Excerpt from The Education of a Technologist

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We present this excerpt from The Education of a Technologist, a book in progress by Dan Woods as a call to technologists to take a hard look at themselves and prepare to improve their performance. The messages sent will resonate with the business side, and will likely suggest a new way of working with technologists. But the analysis in this excerpt is focused on what technologists should do to make things work.

The Core Features of the Raw Technology Persona

Why is it that:

• Most technologists know they are regarded as extremely smart, yet wonder why they rarely are asked their opinion about important issues outside of their bailiwick.
• Most technologists know that they tend to underestimate the time and cost needed to accomplish technology projects, yet again and again, the make the same mistake and over promise on delivery dates.
• Most technologists have instincts about business strategy, but can't find a way to coherently make a case and guide the consensus.
• Most technologists think that if they work hard and their department does well this will be automatically noticed, and they will be fairly rewarded.

The thinking that motivates the positions listed above is not representative of an ignorant or terminally ineffective person. Rather, these positions spring from a strong character full of admirable traits. The raw technology persona represents admirable features taken to extremes and not guided by experience and practical limits of the business world.

The raw technology persona is defined as one dominated by the following features:

• Optimistic
• Mathematical
• Innocent
• Accommodating
• Creative
• Focused
• Summary

When taken too far these positive attributes serve to limit the effectiveness of a technologist. We will now examine these traits in detail and explain how they reinforce each other.

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