The fact that IT
is about business and that IT executives should be adept in business matters
has been written and talked about a gazillion times by everyone who even remotely
has anything to do with IT on this planet. It has been a discussion, debate,
viewpoint, opinion, experience, coaching, mentoring, part of courseware and
curriculum, published by IT media, books dedicated to, researched, pushed down
the CIO and IT throats, for as long as I can remember; with my weak memory indexing
that would be a decade plus.
Neither CIOs nor
IT disagree with this postulation, they are however fed up of repeated ranting
of this party line. It is not that IT folks do not practice this every day when
they are in midst of their business teams or with others. I have observed that
leaving aside a handful, every IT team member has a good view of the business
even if it is narrow view of the function s/he supports. As you move up the
ladder the articulation gets better and the view broader; some good CIOs could
give a discourse about the industry too.
It is fashionable
for most vendors to start discussions with the rhetoric what are your top 3
business priorities and then barely listen to the response. Every consultant or
research report continues to talk about alignment and enabling the business.
The message has remained the same; the words have changed to include the latest
fad or trend – cloud, big data, mobility, security, and social media – as if
these are critical components of business rather than technology.
I don’t know why
but a recent post by a consultant got my goat and I went into my once in a
decade murderous moods wanting to challenge this underling to a duel. What did
he know about the CIO and his/her role when he has never been one ? He only had
advice on what a CIO should be doing to stay relevant, and that included the
usual stuff that is the norm now. After a brief attacking response, I tempered
down to reach the stage we reach when we see a lot of dogs barking; we ignore
them.
Ruminating over
the state of affairs I wondered about the fact that one of the core
competencies of IT is that they understand technology and are able to apply it
to influence business outcomes. If IT did not understand technology, its pros
and cons, the application of technology solutions would be like a game of
roulette; you win some, you lose some. And if IT abdicated this responsibility,
who would validate the efficacy of the solution and that it is being used to
its optimal capacity or value or benefit ?
The technology
team needs to engage the vendors and solution providers on equal terms getting
into deep dives on every technology component as well as the integrated
solution to understand how it will deliver to promise as well as coexist with
the current technology framework and architecture. Things don’t work by chance
when information follows with the material or process to generate goods and
revenue. They have to be made to work with each other by design and that
requires technology skills.
The diversity of
technologies, hardware, software, applications, networking, storage, cloud,
dashboards, analytics, reports and reporting tools, mobile devices, data
management, security, and what have you, each requires extensive effort to
understand how they impact each other and then manage them effectively. I have
yet to sight a person who had expertise in all of them; a team can collectively
represent a potent unbeatable combination which when married with business will
always succeed.
It is a fallacy
to expect the IT team to give away their foundation of technology and embrace
business skills only. To me it would be like choosing either work or life. Life
gives birth to work and work enables a life. Similarly technology innovation
opens new opportunities for business and new opportunities give rise to new
solutions. I believe that a balance has to be found such that the two sides of
the coin give different views to whoever is looking at it without compromising
each other.
Technology needs
business as much as business needs technology today.
