Staying Technologically Nimble

In the proliferation of technologies that are emerging today, the key question for a CTO is, "What is just cool as opposed to what is profound?" I generally try to solve this riddle by envisioning the effects of the new technology. Will this reduce the cost of applications? Will it reduce the cost of doing business? Does it enable companies to do business in a completely different way? There have been many things I thought were really cool, but in the end, I don't know how well they would have been accepted and don't know how they would have changed everyone else's life (remember PointCast?). In the end, you can't stand behind technology if it's not growing the business or cutting costs. You just have to let those cool things go by. Maybe some other day you can envision it a different way, but if it doesn't meet the test of transforming or growing the business, or reducing costs, then it's just an interesting anomaly along the way.

To be successful both individually and as an organization, I think you have to have a vast appetite for taking in information. You then have to have the ability to dissect it and separate the good ideas from the ones that are just curiously interesting. You have to be open to a variety of sources. I haven't found one single source that I could read and say, "I've found everything I need."

Information comes from a multitude of sources. It can come from your customers and from fellow employees. It certainly comes from the media who expose what other companies are doing. You get leading-edge ideas from professors who are writing books. You get information from all of these different sources, and the challenge is to turn that raw data into information that's relative to your organization. You depend on people to synthesize that information and bring it together into a vision of where you're taking your company. Each individual has to figure out what sources to deal with to make himself more effective in his individual job. Each organization has to have in place a culture that is accepting and thriving on change.

We want to make sure we're current with technology to enable us to do business differently. That's why an organization has to have a culture. Those will be the thriving organizations that tolerate change, change the rules, and promote people for bringing out new ways of doing things. In some ways it runs counter-intuitive to the order of the world, where people like things to be steady. People say, "I'm all for progress, as long as you don't change anything I have to deal with." You have to have a culture where, once in a while, things are done differently. What you have to promote is not change for change's sake, but change for the business' sake.

Companies are better suited for change when they have a culture that thrives on information interchange. Look at the things you've hoarded. If they were gold, you'd have a whole stockpile of gold, and then you'd be rich. This attitude has pervaded the thinking that information is something that should be hoarded. The cultural change that companies have to realize is that information is not what's valuable - it's the exchanging of information. It's what people do with the information that's actually more valuable than the information itself.

The most effective organizations think about interchange of information among the people in the organization. They think about being willing to share it with your partners and suppliers and others. Even if there's a risk of information getting out to a competitor, an organization that can share and act on information quickly often has an advantage. It's what you do with information that has value in today's economy. That's the cultural change that will determine the ultimate winners from the losers.