There is a lot of information on this website about the professional things that I have done and the kudos that I have received.  This page gives you the story that helps to tie those things together and explains my philosophy with respect to technology and leadership as developed on the journey to being a technologist and a leader.

My first foray into technology as a teenager was somewhat happenstance.  My father owned his own business and was a believer in technology.  He bought a couple of computers and he needed an inventory and invoicing system and I built that system.  A year or so later I wrote a program in basic to do some statistical analysis.  At the time, if someone had told me that I would have a career in technology, I would have laughed.  Over the next few years, I wrote a variety of programs and created various database systems.  The theme across all of these projects was “here is some really tedious activity that needs to be done and/or here is some information that we really need to have in various places and we only want to enter it once”.   I greatly appreciated the ability of technology to reduce the need for the tedious and reduce error and let me or others do the fun and creative stuff.

I continued on this path while I pursued my bachelor’s and master’s degree in Economics and International Political Economy, I continued to use technology to help myself and my colleagues and I also used those skills in part time jobs and internships that required technical skills.

After my master’s degree, my first job was ostensibly oriented around economics and analysis.  The big problem that we faced on our project was that the economic model we were using was very complex and needed to be implemented on a computer to be useful.  Unfortunately, the economists did not speak software development and the developers did not speak economics.  I quickly took on the role of product owner (if we were talking about a Scrum environment).  I would work on the economic model with the other economists talk to the other stakeholders and then go talk to the development team about what we needed.  I learned to translate back and forth between the different groups.  Once again using technology to remove the tedium of complex calculations and the recording and comparison of results.  It was during this period that I took my first formal courses related to software development.

After a couple of years in that role, I decided to go back to school for my Ph.D.  I was still not focused on IT.  However, I did see technical consulting as a way of putting myself through school.  My years as a consultant gave me a breadth of experience across different verticals and across different aspects of information technology.  I was able to branch out from a base in software development and database and data modeling work into technical infrastructure and system administration and design.  I learned to translate across the many specialties in Information Technology.  By the end of the Ph.D. program, I discovered that I had a lot more fun creating technical solutions that really made people’s jobs easier and better, than I did doing research in international political economy.  I have never looked back.  I became and still am a technologist focused on business/organizational solutions.  I have created solutions both in back office roles and in operations roles.

All of this left me with a very solid philosophy about why and how I do IT.  Why do I do IT?  I do IT because the technology can actually make someone’s job or life easier or more fun or less time consuming and these are the things that not only help the individual but also the organization.  I don’t do IT just so I can play with a new piece of hardware or learn a new language or technique.  There is fleeting joy in those things, but the real joy is when a user/client comes to me and talks about how they still use the system built 5 or 10 years ago and it still saves them time and energy.

How do I do IT?  As inclusively as possible!  Inclusively across the technical team.  Whatever the project, you need to talk to all your specialists who will be affected (network, system admin, security, database, developers, help-desk, etc. etc.) Inclusively across the stakeholders.  Why are we doing this?  How does this help us meet organizational goals?  Who will this affect?  Have we addressed change management?  Do we have a core and a majority of stakeholders on-board and understanding the project?  Have we looked at the hard to quantify costs around learning curves and retraining and impacts on teams?

After several years of consulting, one of my clients hired me into an IT leadership role.   That started an interesting journey in becoming a leader as well as a technologist.  I have had the pleasure of leading teams in a number of organizations and having increasing responsibilities in size and diversity of teams and organizational roles.  I think that like many people I started that journey by thinking about the leaders that I admired and people that I never wanted to work for or with again.  I have learned a lot about leadership through experience and through talking with leaders that I respect and reading about leadership. This journey is far from finished, but here are a few things that I think are tenets of my leadership philosophy.

Leadership is a difficult thing and one of the easiest ways to sabotage yourself in a leadership position is to have people on the team who either cannot pull their weight in terms of work product quality or quantity and/or people who do not work and play well with others.  My goal is always to hire people who can both do the job and work well with others.  If there are existing team members who need help doing either, then part of my job as a leader is to either mentor them or find them a mentor.

Another key component of leadership for me is giving people the resources that they need to do their job.  Some resources are easy to identify – a computer or a piece of software or a desk.  Some resources are not as obvious.  I firmly believe that people need to understand how their day to day activities fit into the overall strategy of the organization.  This helps greatly in the clarity of explanations for what we need to do next and what the end result needs to be.  This means that individuals can be more self-organizing and self-managing, which leaves the leader in a position to resolve the issues that the individual or team can’t resolve internally.  A good leader does not need to micromanage.   That leader in fact relies upon the vision and ideas of the team.

Another aspect of leadership that I have found critical over time is collaboration.  I expect that any team that I lead will be collaborative internally and externally.  The great joy is in saying yes to request.  Who wants to say “no”?  There is no joy in that at all.  Of course we can’t always say yes, but the approach should always be how we can meet this person’s needs.  We should try and understand why they are making the request and what they really need.  A key part of collaboration is the ability to understand where the other person is coming from.  We should find a way within the constraints of budget/resources and policy to help other people get their jobs done, because we are all on the same team.  When we have to say no we should be able to point to prioritization of organizational goals or technical constraints.

Leadership by example is critical.  As a leader you must not only talk the talk but walk the walk.  I remember going to a management talk some years ago and the speaker who was supposed to be a very collaborative leader publicly humiliated one of the organizers for some technical issues with the slides for his presentation.  My thought at the time was “talks the talk” and he did that very well, but he clearly could not walk the walk of collaboration and respect for a colleague.

The leadership journey for me is far from over.  I do think that I am on the right track, because of two things.  One is that other leaders have requested that I join them as they move to new opportunities.  The other is that members of the teams that I have lead have followed me as I have moved to new opportunities.