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I'm reminded of a riddle told to me by an old-time IT veteran who was about to ride off into the sunset at the tail end of the punch-card era: If you ask a horse to build a locomotive, what will it come up with? The answer: I don't know, but it's going to be something with a horse in it.

The lesson I took away from that is you can't convince someone to support a concept they see as a threat; something that will upset their routine or their job — and technology is about as upsetting to someone with an old-school mentality as gravity is to Wile E. Coyote. Out of self-preservation they will do everything in their power to incorporate as much of the old into the new as possible.

So how do you get old-school management to support and finance an intranet when they themselves are not likely to use it?

Who Are These "Old-Schoolers"?

Traditionalis Maximus: a rare corporate species characterized by an inability, or unwillingness, to adapt to new technology and tools; thought to have been extinct since the mid-1990s.

They look like us, talk like us, and work all around us. But unlike many of us — especially those of us in the technology field — they display a natural tendency toward complicating fairly elementary processes in order to avoid having to change their own habitual behaviors. A simple two-step process is, all of the sudden, a five-step process. And it doesn't even matter to the old-schooler that their roundabout methods betray all sense of logic; as long as they're comfortable with it, that's how they're going to do it.

The most common example of this behavior can be seen in the old-schoolers' handling of e-mail. While the majority of us have come to accept the use of e-mail as everyday as using the telephone (and in some cases, preferring it), the old-schooler hasn't faired so well. Rather than opening their e-mail client and reading the messages themselves, they would enlist the aid of a third party — usually an already overworked administrative assistant — to print out the contents of their inbox and, short of having their AA read them aloud, sift through their e-mail on paper. They would then dictate their responses for the AA to send out, completely failing to grasp the "e" in e-mail.

Old-schoolers simply delay the inevitable by finding ways around the technology, bending the tools to their will in order to avoid having to learn and adapt to new methods. And when this happens, all of the advantages that would have been gained will be lost because, rather than adapting themselves to the improved processes brought on by these new tools, they warp the processes and tools to adapt to them.

The Dangers of Technophobia

The technology train — in all its indifference — is going to forge ahead regardless of what we do. It's up to each of us to decide whether we're going to hop on board or stand by the tracks watching it roar by. But, if you choose the latter, be prepared to find yourself abandoned at a dusty weigh station with little more than the rustling of tumbleweeds to keep you company.

With the speed at which the technology train moves, if you allow it to get too far ahead of you, it will be tougher and tougher to catch up. So, while everyone is enjoying a cocktail in the train's lounge car, you'll be trying desperately to follow along the tracks with your old, manual hand-pump car.

What everyone in this technological age needs to understand is that you can no longer separate the technology from the process — they move in parallel, as one. Back in the 1980s many of the computer applications being introduced commercially such as the word processor were major enhancements to common, everyday business tools like the typewriter. However, the function of word processing existed long before the first appearance of the electronic word processor. The two tools serve the same purpose with a very different approach.

But now it's difficult to differentiate between the technology and the process because they have become so interdependent — the process could never have been conceived without the technology to facilitate its existence, and the technology would be a mere toy without the process it's meant to support.

Old-schoolers fail to understand that they can only hold technology back for so long because that new tool being introduced today will become the norm tomorrow. And as the days go by, it will be the only thing available to work with. If they don't learn to adapt to it, they will be going through the day trying to hide their techno-illiteracy.

This is not to say that everyone should be stalking technology trends gently balanced on the bleeding edge and jump on board blindly, but everyone needs to at least keep up enough to prevent themselves from becoming technological roadkill.