Surprisingly my greatest personal challenge in my position as CTO is not technology. Technology is the easy part: I enjoy it and excel in it. However, technology alone never seems to address the real needs of our company, and I suspect any company. There is an overabundance of technology available and it is easy to drown in cool technology, sucking up as much resources as are made available. I believe my role is to select the minimal amount of the appropriate technology to effectively address our needs.

This rant was sparked by a sentence in the book "groundswell" which Loren Skagen loaned to me. On page xi of the introduction of this book:

"We define the four-step POST process for creating strategies-people, objective, strategy, and technology-and reveal why starting with the technologies is a mistake."

As I noted in me previous talk about Mark Cohen's talk about Interactive Advertising, the point that made the most impact on me in his talk was that understanding and defining the target audience, marketing strategy, and marketing objectives was the prerequisite for lining up and using appropriate interactive marketing technologies to effectively accomplish the marketing goals. It's the same point.

The challenge for me is to practice and master new skills, and to curb my natural tendency to play with cool technology for fun without much regard for why and how it's used to address real needs. Fortunately, I've got the support and guidance of a lot of really smart people skilled in business and marketing strategy at Hawthorne. They're also very understanding and accommodating in letting me play a fair amount of the time!