Positioning Your Company for Change


One of a CTO's most important roles is positioning his or her company for changes that are likely to happen. The CTO is an internal evangelist, as well as an external spokesperson. You have to rally the engineers and the business people inside a company to understand the big scene: Why is this market going to make it? Why is it productive for us to spend resources in one arena, rather than another? What technology choices should we make, and what will that technology do to solve a real problem that matters, that has economic value?

There's a story that Warren Buffett used to decide which companies to invest in by listening to what products his wife and her friends were talking about - what was going on in the grocery store and at the shopping mall. That's a very important part of the issue: What is actually happening in the real world, as opposed to what technical things are the engineers interested in?

We spend far too much time looking in the mirror, thinking we're seeing the rest of the world. We're not watching what other people - non-technical people - are doing. Amazingly, technical people often argue with others about what they should want to do with technology, surely a losing argument every time it occurs. It's the same problem the automobile industry had when it was still making cars for hobbyists instead of their wives. We have to figure out how to make machines for people who don't care how the technology works.

I saw one of the most brilliant technology advertisements ever a few years ago, for a satellite TV service. It was for Hughes Direct Broadcast Satellite TV, which was one of the companies that started that whole industry. In the commercial, an actor came out and started talking about "Direct Broadcast Satellite" - using that technological word, "satellite" - but then he immediately stopped talking about the technology and asked, "You like movies? We have 250 movies, ready at any time. You like basketball games? From Gonzaga University?" When do you ever get to see Gonzaga University play on TV, except maybe during March Madness? Are you a displaced Broncos fan, living in New York, who wants to see the Denver Broncos play Seattle when they're showing the Jets against Miami where you live? With Direct Broadcast Satellite, you can use an easy little index to choose what you want to see, and you have hundreds and hundreds of choices. Then the actor said, "How do we make all this happen?" He started to turn around, and behind him, an old-fashioned green chalkboard appeared and filled up with a bunch of equations - real ones - any technologist would recognize the Schroedinger Wave Equations, Maxwell's Equations, some phase-shift calculations, things that really do matter to making the technology work - but the actor looked back at the camera and said, "I have absolutely no idea."

The supremely important subliminal message there is that some very smart people who understand this technology were back there working on this. They got it to work. But you and I don't need to know how they did it. What you need to know is that you can watch Gonzaga play basketball on TV tomorrow if you want to, or see Gone With the Wind, and all you have to do is push a few simple buttons.

That's the technology story we have to get to: Make the technology easy to use for people who don't care about technology, and then technology will succeed. Try to make technology for the geeks, and you'll satisfy only the geeks. The job of technologists is to make technology invisible in any application. The way to make it useful is to make it disappear from view. Almost everyone drives a car in this country, but almost no one can tell you what kind of transmission is in it. What are the gear ratios? How many quarts of transmission fluid? My point is that this is a good thing. Transmissions are crucial for automobiles. Once they were the subject of important engineering innovations on the leading edge of automotive technology. But they became most important when they disappeared from view, when they were not only automatic, but also invisible.




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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