The Future of Technology

As technology is getting more complex, it is also getting more intelligent. One of the trends that I have seen is that technology professionals are spending less and less of their time actually coding technology, assembling the bits and bytes. They are spending more of their time configuring and implementing technology in direct support of business needs. Successful technologists must become more and more business experts and understand how to deploy technology in support of business objectives. They need to be less focused on knowing a particular bit of technology. Technology changes so rapidly that we need to be flexible in what technology we use to solve a business problem. The days when a programmer could spend an entire career working with one programming language are over. What is going to be most valuable and get to be more so going forward is people who understand how technology provides value and can understand the needs of a business and be able to figure out the right technology to put in place, and how to do it most effectively.

We look at all of our technology decisions in the context of our customers. We try to avoid jumping on technology bandwagons. An example is wireless. We look at wireless connectivity to our customers as an example of something that we just don't see a great driving need for in our business right now. A lot of companies went out and spent a lot of money on building wireless interfaces into their business, and nothing came of it. In our case, we are going to really focus on the things that might not be as glamorous, but things that will move the lever in our business, which is based on understanding what our customers are really going to use and need.

The future of technology must increasingly consider the people interfacing with it - customers. Our company focuses across our business on usability. This takes the form of talking to our customers, understanding how they think about things and interact with us, and making sure that the things that we bring to market are things that we are going to get the full value out of because we have usability tested them. We are using that concept across our business now and doing usability work on internal applications that just work with our own associates. We recognize that in a company like ours, with 50,000 associates, we can't afford to go out there and train all of them on how to use an application. It has to be intuitive. It has to be something that people can understand just by looking at it, and it also has to be able to conform to common standards about how people interact with technology. It is best when people can pick something up and understand it right away. That concept applies with our external customers as well as internally with our associates. Our key drivers are really focusing on technology as very easy to use and enabling tremendous value in the businesses.