two kinds of tech plans

As I was digesting the readings for the week it occurred to me that it might make the most sense to have a kind of two-faced technology plan, meaning embedding a useful one into a generic plan so as to meet all the necessary goals. On the one hand, a technology plan can be a useful guide for laying out an organization’s goals and technology philosophy as well as a way to inspire and invest staff, stakeholders and the public. On the other hand a technology plan needs to inspire and involve the very disparate groups of staff, stakeholders and the public and making all three happy can be a tricky business. As Michael Schuyler writes, most people don’t know nor care to know the intricacies of how technology is managed; they just want it to work when they turn it on. So for them you give a generic technology plan that satisfies on the surface level. But for the purpose of actually knowing what to do, who should do it and how to pay for it for people who really do need and want to know a realistic technology plan is a necessity. One that involves elements I do believe are important to the health and vitality of a library like the concepts behind environmental scanning. Some kind of double speak might emerge where behind the generic topics, useful information is coded for those who are truly listening. Also I can’t decide if the idea of peer reviewing technology plans as Schuyler suggests would be a brilliant or if it is like comparing apples with oranges and the potential wide range of differences between libraries make it essentially useless.