The Role of Technology

Our perspective is highly people-intensive: A good person working on current technology will deliver more value to a client than an average person working on the next generation of technology.

Technology counts, of course, but it doesn't put a project over the top. The person working with technology toward a specific customer solution puts it over the top. And that has to do with understanding the technology and the execution of the technology, understanding the industry that the technology is applied to, and understanding the needs of the customer. And that isn't technology.

Technology is the price of entry; it's not an option. It is the enabler, but it's not the solution. It serves the strategy, not the other way around. Technology without metrics for success is almost always a losing situation.

Technology prowess is surely required, but so is training and timing of early wins, and so are implementation and the demonstration of ROI. And at the end of the day, human capital needs to be in control. Technology is just a tool of the data and marketing professional, not the other way around.

Once someone, whether it is us or someone else, has money inventing a unique, innovative, and wonderful piece of technology, we then can focus on the people side of that, and on the market orientation side of it, and on the technology application side of it, and that's how we make our living.

And that is not to say that we don't develop technology, because we do. It is just that technology spans the spectrum of what we do, and there are literally hundreds of technology elements that ultimately yield applications in which we specialize.