“How technical are you?” This common challenge, almost playground-aggressive in nature, can turn into a sore spot for the CIO today. It’s inevitable (and actually desirable), you see: as you move up to executive rank, you lose your day-to-day involvement in the actual nuts-and-bolts implementation of technical details. Many executives respond by essentially abandoning all direct personal engagement with technology. But to do so across the board is a mistake.
Here, I seldom post directly about technologies or techniques, because, quite frankly, I’ve found in business situations that technology in and of itself is very rarely either the real problem or the real solution. Despite this, I still see technology as an ongoing crucial area of expertise for the CTO/CIO (contrary to the claims of some pundits that I’ve written about before). To maintain this vital expertise, the CIO’s dilemma is as follows: you have to keep your hand in, but you won’t ever have the time or focus to try out every technique, tool, or approach. You’re going to be, at best, a dilettante.
However, just because you’re doomed, as an executive, to be a dilettante doesn’t mean you should give up all efforts to stay current, or that such efforts won’t provide you with useful CIO-level insights. Even a little goes a long way. This post describes one example of that, as a case study.
