I.Q. ratings are a measure of a person's capacity to learn something new. I.Q. ratings are usually expressed as a ratio of a person's tested "mental age" to his or her chronological age.

You could say, then, that a company's Technical I.Q. is the company's capacity to learn something new about a technology that the company is involved in or depends upon.

Once a new technology is understood, the technology can be applied to advance your company's products or services. This increases your company's ability to compete effectively, and to expand and continue to be successful.

While I've never met a person who was actively engaged in trying to lower his or her own personal I.Q., I have seen individuals engaged in practices that would lower their company's Technical I.Q.

This is most common, and most dangerous, with departments or groups who are engaged in the development of new products or services.

Not Invented Here

The "Not Invented Here Syndrome" is a commonly used label for the phenomenon where company personnel reject a new idea because it was not developed inside the company, or inside a particular department or group. Sometimes called by its initials "NIH" for short, this phenomenon is nothing new. However, its consequences are often more serious today because the pace of technological change is faster and more far-sweeping than ever before.

Generally NIH is thought to be the result of defensiveness, jealousy or some personality quirk of the person or persons involved. However, to write off a specific instance of this phenomenon without closer examination can itself be a short-sighted move that is detrimental to your company.

Technological Defensiveness

Managerial attitudes toward a technical development team can have a much bigger impact on developmental success than many executives may realize. If your own technical team seems to get defensive when asked about or introduced to new ideas, you can take a step back and see if any current managerial or executive attitudes are helping to keep the defensiveness in place.

The Blame Game

Not too long ago I saw a company executive take his technical team out to see a promotional display that featured a competitor's innovation. Recognizing the brilliance of it, they began to admire it and ask all about it. You could hear the excitement creeping into their speech. "Maybe", they were thinking out loud, "there's a way to put a new twist on this idea for our own company's products."

The executive, lost in his own thoughts about sales competition and who knows what else, did not hear or recognize the resurgence that was taking place in his own technical crew. Their enthusiasm was suddenly and completely flattened when the executive looked up at them all and yelled, "Why didn't you think of that?"

They were crushed by his delivery of the remark, which seemed to them to be the whole point of the trip. Upon returning to the office the technical team slinked backed to their desks, afraid to show their faces outside of their own work room. I couldn't help thinking that this company's development team had no hope of coming up with any bright ideas unless they could first cast off the depression that had now settled over them.

You Don't Always Have to Be First

Most people think the Wright brothers were the first to fly. The first real flight happened in France on October 9, 1890 by Clement Ader in a steam powered airplane. The altitude was only a few inches. The Wright brothers knew about this flight and studied it.

How different our world would be if the Wright Brothers would have just blamed themselves for not being first and simply abandoned the subject. Instead they took the ideas they encountered, improved upon them, and made history.

Whether or not your own technical people are the first to think of some new idea is generally not that important for most companies. Much more important is their ability to fit the use of a new technology or new idea to your company's own products or services.

The "It's Not Possible" Response

Sometimes it is engineering's job to implement new ideas from marketing or management. When engineering starts responding to valid requests or suggestions with too many "it's technically not possible" answers, it's time to examine the situation.

In cases where the technical team is already overburdened with work, "it's technically not possible" is often the easiest response. Sometimes the response should really be "it's just not possible given our current workload" or "we don't know enough about that right now to be able to evaluate the request". Technical staff often think that such responses would not be well received and may even endanger their jobs.

Before declaring a "mutiny" and firing the staff it's wise to look more closely to discover the real cause of the situation. Are requests being rejected due to an already impossible work load? Do existing unresolved technical troubles prevent any further work on the subject of the request? Has the request been made in such a way that it threatens the technical staff and so is being rejected without really being examined? Is the question beyond the technical expertise or the assigned purview of the existing staff, so that they can't or shouldn't be expected to answer it?

Technical Time Bombs

Sometimes a technical problem can exist which one or more individuals on the tech team have kept hidden from management. This usually starts as a seemingly small problem which is not mentioned because it appears to be solvable in a short time, without requiring a fuss. When the short time period expires without a resolution, things can get complicated. If the technical problem won't resolve without the use of significant resources (time, personnel and/or money), it generally cannot be hidden for long. The longer it is kept a secret, the bigger the upset can be when it is finally revealed as an unsolved problem.

One company's small software team kept telling its management that implementing the new features they wanted "could not be done with current personal computer processing power". The team stated that any implementation of the requested features would cause unacceptably slow performance in their product, and customers would complain.

The real reason was that there were hidden flaws in the software for which "work-arounds" had been put in place. The new features were incompatible with the work-arounds. Instead of finding and correcting the flaw, the team kept implementing visible product improvements to keep management at bay and buy time (they hoped) to perform the corrections. When a competitor successfully implemented the requested features in the competitor's product, management concluded that their software team was incompetent and let the entire team go.

Don't Hide Technical Problems from Management

Hidden technical problems are time bombs that must be defused as early as possible, by properly reporting the problem along with proposed solutions. In the above example, it turned out that management would have been willing to hire a new person and dedicate that person full time to resolving the software problem and eliminating the work-arounds. After the team left and the problem was discovered, that's exactly what happened.

Orientation Towards Results

The world of business is a results-oriented world. A company's objectives, both long-term and short-term, must be accomplished for the company to survive. A high Technical I.Q. in your company means that there is that much more ability to advance your company's objectives by the use of appropriate technology.

The descriptions and examples above point out ways that people lower their company's Technical I.Q. What about raising it?

People Apply Technology

In any company, a key thing to remember is that people apply technology. People are the key to utilizing technology. There are many ways to encourage your personnel, technical and non-technical, to keep abreast of new technology and to get themselves educated in relevant technology. However, education alone is not enough.

The knowledge of technology must be properly focused in alignment with the company's objectives in order for that knowledge to really advance the company in any way. All the way up and down the organization, each person can only do this by first clearly understanding the objectives of his or her own job. This is a basic and simple principle that enjoys wide agreement. Yet it is seldom applied regularly enough by each person on the job.

More Important Than Efficiency

If you can't clearly define in a one-page or less description exactly what your job is and how it relates to specific company objectives, you yourself are in danger of holding back your own company's progress. Having the right focus is more important than efficiency. If you are very efficient at doing things that really don't advance your company's objectives, there is no ultimate value to that efficiency. Even if you are only somewhat efficient at accomplishing things that do forward your company's objectives, there is tremendous value in what you are doing.

Focusing the Power of Technology

You can focus the power of any technology you use or work with, by aligning your efforts to the objectives of your team, your group, your department and your company overall. If you do not have a current list of objectives for yourself that support and match up with objectives within your company, you need one! Schedule a few hours in the coming week to re-examine the objectives within your company, and the objectives for your own assigned duties. Make a list of your own objectives, and how they relate to the duties assigned to you. These objectives and duties must match up. Where they don't, talk to your manager or supervisor and work it out so that they do.

When You Can't Learn Everything

There is too much new technology being released each day for any one person to keep up with all of it. As information about new technology comes forward, how can you decide which subjects or topics to learn about, and which ones to ignore? Your accurate list of job objectives and duties gives you a starting point and tells you where to focus your attention.

Find out which technologies have a chance of helping you with your objectives and responsibilities. Those are the ones to explore a little. See how they apply to your work and how they interest you. If you end up with more subjects to tackle than can possibly be done in the time you can spend on it, how do you choose? A good way is to take the subjects that spark your interest the most. You can also split up the topics with another person who shares related responsibilities and interests.

Keeping Your Company's Technical I.Q. High

Following these suggestions will ensure that you and your company get the greatest practical benefit from new technology. This is how both you and your company both increase your "technology power". Instead of lowering your company's Technical I.Q., you will be raising it!

For a list of items that can lower or raise your company's Technical I.Q. see the chart entitled, "Things That Affect Your Company's Technical I.Q." (click to view...)

From Security Technology and Design, January/February 1995.