Definition of a Technology Evangelist

Sometime ago, there was a number of good discussions on the gnote mailing list about what a definition of a Technology Evangelist (TE) is. Then there was a question about technology evangelists in Singapore. These prompted me to look much deeply in to this title that was pretty much thrusted on to me by my boss.

TE in SCS
Let’s set the stage by first describing a bit of my day to day. In total, some 5% is spend on the work of “evangelism” (as defined by wikipedia), i.e. getting out of my cubicle, meet up with others in the effort to spread the word about new technology, convincing adoption of the new technology and hopefully support them once it’s adopted. After all, what’s the need for technology evangelist when you’re just selling them – those are the territory of “sales” isn’t it? Sales work with numbers they have to meet – you sell enough technology, you meet your numbers, you get your commission and bonus. So in short, I don’t “do sales” (yet?). Before the acceptance of this religious term “evangelist” in SCS context, this would have been something like “pre-sales support” or “post-sales support”. TE is just a much fancier term in this case.

What about the other 95%? The majority is actually in the implementation of new technologies in within the company itself. These implementation of 21st century tools and processes always comes with a bit of education, as people tend to resort to their comfort zone. Along these education, I also maintain a community blog of technology updates for the company’s intranet – after doing it I found it to be rather challenging due to the varied interest within the company (SCS is one of the rare ones who still want to pow ka leow and do everything software and hardware and more). Along side an online approach is an offline approach where we get people to come for a TechTalk session every month++, a concept I borrowed from Amazon’s Friday Lecture Series. It is definitely a challenge to convince sales people to stop selling last generation technology when they are earning their living, for example try telling a guy who pushes server boxes to his or her customer to sell virtual machines such as VMWare.

Then there’s the part on managing vendors and their expectations. Lots of vendors try to sell into our company as Systems Integrators (SI) are supposed to be playing the role of filtering the various available technology in the market to our customers. As I understand this is slightly different in some countries, where we colloquially say that technology vendors “go direct” to the customer. The power of the SI lies in its broad-based investment, and selective partnerships with only technology that works ensures a large volume to secure further discounts. Helping structure such partnerships and maintaining them is critical.

But what if the prospects are not happy with all the powerpoint slides and want to see the stuff working? This turns out to be a fairly common problem as what we sell are typically not consumer goods with nice demos of beautiful blondes posing. Heck, some of them we haven’t seen it working yet ourselves as it hasn’t been implemented in Singapore before. In this case, a Proof Of Concept (POC) is order and I’ll be the one making sure that it gets done by hook or by crook.

Of course not all POCs can be done as a OMO (one man operation…) regardless of how much geek prowess one has. And since most of the rest of the company runs in a slim manner, I’ll have to resort to external sources to get this POC projects done. Fortunately, there are such things in Singapore called Polytechnics, which are tertiary education institution crowded with eager labour to work on “industry projects”. So another part of the job is to make friends and try to “sub-con” these POC work to them, some of which makes perfect final-year projects for students, others better handled by the lecturers themselves due to its complexity and delivery schedule.

I shall not bother about the rest of the stuff I do (less than 20% of really random stuff), so you can have a clean glimpse of the major things I do – how much of these resembles the portfolio of a TE? Well, we have to compare against others locally and globally then.

Some Famous TE
Let’s now jump to the “stardom” league. Search for Technology Evangelist on your favourite search engine. Chances are you’ll chance upon them:

Guy Kawasaki once upon a time Evangelist
Jeff Barr Web Services Evangelist
Vint Cerf Internet Evangelist
Richard Stallman Free Software Evangelist
Matt Thomson also an Evangelist
Jeremy Zadwodny too
and so on and so forth…

Jeff is perhaps the first person I met who falls into this category (when I was in Amazon). Somehow I felt that he’s lucky to have a focus (web-services). Check out his intro of the job. In fact, the job description of an evangelist is spelt out rather clearly. Emerson, my buddy in Amazon has also moved into evangelizing for Amazon JP web services, working for Jeff, but he still lectures widely from web 2.0 to scrum/agile development to “Infrastructure Oriented Architecture” (wah..) and muck. His 2007 tagline, technology is not a community or fun .. it’s something you do at the office and as little as possible, resonates a lot with the typical audience I speak to.

Then there is Guy who to me spells VC more than TE, but he still talks a lot about his work in the early days when working for Apple, trying to sell their vision and technology. More on Guy’s views later.

VC, Stallman, etc are the “professor grade” ones, commonly known on the streets here as the lao cheow. White hair all out, these guys wrote papers and lectured, so although they work in the “real world” as evangelist, I would treat them as “teachers”. Then there are the next generation ones (like Matt and Jeremy) who either lead teams of evangelists in their companies, or go around helping people. Most of them are respected due to their deep understanding of a particular aspect of technology.

One very major characteristic of TE in this light is that they lean more towards the consumer world, or a wide based audience, whereas technology I need to go after are fairly limited in the audience. I mean how limited can it be when I have to talk about some technology that’s only possibly useful to one or two military in the region? Or maybe it is fair enough to say that the horizontal base of stuff I need to cover, coupled with my lack of experience of actually doing it makes me go mad – one morning I’ll be with a team telling them the intricacies of MS SoftGrid, before noon we would be delving into VOIP phone protocols, or perhaps later in the day some new security software or workflow application evaluation, and all these happening while I’m trying to get my Ruby on Rails app running (which happens to be the thing that I care about but not paid to do…)

Other local TE
Fortunately I can also compare to some of the local “evangelists” in the region.

The first kind ought to be those from Microsoft. This (Microsoft Singapore in this case) is the single company where I have come into contact with more “evangelist” than developers (practically none), salesman or managers, perhaps due to our direct work with their XXX evangelism group. There is sort of a career path as an evangelist (see sample job posting). However, IMHO this takes away the pride and uniqueness of this title – especially when you meet some of these people who can’t articulate their own product they are trying to evangelize. Proselytizing is an art you know 🙂

Then some other product vendors also have TEs as their pre/post sales support. I work with Jacky from Borland Singapore, who is also a TE but his goes all out to listen to my bug rants and take up some form of support as much as he can. Somehow I characterize his work as the only kind of practical TE in this local market – because you don’t talk tech if there’s no business. From a company’s perspective, it’s ok to go “excite” the market about your products, but the “excitement” is usually considered a waste of time and effort if there’s no serious commitment.

Other than myself, Guan Sin also liken his role as an evangelist, as the Grid uptake in Singapore has been fairly limited still. It is not easy doing forerunner job that includes a numeric target, you just don’t know how much sales you can make out of this job. Can you imagine the pope giving you the job of converting some entirely Muslim community to Christianity?

Study on TE
Just now I said that I will come back to Guy Kawasaki and here it is, an article to a paper (pdf 188kb), interviewing 39 TEs across borders through SDForum. It quotes Guy heavily. Here are, to me, some of the major points in the article (for the lazy people… seriously I suggest reading the whole thing if you have time):

1. Definition: Ambassador of organizational technologies, interacts with prospects, partners, users, producers etc. Many are not formally assigned the position, typically assumed by company CEO / strategist / pre-sales support / post-sales support.
2. Requires a commitment to the product / service being sold, attached to a cause and embodies a vision, generating positive feelings in people with distinctly different attitude from sales and marketing, such as empathy, trust, openness and loyalty.
3. Some common TE role’s characteristics:
   • Motivator and Creator of a Sense of Urgency, selling rather than telling
   • Relationship Builder and Project Manager, keeping teams together, delegate effectively, rapid reaction to circumstances
   • Communicate large volumes of content, enthusiastic, generous in assistance, informal and extrovert
   • Interested in forging teams to handle technical matters, building relationships, and work on goals instead of plans
4. Four major profiles of a TE:
   1. Typical Experienced TE (excel, successful leaders)
   2. Atypical Experienced TE (forced public interaction)
   3. Typical TE in progress (probably me)
   4. Atypical TE in progress (pre/post sales moving out)

The article continues on a long discussion on how to recruit, develop, and reward TEs, which can be debatable depending on various company / industry culture. The 3 most important lesson I got out of it was:

1. TE’s work is hard to measure (how to track a TE’s trust, love and commitment?) therefore, it is important to stay away from micromanaging them and allow for lots of advancement in the job to keep them occupied.
2. TE requires specific kind of energy, thus, getting the right kind of people on the bus is important – there’s no point developing someone who doesn’t have the criteria to be a TE to be a TE, any much more that trying to make a cow climb a tree.
3. TE needs very close integration with the the entire company’s function in order to realize its full potential. As it’s a rather new term in the industry, it’s necessary to put in more effort to make sure that every member of the company appreciates what a TE does for the company and how they could interact with him.

Conclusion
This comes to an end of my (sorta) brief note about what I’m doing and what I could be doing 🙂 In fact, another reason that prompted this whole research is due to the overwhelming query from people whom I meet about my geeky title. It is not easy to live up to the title when it’s carried by gurus whom you look up to, but at the same time it’s fun and a good conversation starter. Sorry if it is a bit messy, at least it’s not powerpoint (ugh).
Just don’t say I’m proselytizing (or a technology proselytizer) when I somehow convince you to switch your technology stack from .NET to J2EE or vice versa!! Now that’s going overboard…