CIOs must re-energize staff and stakeholders to the creative potential of IT. Only by recapturing hearts and minds can we re-instill the joy and curiosity that moves innovation forward.
There is so much going on in the world right now that it’s little wonder that not much attention is being paid to IT.
From climatic perturbations, to daily acts of violence, to heightened geopolitical tensions, infrastructure breakdowns, and unpredictable public policy pronouncements, IT — with the exception of AI — is largely off the radar of most people’s larger discussions of the day. This is a dangerous proposition as we sit at a momentous technology inflection point — Le moment de vérité (moment of truth) in the words of outgoing French Prime Minister François Bayou.
CEOs, senior executives, the public, and print/broadcast/social media outlets are not devoting enough critical thinking time to IT. I conducted a worker-in-the-trenches survey that suggested the general thinking around IT today is, “If it isn’t broken, don’t talk to me about it.”
IT-enabled value creation will etiolate without the sustained light of stakeholder attention.
CIOs need to manage IT signals, symbols, and suppositions with an eye toward recapturing stakeholder headspace. Every IT employee needs to get busy defanging the devouring demons of apathy and ignorance surrounding IT operations today.
French General and President Charles De Gaulle opened his War Memoirs declaiming, “All my life I have had a certain idea of France.” Does everyone in your workspace and marketplace have a certain idea of IT? Do you? What is the prevailing theory of the case regarding creating value with IT?
Prior to the 1960s, historians concentrated on the comings and goings of the elite — the Great Man theory of history. I fear our industry has returned to this obsession with those at the top of the tech pile — Musk, Altman, Bezos, oh my. We study the superficials of tech titan wealth accumulation and personal life foibles, overlooking the deeper impacts of technology in the real world. We need to move beyond our “hero on horseback” obsession with single actors.
Instead we need to return our efforts forcefully to l’histoire des mentalités — the study of the mental universe of ordinary people. How is l’homme moyen sensual (the man on the street) dealing with the technological choices arrayed before him?
Energizing the IT base
The IT pundits’ much discussed promise of “technology transformation” will never materialize if appropriate exothermic — i.e., behavior-inducing and energy creating — IT ideas have no mass following among those working at the screens around the world.
Historians tell us that the Western Renaissance was a magical time between the 14th and 17th centuries characterized by a society-wide thirst for the new and a zeitgeist embracing infinite possibilities and ever-widening horizons. It was a time of hope. Anthropologists used the term Libido sciendi — a Latin term meaning “the love of knowing” or “the desire to know” — to describe the attitude of the day.
I don’t know about you, but I am not sensing a bubbling feeling of joy or curiosity when I talk to college seniors seeking their first jobs or to midlevel IT staffers doing the heavy lifting of keeping the existing IT infrastructure running.
As CIO, have you articulated a clear vision of what you want IT to achieve during your tenure? Have you calmed the anger of unmet expectations, repaired the wounds of system outages, alleviated the doubts about career paths, charted a filled-with-benefits road forward and embodied the hopes of all stakeholders?
Education and evangelism beyond the IT org
The cognitive elephant in the room that no one appears willing to talk about is the widespread technological illiteracy of the world’s population. Most of the people living in our digital society have never built an IT system. Several scholars studying how knowledge is actually created believe that one cannot know something without experiencing it.
In an Open Yale Course lecture, beloved and now sadly passed Yale history professor John Merriman recounts the story of Napolean, who, following his program of centralizing curriculum for all of France, bragged that he could look at his watch and see what all the students in the lycée — the high schools he created — were studying at any particular time. We — the IT profession in general and you the CIO in particular — are woefully ignorant of the tech ignorance of our key stakeholders.
I applaud and admire those very few CIOs (less than 20%) who have successfully implemented executive development programs designed to make us smarter about analytics, cloud, cybersecurity, and artificial intelligence. The one thing that just about everyone I know agrees about is that the majority of corporate training programs do not have the intended effect of eliminating ignorance.
The road ahead is clear. We have to recapture hearts and minds. We have to exponentially expand what people know about IT.
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