Technology is science. Art is art. Technology can’t be art, can it? Think about it. Technology fits into the left-brain activities of logic, reason, mathematics. Art is a right-brain thing, like creativity, music, expression, and feeling. When you go to college, you major in “the sciences” or “the arts.” Your Associate’s, Bachelor’s, or Master’s degree is in either Science or Arts, but not both. We even have special magnet schools that focus exclusively on STEM education, which stands for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math. Those things go together. Art is something else. There are certainly arts-focused schools too.

I recently re-read the blog article I wrote on being an indispensable linchpin in your company. One of the key principles in that article is the need to use your job as your platform for art. Given our stated dichotomy, I figured that was worth exploring a bit. There’s a quote in Seth Godin’s book, Linchpin, that’s worth repeating:

“Most artists can’t draw, but all artists can see.”

What makes and artist an artist? Is it just the medium? If so, that changes with the times. Cave drawings gave way to oil and canvas. The harpsichord gave way to the piano. More people play guitars nowadays than lyres.

What if technology engineers are actually artists and the technology itself is just the medium? Instead of oil and canvas, we use software, hardware, networks, cloud services, and data.

The training and educational part of technology feels like science. We need to read the manual and understand what a given technology can and cannot do. We need to understand the design and constraints. This is similar to art education. Painters learn painting techniques, the properties of different brushes, and paints, and canvases. This is also science. This is a baseline prerequisite, but at this stage no art has been produced.

Once you master the science of technology, then art is possible. You might be thinking that enterprise technology is too fixed and constrained for art. We implement and operate technology. Then we manage it for homogeneity, efficiency, predictability, and stability according to industry best practices. That doesn’t sound very artsy.

Industry best practices are great. I use them all the time. It’s a stop along the way, but not the final destination. If you think about it, best practices solve yesterday’s problems. What about tomorrow’s problems? Sure, we can wait for someone else to figure it out, but why not push the envelope and be industry leaders ourselves? That takes an artist.

I see the opportunity and possibility for art and creativity every day. Art is the human interaction between a technologist and a business person working together to solve an interesting and challenging problem. Art is troubleshooting and stabilizing an unstable system. Art is designing the perfect architecture that somehow meets all of the business and technical requirements when it didn’t seem possible. Art is turning a negative customer experience into lasting and trusting relationship. Art is anticipating and giving the customer what they really need instead of exactly what they asked for.

Without constraints, art isn’t possible. I don’t do much technology engineering myself nowadays, but I do manage my department’s budget. Of course, I wish I had more to work with. That would be nice. But being constrained forces me and my leadership team to think creatively about how to do more with less and how to drive efficiency to fund our valuable initiatives.

We need to bring both sides of our brain to work every day. If you do your left-brained work at the office, and have a bunch of right-brained hobbies outside of work, then you are doing it wrong. Sure, it’s great to have hobbies, but don’t let that be your only creative outlet. Bring your creativity to your technology engineering job. Do your art here. The business is counting on it.