Recently, my colleague David Berlind introduced me to Carolyn Lawson, the CIO of California’s Public Utilities Commission. For a couple of months now, I’ve been working not just on Web 2.0 Expo, but on a new set of events the TechWeb/O’Reilly team will produce focused on the use of Web 2.0 in government, and David was excited to connect me with someone with a passion for public service, great insight into the challenges of government and technology, and an extra helping of leadership savvy.

Over lunch (for which we needed separate checks, since government employees can’t take freebies for anything over a couple of bucks), I asked Carolyn about her thoughts on the potential for the principles and technologies of Web 2.0 to transform government (and recruited her to speak at Web 2.0 Expo). As she gracefully articulated the challenges and the potential, I began to get a sense of a woman who has risen to a position of authority and power not because of her passion for technology (though she is clearly an expert), but because of her dedication to people: both the teams she leads and the public she serves. When she talked about what drives her – a firm belief that she serves the public good, that citizens rely on her teams’ systems for their safety and well-being, that her work helps people survive in a harsh world – I got shivers down my spine. And I knew that I had found the person I should profile for Ada Lovelace Day.

What is Ada Lovelace Day? It is an international day of blogging to draw attention to women excelling in technology, named in honor of one of the first computer programmers. A few months ago, Web 2.0 Expo Europe speaker, social software consultant, and inspiration in her own right Suw Charman-Anderson published the following on PledgeBank.com:

“I will publish a blog post on Tuesday 24th March about a woman in technology whom I admire but only if1,000 other people will do the same.”

What a great idea, Suw. Here’s my interview with Carolyn:

How did you get started in technology?

Out of self-defense. I was an administrative assistant at a brokerage firm; our office was in Northern California and the main office was in Southern California, and the network would constantly go down. I’d call the guys in SoCal and they’d say “what did you do?” It got tiring. So I went to Borders and bought a book on NT 3.5 and read it. I did it to avoid them, to avoid always calling for help.

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I just ran across a great interview with Stephan Spencer over at TechCrunchIT. Stephan is one of our most popular speakers (and one of the nicest!); his session last year got rave reviews and attendees keep coming back, since one of Stephan’s super powers is being up-to-the-moment in this fast-changing and sometimes ethically confusing field. Jeff Widman gets some good insights out of Stephan by asking specifically about the clash between typical enterprise culture and the demands of SEO.

Enterprise and SEO is like cognitive dissonance–SEO is nimble, experimental, dynamic, continuously iterating, never-ending process. A complete anathema to enterprise IT which is project focused, do it and forget it.
There’s also an internal disconnect because SEO crosses IT and marketing. Example: changing from horrible URL’s–super long, no keywords in the URL–to cleaner, shorter URLs is a marketing driven initiative but entirely reliant on IT execution.

This speaks to one of those structural barriers to improvement that is so easy to see (at least from the outside) and yet so hard to fix. I’m often asked how the tracks work at Web 2.0 Expo: do attendees pretty much stay in the track closest to their job function? My answer is the smart ones don’t; getting the most out of the conference usually involves attending around half the sessions outside your obvious home, if only to try on a different way of seeing things for an hour. Early stage start-ups are often forced to cross-train because everyone pitches in; even when they get to the phase where the developers aren’t doing customer support and the designers aren’t ordering the office chairs, there’s so little distance between the various roles that perspectives are easily shared. In contrast, at the enterprise level, success on the Web requires an active dissolution of the boundaries of many functions. I’m reminded of another workshop we’ll be running in April, this one by Alistair Croll and Sean Power, called Watching Websites:

Until recently, no one person in a company knew what the web was up to. Different people watched different parts of the online world: Operators tested its uptime and responsiveness; marketers counted visitors; UI designers worried about how test subjects navigated pages; and market researchers conducted surveys to understand buyer intentions. Today, these once-separate roles are being forced together. Each role has things to teach the others.

When Alistair and Sean proposed this session, we had a lot of trouble sorting out whether it belonged in web operations or marketing. Ultimately, it’ll be held in the room where the other webops talks are happening, but we’re cross listing it with marketing. We hope a bunch of marketers show up.
What other disciplines are ripe for cross-training? Leave a comment and we’ll take it up in a future post.