A tricky balancing act

AS I'VE WRITTEN in this column in the past, one of the defining characteristics of a CTO is his or her technology evangelism. CTOs believe passionately that technology drives business and makes the world a better place and that the constant march of technological progress helps companies serve the customers more reliably and efficiently. We are always on the lookout for new products and services that drive this vision.

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But what happens when the CTO -- who has been trumpeting the transformative effects of technology in the hallways and boardrooms -- is skeptical that a particular technology implementation will solve a business problem? There is a fine line between selling a project to get budget and resources lined up for a particular initiative and unwittingly making people in your company think that by implementing a particular technology the rough waters will part and a voice from the heavens will intone, "This problem is now solved for all eternity." The balance between promoting the real wonder of technology that most CTOs recognize and managing the expectations of end-users during an actual rollout can be tricky. A "silver bullet" mentality can develop quickly -- nontechnical staff can begin to think that once a new technology is implemented, all legacy problems will disappear.

Quite often, the silver bullet mentality when applied to technology leads to false expectations, as people within an organization think that installing a piece of software will correct fundamentally nontechnical problems with the way business is done. For example, when sales at a company are down, it's much easier to say, "We need a more sophisticated SFA [sales-force automation] tool to drive revenue," than it is to say, "Our sales force is disorganized and doesn't have a clear vision of the products and services they are trying to sell." When a fundamental business problem masquerades as a technical problem and everyone thinks a piece of software is going to fix everything, proceed with extreme caution. Technology is usually an enabler, not a "solution," despite the marketing efforts of technology companies.

Currently, the technology team at InfoWorld is evaluating CMSes (content management systems) for our Web site. Our existing system is showing its age; it has a proprietary scripting language, an overly complex and difficult-to-manage database layer, and worst of all, the company that created the product is out of business. Our editorial staff suffers through an obtuse and difficult interface for pushing content through the system, and our engineers labor on back-end code in a language that has no further development path and therefore no long-term significance for their careers. Naturally and understandably, there are high hopes that a new CMS at InfoWorld will revolutionize the way we deal with content and make everything much less painful, and I think that it will -- to a certain degree, with the benefits realized over time. Although the market has advanced in the past year, just last December Forrester Research released a ranking of its top picks for CMS products, and their No. 1 pick (OpenMarket's Content Server) scored a scant 3 on a scale of 5. For a media company such as InfoWorld, a solid CMS is a "must-have" item and core to our business, so it's really a "must-have-now" item, regardless of the maturity of product offerings. Judging from these scores, for a content-intensive business such as InfoWorld, adopting even a top-ranked CMS is similar to hiring a first-year law student from a third-tier law school to defend you at a murder trial. Still, I remain optimistic.

Even as a strong believer in technology, managing expectations for technology in an imperfect world is perhaps the CTO's biggest challenge.