Technology & Leadership
Alex Soojung-Kim Pang

Participant
Ray, the ability to instantly make things known in one place available in another is surely a mixed blessing. Isn't that what leads to information overload? Perhaps, when we are talking about strategic leadership, which is what top leadership has to be about, "information" is not the word we should be using. I suppose what we should be talking about is a term more like "perspective" or "wisdom" or "ideas".

Participant
I want to return to a question Alex posed at the outset of this conference that I think relates to recent postings, he asked, how much do top executives really need to know about information technology? At the risk of seeming overly simplistic, I believe that in most cases, executives need to understand the functionality of a variety of information technologies, but they usually don't necessarily need to understand the mechanics.

In my mind, IT executives have a responsibility to describe IT in ways that make sense to executives. In general, it's usually a relatively straightforward process. For example, I've explained neural networks and expertise location software to executives in a few sentences.

Control issues often arise when you have an IT executive that's engaging in intentional obfuscation. Business leaders want to know what tools and technologies they have at their disposal to run their businesses more effectively and efficiently. In my mind, it's IT's job to do that matching process in ways that make sense. They need to be able to deconstruct business strategies and determine what technologies might be appropriate, describe those technologies to executives in functional terms and then come to a joint determination if that is what is needed. Executives know what needs to be done, IT people can tell them whether it's possible or not.

(One caveat to all I've said thus far: Things do get a little more complex when you talk about what policymakers need to know about technologies because policy decisions can be quite different from business decisions.)

To address Dick's question about wisdom versus information. I think if you are talking about tools for executives to use themselves then yes, wisdom might be a better word. But the fact is, sometimes executives just want raw information, like stock prices. It all depends on the executive and his or her objectives. If they want to use tools for leadership, then things like expertise location software, computer conferencing, email, teleconferencing, etc. are likely to be useful to them. And having a visceral experience of one or more technologies used on a personal basis for real work can provide a good foundation for understanding other technologies that the executive may need to know about but not need to use.

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