The Long View

Stealing WiFi

I've seen several pieces in the last few days about people "piggybacking" on others' WiFi connections. The most recent was a NY Times article.

I've been guilty of this myself. I was working with a client on an extended out-of-town contract, and always stayed at the same hotel. For some reason this hotel's wireless router was often unavailable, depending on what room I was in. However, the router at the Fairfield Inn just across the parking lot would come in fine, and since it wasn't secured, I'd go ahead and use that.

I got a real chuckle when I was at a business breakfast recently, and one of the speakers - a very nice, straight-up kind of lady - admitted getting in her car and driving through neighborhoods near her hotel to find an open WiFi connection to check her email when the hotel didn't provide that service! The image I had of this lady (who really looks like someone you'd meet in church) "war-driving" around a neighborhood was priceless.

First, I'm appalled that any business-friendly hotel would not have this service. Second, it goes to show how we can all be pushed to marginal behaviors by necessity.

Technology as enabler

Once again, with feeling...

I've expressed the opinion several times in blog entries (and will say to anyone who gives me the slightest sliver of opportunity to riff on this) that technology is only as effective as the processes that it supports. I've said many times that I'd rather be running a company with outstanding processes and mediocre technology than a company with state-of-the-art technology and dysfunctional processes.

I started reading a book that's long been on my "must-read" list, and  - bang - in almost the opening pages is the empirical evidence for this observation.

In Good to Great by Jim Collins (and you really have to read it to get a sense of the depth of the five-year research that went into this book) he recounts a number of things that one might expect to have played a part in a company's transition from a good company to a great company, but in fact did not. One of these things was technology.

Technology and technology-driven change has virtually nothing to do with igniting a transformation from good to great. We did find technology to accelerate transformations, but we learned that technology cannot cause a transformation; it can never be a fundamental prime mover in a shift from good to great.

So, if you want to be where the action is, to effect change, or to try to achieve greatness in a company, it is definitely NOT in the IT department, writing code, maintaining networks or configuring servers, no matter how cutting-edge the technology. You have to be led and directed by someone who can formulate the goals and objectives the technology serves.