Technological ignorance — what we don’t know about technology — is slowing the growth of the global economy. Increasing in all facets of existence, technology ignorance is growing fastest and having the most damaging impacts between the ears of key stakeholders.
To deliver on the full promise of the technological Wunderkammer poised to be implemented today, CIOs must know what stakeholders know and don’t know about technology, as there is significant upside to making stakeholders smarter when it comes to IT.
Here are three key questions IT leaders must answer about stakeholders throughout their organization.
Do users understand the technology they use every day?
Following my return from France where I studied the mental and artistic evolution of Vincent Van Gogh during his years in Provence — many excellent lessons for midcareer CIOs — I attempted to put my personal technology house in order (much as Vincent attempted to put his mental house in order by voluntarily checking himself into the asylum at St.-Rémy).
Lacking the advantage of tech-savvy younger relatives or high-quality institutional tech support, the sole reason IMHO that many long-in-the-tooth executives are reluctant to retire, I ended up spending a great deal of time with the hardworking front-line employees of the vendors who sold me my personal tech stack — e.g., Apple Genius bar, Best Buy Geek Squad, and Verizon/AT&T/T-Mobile support staff.
These exceptionally talented and egregiously underappreciated tech professionals, who have the patience of saints, all believe that most angst associated with technology today is a function of “operator error.” And the vast majority of operator error emerges from technological ignorance. We have to fix this.
Every organization has a group of people who “get” tech. They know how to make in-place tech and new tech work for them. CIOs need to make sure this “useful knowledge” — an economic term of art made popular by recent Nobel Laureate Joel Mokyr — is distributed, shared, challenged, and supplemented.
Do users know what they want technologically?
As a futurist I will be the first to admit that the path forward is decidedly nonlinear. Tim Hartford, the “undercover economist” writing for the Financial Times, concurs stating that “psychologically realistic humans are not mathematically predictable.” Artificial intelligence — no matter how powerful the algorithm or how well trained the model — cannot tell us what the future holds.
That said, we need to crisp up our understanding of the aspirations we have for the $5.43 trillion that Gartner estimates humans will spend on IT in 2025. As I have mentioned in previous articles, what the CEOs of the dominant MANGO and FAANG tech firms want and what your stakeholders want are not the same.
What do your stakeholders want AI to do for them? One school of thought gaining prominence in the consumer sector is that AI is a cognitive tool — a “calculator on steroids” as one business professor concludes. Others see larger impacts forecasting that AI could be the washing machine of the 21st century — freeing individuals from quotidian tasks like booking a venue for a child’s birthday, scheduling a plumber, generating an obituary for a relative, or arranging a vacation itinerary. How far away are we from a day when the basic elements of human existence are converted into tasks to be optimized by AI tools?
What processes do you have in place to understand the demand signal for AI? What processes do you have in place to understand what key stakeholders want from technology? Péter Tamás Bauer, a professor at the London School of Economics, was convinced that “economic development requires modernization of the mind.” How are CIOs shaping — and guiding — technology aspirations today?
What does your organization do about stakeholders who don’t benefit from technology change?
In A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy,Mokyr acknowledges that “the thing about technological change … is that even though it makes a society richer, there are always losers. … [S]ociety has to come up with mechanisms by which people who don’t necessarily benefit … will not resist the process of growth.”
Have you as a CIO identified those stakeholders who will not benefit from technology change? Have you crafted some kind of remedy?
Stakeholders need to know how to get the greatest value from the technology at hand. CIOs need to know what stakeholders want from technology. And everyone needs to have a broadbrush assurance that what comes next is not going to suck.
See also:
- IT’s renaissance risks losing steam
- Winning over IT value skeptics: CIO job No. 1
- Business survival requires an IT org that stands apart