With my love for writing and technology, it was inevitable that I would start a blog. To some people, blogs are old news and for others they are asking, "a what?" Nevertheless, I'm looking forward to jumping into the blogosphere and adding what I see as a missing component to all the conversations about web sites: how to make sure the business is driving technology decisions and not the technology driving the business.
My passion for technology started before the words "World Wide Web" and "the Internet" were everyday vocabulary words. My first experience with the Internet was writing e-mail in college on the VAX 11/780 mainframe with dumb terminals that we used to communicate with professors and classmates on assignments. Those days seem like a long time ago!
One of my first work study jobs was as a user assistant. I loved helping my fellow students realize that "all this computer stuff" wasn't really that hard. I also decided almost immediately as a freshman that I would major in Computer Science. A passion was born.
As a sophomore, I got an internship working at NeXT Computer. I worked at NeXT in the Channel Sales department during the summers and part-time during the school year for the next three years. It was a fantastic opportunity to work for a Steve Jobs company. My wide-eyed enthusiasm soaked up all that was around me: the innovation, the hard work, and the lightning speed of Silicon Valley.
One thing I learned about myself while an intern at NeXT was that I loved demonstrating the technology to users. The more I worked in channel and sales support, the harder time I had imagining being a programmer full-time. Working in high-tech marketing provided a perfect mix for me. I could use my technical skills (which my marketing colleagues LOVED); I could then develop valuable marketing and sales skills, which I so enjoyed. A career was born.
For the past seven years, I have turned my passion for technology and sales/marketing into a consulting business - advising and assisting some of the great companies in Silicon Valley on how to make the most of their web technology investments while meeting their business objectives. When it comes to large-scale web site implementations, you start out with business objectives; but by the time you get through weeks or months of implementation, you wonder what happened and how come you didn't get what you wanted...or paid for. The problem is that as you get deeper and deeper into implementation, technology decisions start ruling the day vs. business decisions.
As an executive in Silicon Valley, you're probably pretty technology savvy to begin with. But when you ask your technical team if something is possible and the answer starts coming back to you in techno mumbo-jumbo, your eyes probably start glazing over. There is only so much technical stuff you can (or should) learn to make sure you get the web site you want.
As a web site manager, you might be trying to sell web technology solutions to your executives and either being told "No" or "Maybe" - but not really getting your project off the ground. The benefits of the technology solution are clear, but you're not getting the message across to your executives.
Well, that's the gap we're going to bridge here...talking about these kinds of issues in depth and exploring how the business side AND the technical side can remove the roadblocks to creating great web sites that make a difference to a company's mission and to its bottom line.
with your impressive background I hope you resume writing on this blog!!
Kare Anderson
Posted by: Kare Anderson | January 04, 2009 at 02:55 PM