Thornton A. May

Sustainability, or creating economic prosperity without wreaking ecological havoc, is very much on the minds of executives at big brand companies like Coca-Cola, American Greetings and UPS.

Career sustainability, or lifting your personal brand via consistently delivered, measurable enterprise value while maintaining some semblance of work-life balance, is top of mind for the millions of underappreciated IT professionals today. The world of IT work is in the early stages of fundamental change.

A few weeks ago, football fans in New England watched in horror as quarterback Tom Brady and the Patriots suffered an unattractive loss to their trash-talking divisional rivals, the New York Jets. The next day, sports fans throughout the region were numb.

The fact that a team that had held so much promise, had consumed so much of the community's time and attention and had been lavished with money had failed to deliver again reminded me of something else. I'm sorry to say, it was IT.

are dinosaurs: out of place in the world that is taking shape, and headed for mass extinction.

For most people, the phrase "mass extinction" evokes images of an asteroid slamming into the Earth 65 million years ago, forever altering the course of life on the planet.

After 25 years in this industry, after teaching at four business schools, researching for three think tanks and working at five consultancies, I had an insight last week that may seem forehead-slappingly obvious when you read it: Ignorance of IT destroys value.

If the full value is to be extracted from every IT dollar spent, high-level executives have to know "things" about technology. As a knowledge-deficit kind of guy -- that is, as someone who studies the effects of ignorance on organizational performance -- I'm interested in figuring out what things need to be known about technology and who needs to know them.