How many times have you heard, “Well, just ask the young folks, they know how all this tech stuff works?”

I am often talking with people of various skill levels, backgrounds, and experiences about technology.  So what is it that makes some people “get” technology and not others?  Well, it’s not what you think…

It’s not age, experience, or maturity.  It’s your technology mindset.  The openness to evaluate new services and applications.  The ability to understand the business you are in and how technology can effectively support it.  The maturity to evaluate how a new product or service may just be a better way than how you do it today.

It’s also the mindset that technology is just a tool in business.  It will not fix a flawed workflow or, in a more extreme case, a broken business model.  The business goals must drive all technology decision making and not the other way around.

This becomes very clear when I meet with IT leaders that are embracing the cloud-based future we are headed towards.  They are not in the back hugging their servers and tape backup drives, they are not worried about what will happen if all the data is (securely) stored in the cloud.  They embrace it.

And those “younger” folks?  The solution is not always to rip everything out and move to some unproven cloud-based service.  The iPhone will actually NOT solve all your business problems. Sometimes we do need to use that good ‘ol MAS90 accounting package loaded on our workstation, Mint.com just isn’t going to cut it!  So again, it’s about the right technology mindset…

Written by: Edward Stringfellow