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by Teresa Martin

Memo to all those who are proud to be technology know-nots, who refuse to open a digital document, and who are completely ignoring the technically-driven culture shifts of the past 20 years: WAKE UP!

We live in a digital era. Period.

And we now have national leadership that acknowledges this: President-elect Obama's plans call for a national Chief Technology Officer. This is a move that is more significant than it might seem on the surface and isn't about adding computers or teaching certain members of Congress how to (finally) use email.

The CTO is a strategic role. It looks at the organization, its needs, and its future directions, while at the same time looking at all sorts of emerging technologies and technology-driven trends in order to anticipate and leverage these trends for the organization's health, well-being, and mission success. The CTO is also part of the team that defines the future of organization, with an eye toward the ways technology may shape it.

This is very different from an IT role. IT is about deploying systems, supporting users, managing IT vendors, and maintaining software and hardware. The IT role is vital and it is very much part of the operational structure for any organization today. The IT activities are about managing one important aspect of organizational resources.

You'll note that I am carefully using the word "organization" - that's very intentional. Businesses, non-profits, and government entities are all being shaped by technology driven trends. It doesn't matter what you are; you are not immune from the larger forces around us.

By adding a CTO role, Obama and his team are saying that they understand the world is evolving, and that much of that evolution is driven by technological change - and that effective governmental organizations need to understand and evolve too, not stick their collective heads in the sand and pretend that it is 1950 all over again.

Indeed, the very nature of democratic participation, civic engagement, and governmental function are in flux. The digital tools we've created and the cultural use that has emerged around them creates a work-in-progress when you think about what governance means in the digital age.

Blogs, mico-blogs (like Twitter), universal and instant peer-to-peer content and information sharing, multiple media experiences, and the sheer global interconnections create a very different environment and set of expectations from even 10 years ago. With fewer centralized points of mediation, we have in created a culture that expects a truer democratic process, with more voices speaking up and more voices expecting to be heard. Yup, a percentage of it is inane drivel, but so is a percentage of all of our political processes. Just read through a CSPAN transcript sometime!

The dynamics of our 21s century culture demand - and will increasingly demand - different methods of leading. A press conference for three (or even four) television networks and a handful of large print publications is so, well, last century. The idea of that a feather dropped inside the US border creates ripples only inside those boundaries is an illusion. I'm thinking of a story told by a MIT researcher about work he was doing with social media and how a company that released a product for the youth market in Asia but not in Europe US was stunned that within hours it was receiving messages from around the world asking about the product. It couldn't understand how something it did in one location could possibly be generating responses in "different" countries. Welcome to the connected universe where everyone might well be talking to everyone else, without barriers of geography, age, or other traditional markers.

And then there are the policy implications. Technology has direct impact on a range of policy decisions, both explicit and implicit. What is privacy and what protects it? What is public and what isn't? What is literacy and how to we provide for it? What makes us, as a country, globally competitive and how do we provide for the infrastructure, tools, and knowledge to keep us there? How do we balance business and community needs? How are defense and intelligence shaped in this digital world and what does and doesn't define our values? We can do incredible things with biotech - but should we? We can drive new kinds of energy development - what technology trends should we be looking at in this sector and how does it fit in with out bigger picture?

The intersections of technology and policy are nearly endless - and that's another way a CTO can help the organization think about its mission and its goals. He or she brings awareness of the all the way the tendrils of tech reach into policy - and how it can make decisions practical or a logistical nightmare.

Here's another example I remember: a former astronaut was speaking about how his team was mandated, post-Challenger disaster, to practice (on the ground) for high altitude emergency exits. The Russian shuttle team was rolling on the floor in laughter at this - the science of physics is not kind to human bodies at speed and altitude, and emergency exists as mandated by a technically-illiterate Congress were a foolish mandate that didn't address the real issues or help develop a solution. A CTO sanity check anyone?

Obviously adding a CTO doesn't solve the problems or answer the questions or find solutions to all the issues raised by our ever-shifting technology developments. But it does at least get the topic into the conversation at an appropriate strategic level and by intelligent and knowledge people. And it makes it clear that there's nothing to proud about in hiding from the present and bragging about how stupid you are with computers.

Are we going to be leaders in this century? I sure hope so, and I take heart that the gesture of a CTO speaks volumes about looking forward instead of back, and in believing that human minds, curiosity, and intelligence are part of the solution.

One of the smartest (and wealthiest) technology industry people is venture capitalist John Doerr. In this interview from Web2.0 November 2008 he talks about an ideal Chief Technology Officer - Bill Joy (BSD Unix, Sun Microsystems, Java) or Danny Hillis (Thinking Machines, Disney, Applied Minds/Metaweb) - plus shares his views on technology policy and what is really happening in the economy. Worth a watch
(http://link.brightcove.com/services/player/bcpid1568178642?bctid=1902595942 )
if you have 10 minutes!