What 'suits' need to know about IT

After 25 years in this industry, after teaching at four business schools, researching for three think tanks and working at five consultancies, I had an insight last week that may seem forehead-slappingly obvious when you read it: Ignorance of IT destroys value.

If the full value is to be extracted from every IT dollar spent, high-level executives have to know "things" about technology. As a knowledge-deficit kind of guy -- that is, as someone who studies the effects of ignorance on organizational performance -- I'm interested in figuring out what things need to be known about technology and who needs to know them.

When the World Changes, Shouldn't You Change With It? First, line-of-business executives are going to have to evolve. The world is changing, and if they want to survive, they will have to come down from the trees and learn to walk erect on the savannah of digitally enabled enterprises that have been transformed by globalization, Web 2.0 technologies and functionality delivered via the Internet. Not only do they need to know something about IT, but they also have to be perceived as knowledgeable.

And that knowledge has to be personal; it won't be enough to have sufficient tech knowledge to hire smart IT professionals. How fast is the environment changing? Very, very fast. President Clinton was famously technologically challenged, and he could get a laugh in 2000 telling an audience in Hyderabad, "When I was a young man, chips were something you ate, windows were something you washed, disks were part of your spinal column that when you got older often slipped out of place, and semiconductors were frustrated musicians who wished they were leading orchestras." In 2008, the laughter had a different tone when John McCain confessed that he had "never felt the particular need to e-mail." And even though some may have credited McCain with hiring technologists who are more savvy about the Web, business intelligence and search-engine optimization than those working for his opponent, he still lost some credibility by exhibiting his personal tech shortcomings.

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