of computer technology is that technology creates the ability to do things that cannot be done any other way. This is the real power of technology. Ironically, it is the people in the system who are slowing down the process. Technology is fundamentally changing the game. Humans as a whole just can't wrap our brains around and adapt to change as fast as technology is capable of creating new opportunities.
Therein lies both the challenge and opportunity for business leaders.
