Technology meets art

Handing out awards amidst a raging downturn is a tricky business. What constitutes leadership during a meltdown? Do the skill sets, qualities, and accomplishments that play so well during the fat times apply while people are losing their jobs, companies are retrenching, and budgets are shrinking?

For the past several months, we’ve pondered these questions while preparing the InfoWorld CTO 25, our annual awards recognizing the IT executives who’ve demonstrated leadership within their companies and in the tech community.

This year’s 25 winners have varying styles, budgets, organization sizes, and mandates. Yet all would be considered IT leaders any year, including the free-for-all that was 2003. Indeed, the judging committee of editors (including InfoWorld CTO Chad Dickerson) and our own CTO Advisory Council ultimately concluded that the essential nature of leadership — courage; big-picture vision; integrity; the ability to effect change; and the talent to motivate your team, your company, and even your industry — is a constant.

But leadership in a downturn requires something extra. A touch of charisma, maybe. A dogged optimism, certainly. In evaluating this impressive collection of candidates, all with the title CTO or its equivalent (vice president of technology, chief architect, chief technologist, CIO, and so on), we were struck by how often the concept of creativity kept cropping up. Veteran technology journalist Howard Baldwin, who wrote the article and interviewed all 25 winners, was startled at how often the motifs of art and creativity kept wending their way into the conversation.

“I had expected these people to be straightforward engineers — certainly not uncreative types, but more numbers-driven and not necessarily artistically oriented,” Baldwin says. “Yet, unbidden, they kept coming up with these references to artistic disciplines and to the creative processes their jobs required.”

CTO Raymond Karrenbauer at ING, for instance, draws from the theme of music to make his point. “How the instrument of technology is played is analogous to an art,” he notes. “I like to think of CTOs as conductors — they are capable of playing any instrument in the orchestra and coordinating the harmonic sounds to form a symphony.”

QAD’s Jim Kirkley waxes equally poetic about his vocation: “I’m big into symmetry. If I see an architecture that isn’t beautiful in its design, it bothers me. It becomes an artistic thing. If it doesn’t look right, if it’s out of balance, you can tell.” And Sun CTO Greg Papadopoulos sounds a similar note, calling the technologist’s craft an act of creativity and passion.

Passion and artistry may not be the first words that come to mind when you think of IT. But our award-winning CTOs strive for nothing less, in good times or bad.