Success = Tech + Creativity
February 26, 2015
By Alan Cooper
The following is based on my interview with Mike Switzer on the South Carolina Business Review – click here.
You will never guess where I took my thirteen year old teenage son and his friend the other night. The Monster Truck Rally? The home opener for the Gamecock baseball team? An action movie?
How about the South Carolina Philharmonic? One of the pieces on the program was Holst’s, The Planets, a unique early 20thcentury symphony that I had never seen performed. In order to spice things up a bit, they partnered with the South Carolina State Museum to set up telescopes outside the Koger Center so that patrons could observe the stars. It was a beautiful, starry night sky. A scientist was there to answer your questions. We saw Jupiter and its four moons, a few other stars I can’t remember the name of, and then headed in for the performance. On each side of the stage, two big screens offered the listener a visual tour of the planets during each segment of the piece.
Great music presented in a creative way with a little technology involved. The Koger Center was sold out. How did those thirteen-year-old boys like the show? They said it was cool. Is that not the ultimate compliment? Way to go SC Phil!
The other day I opened up the Wall Street Journal and noticed that the second section, Marketplace, is now called Business and Tech. In the WSJ’s reasoning:
- “Every business is a technology business”
- “Technology will guide every function in the modern enterprise – sales, marketing, finance, supply chain, etc.”
- “Your next CEO is currently a CIO”
The WSJ’s plan is to infuse every business story with a tech component because that is how companies are competing. The next day, the lead was about how two years ago GM hired 8,000 people – not to work the factory – but programmers to help them develop software to sell trucks online. GM’s CIO cancelled a $3B a year contract with Hewlett-Packard in order to bring much of its technology in-house. “Because we brought the IT work back in-house, we take the lid off of what is possible,” said the CIO.
The task of business strategy is to determine how best to deploy your resources within your environment in order to meet your long-term goals. Increasingly, businesses are shifting to the technology and design departments in order to create a competitive advantage.
South Carolina has lots of examples of companies that are successfully using tech and creativity/design to compete. These are just a few that we have interviewed recently. SPARC in Charleston develops software for the federal government and defense industries. Eric Bowman, its president, is a programmer. BoomTown in Charleston has used technology as a disruptor in the real estate business. Grier Allen, its president and founder, is a computer science major from Clemson. SnapCap in Charleston is reinventing the market for small loans to business. Its founder, Hunter Stunzi, is not a programmer, but has put a team in place to leverage technology to speed up and improve the loan process.
Two people who have been shouting this “tech” message from the rooftops are Lonnie Emard, Director of IT-oLogy, and Peter Brews, Dean of the Moore School of Business. Hearing that GM hired 8,000 programmers would be no big surprise to Lonnie. Lonnie has been at the forefront of promoting the IT profession for at least seven years. One of the main focuses of IT-oLogy has been to increase the pipeline of students in IT.
You don’t need to tell Peter Brews that each of the functional areas of business is driven by information technology. If you graduate from the Moore School with a major in marketing, for example, you will have taken a deep dive into how companies can use data and technology to improve their marketing. IT is embedded into the curriculum.
Am I doing enough as a parent to encourage my children to prepare for this new world order? Should computer science and art be compulsory subjects in high school? Is South Carolina successfully producing a talented future workforce, one that is prepared to make an impact in a world where:
Success = Tech + Creativity
I hope so. You can lead a horse to water, but can you make him drink?
