Chapter 12: Closing the Gap between What Technology Can do and What People Want it to Do


Overview

Dr. Carl S. Ledbetter

CTOs get to help make the future, and most often they do that by explaining what technology can do. I'm a scientist by training, education, and nature, but my background for that is probably a little unusual. I was a philosophy major throughout most of my college years, and my family upbringing wouldn't have suggested a career in technology. My father was a minister, a preacher - and a very scholarly one, the kind who had degrees in ancient Greek and Hebrew and church history. His sermons, which I listened to every Sunday until I left home for college, were always on abstruse, arcane subjects out of the Bible, such as the translation of a particular word from Hebrew and how it applied to the topic of his sermon that day. Interestingly, though, about midway through every sermon I ever heard him preach, he would depart briefly from his scholarly presentation to perform a magic trick in the pulpit. The tricks were all different - I never saw the same one twice - and each of them illustrated by some kind of a topical reference the point he was trying to make in his lesson, something that made the very technical, intellectual, academic subject come alive in a visual way that people would remember. The result is that his congregation was always packed, and people were sitting on the edge of their seats until he did his trick.

What that taught me, almost intuitively, instinctively, is that the way you make difficult subjects clear to lay people is by using analogies, stories, and references to things they know and understand. If you amuse them, entertain them, make them laugh, you also make them understand what's important, even if what matters is otherwise very difficult, complicated, even beyond ordinary understanding. In my case it's technology I'm trying to explain, rather than religion (and I note that my subject is far easier than my father's), and the task is to render accessible to lay audiences what is technically difficult - to show them the heart of the matter as it applies, or will apply, to their lives and interests, without resorting to all the techno-babble that many technologists in the industry fall into instinctively. Such mumbo-jumbo obscures the real issue behind technical language you don't really need to know to understand the main themes in the evolution of technology and what it can do. So because of that lesson my father unknowingly taught me, I have always stood with one foot pretty comfortably in the technical arena and the other in what you'd have to call marketing - by which I mean the ability to explain what the technology is about, how it works, why it's important, and how to use it in a way that doesn't require the listeners to have a Ph.D. to understand. I look for ways to do that and admire it when someone else does.

For example, recently I was in Toronto at a huge conference on e-government. E-government is a catch-all phrase for how you use the computer and the Internet to interconnect everybody to everything they want or need to do with the government. Canada's vision is quite stunning; they call it "One Window, No Wrong Doors." You log onto the Net and go to Canada. You want a fishing license, you get a fishing license; you want a driver's license, you get a driver's license; you want a passport, you get a passport. It's a matter of indifference to the citizen that the fishing license is issued by a local jurisdiction, the driver's license by a province, and the passport by the Canadian federal government. The Canadian government realizes the citizen shouldn't need to know which jurisdiction is responsible for which government activity - it's likely even the government can't keep it straight. So Canada's idea is a wonderful concept, but even better is that they would present this to Canadian citizens in the "One Window, No Wrong Doors" format. This invites citizens to come to the Net to work with the Canadian government, without confusing the issue with a lot of unnecessary complications. This approach says, "Just look in the window the government provides, and we'll get you to the right place, even if you're not a computer expert." So when I went to Canada to explain Novell's role in this new way of thinking about the Net and how Canadians will be able to use it for government services, I needed a way to make this approach clear without being overly technical.

My way of explaining how this would happen, being faithful to the technical potential without exposing all its complexities, was to take up a Rubik's Cube. (I actually wrote the solution book to that more than 20 years ago.) I tossed the Cube into the audience and had people scramble it up, and then during the course of the speech, I solved the Cube in front of them, using it as a prop to make clear how a hard problem can be broken down into easy-to-understand-and-execute phases, and then I tossed it back at the end of the speech completely restored. I doubt that anybody will ever forget the demonstration, but more importantly, they will remember the parable. What I did was a way of saying, "Here's why it's hard. Here's how you attack it. Here's how you do it." If you attack the Cube in some random fashion, you're never going to solve it - it would take you, on average, 1.8 billion years to finish it if you did it that way. And learning the technology - the mathematics of group theory - to solve it on your own is a daunting multi-year effort for math majors. But we solved it in considerably less time than the speech, of course, and the analogy to how Canada can solve the problem of creating e-Government access for all Canadians within four years was clear. I joked that I wouldn't take too long to solve the Cube because I didn't want them to miss lunch, and their politicians didn't want to take too long to provide Net access to the Canadian government because they didn't want to miss reelection.




The CTO Handbook. The Indispensable Technology Leadership Resource for Chief Technology Officers
The CTO Handbook/Job Manual: A Wealth of Reference Material and Thought Leadership on What Every Manager Needs to Know to Lead Their Technology Team
ISBN: 1587623676
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2003
Pages: 213

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