InformationWeek

September 6, 1999

Envisioning Change

By Lou Bertin

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n sports, it's axiomatic that speed cannot be coached. Technique can be coached. Quickness, based on anticipation of how a play will unfold, most certainly can be coached. But speed? Utterly uncoachable. From much personal experience with coaches over the years, I can attest that speed afoot -- despite one's best efforts and eagerness to learn -- cannot be coached. No way, no how. People either have the gift of speed or they don't.

Similarly, it appears, are people gifted with vision -- the sort that enables individuals to see a series of building blocks (think technologies) and envision how they can be used to construct imaginative, efficient, productive structures. The sort of vision I'm thinking about is as uncoachable as speed.

That conclusion is born of a number of recent conversations with veteran IT executives. It's a pity that such vision can't be coached, because it's increasingly apparent that vision is the single most important attribute -- with the ability to educate a close second -- to an IT executive's career success, or lack thereof.

To a degree that's surprising and, occasionally, somewhat depressing, I've recently encountered a number of IT executives who are stuck in an odd sort of time warp where pressure (either internal or external) to innovate is an imperative to somehow be dodged; where the opportunity to apply technology in new ways to gain competitive ground quickly is a burden to be shunned, where technological change is simply a source of pain and not an endless source of nourishment for needy organizations.

Is change simple? More often than not, change is a complex, three-dimensional process. Is change painless? Never. Is it welcome? That's the million-dollar question. While change might not be welcome, it surely needs to be encouraged at best, and tolerated at worst in this economy and in this competitive environment.

Typical of the comments I've been hearing lately came from a CEO who asked: "Who is holding a gun our heads anyway? Why do we need to look at every new thing that comes down the line? Why can't something last longer than six months before we think we need to buy a new one to keep up?" The answers to each of those questions betray just how effective that executive's blinders are and how they typify a management and organizational style that should be dropped as quickly as a smallpox sample.

For one, the people holding a gun to the head of a company are, foremost, its competitors -- either the competitors that are familiar or those that can arise in the blink of an eye as a result of the emergence of the very technologies that the executive in question laments. Enough said.

Why does the organization need to look at every new thing that comes along? Because even if the company isn't looking, it can be assumed with absolute certainty that someone else is looking, not to mention the fact that looking, and learning, has never been easier, thanks to the ubiquity of the Web.

Last comes the issue of why something can't last longer than six months before technological obsolescence sets in. The issue isn't one of technical obsolescence, it's one of functional life span -- and functional life spans are amazingly long-lived as we are constantly being reminded. How many times has the mainframe died? How many iterations of thin-client devices do we need to experience, dating back to the green-screen terminal? Is there a statute of limitation on how long architectures that rely on massive data repositories can be allowed to exist?

Simply put, the issue of coping with and capitalizing on change isn't a question of what tools a company has at its disposal, but it unmistakably is an issue of how that organization decides to use those tools. That thinking is hardly original, but the degree to which it is ignored or is simply incomprehensible is baffling, at least to me.

This brings us back to that troublesome and eternal "vision thing." I think Albert Einstein got it right when he said that "imagination is more important than knowledge," and Walt Disney got it equally right when he referred to his employees as "imagineers."

Here's to the IT dreamers and the visionaries among us. Without them, and those smart enough to listen to them, we'd all be on the streets more quickly than we could possibly envision.

Lou Bertin is an industry consultant. He can be reached at Lou.Bertin@gte.net.