Over recent years there has been an increasing emphasis placed on IT leaders being business oriented. While I wholeheartedly agree that IT leaders need to be business aware I believe the emphasis on business capabilities is being emphasised to the detriment of the IT skills required. We are ending up with pure business people making IT decisions, which means many bad decisions are made.
The problem is this. IT people have, in the past, been locked in their ivory tower protected by a wall of technical ignorance within the business. Business people have perceived IT to be a group of elitist jerks, no better than technology janitors with a Napoleon complex. The fiction between the two means lost energy for the business and this friction boils down to one simple statement.
We are suspicious of what we do not understand.
IT people are suspicious of the business people, believing that they deliberately hold back from advancing technology. Business people are suspicious of IT people believing they use jargon and technology to make things look more complex than they really are.
This friction has increased as people have become increasingly familiar with technology in their personal lives. Why can corporate IT not make my PC work when the one I have at home works fine? I should be able to install applications on my PC at work, I manage just fine at home. Why can’t I have an iPhone at work to pick up mail, the one I have at home works just fine for mail? And so on.
The solution for reducing this friction is more understanding between the IT department and the business. The insistence that ‘IT become part of the business’ is as silly as insisting that ‘accounting become part of the business’. Yes, they need to have a close working relationship. Yes, they need to understand one another’s needs. But at the end of the day IT, like accounting, is a specialised skill and will always be in some respects separated from the core business by that skills set.
IT leaders of tomorrow need to have a clear understanding of technology. This is not to say that they need to understand the nitty-gritty detail of programming or how to configure a router. However, they do need to understand not only the impact of technology on their decisions and on their business but also the potential impact these decisions will have on their IT infrastructure and the people who maintain them.
One need look no further than the current excitement about ‘the cloud’ to see how IT leaders can be distracted by insubstantial hype. This steaming pile of horse manure is nothing more than marketing hype. It is nothing more than network computing. In fact it is something of a move back to the computing model of the 70′s when organisations would lease computing time and storage on large mainframes. But I digress.
It leaders of tomorrow need to be able to understand their business’s needs, so they must have business training and must be involved in board level decision making. There is little point the board deciding to implement a brave new strategy if the IT costs of such a move are prohibitive. Similarly, many IT decisions will require the board to understand why such a move is necessary. This level of mutual understanding cannot be affected without the two parties working together closely.
The best IT leaders are able to understand and communicate technically with the IT department and discuss business matters in the parlance of the business domain with the business. This is a very rare skill set. It should be recognised as such and rewarded when it is found.
