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Wednesday, August 4, 2010
How I See It
CIOs must lead in growing IT pros' business knowledge
By Robert Johnson, director of product marketing, Atrion Networking Corp.
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Your IT personnel play a great role in company performance. From online banking to retail, IT has become the most visible part of many businesses. For many companies, ineffective IT management translates into huge money losses from halted sales and productivity. Much too often, however, IT workers don’t make active connections between their efforts and the functions of the businesses they support.
IT workers can make technology “sing and dance.” However, in order to effectively support users, IT personnel need to incorporate business knowledge. Unfortunately, few IT workers have sufficient business knowledge to help users get the most out of technology and achieve outstanding business results.
What’s preventing IT workers from boosting their business knowledge? Perspective. IT professionals have pursued and been rewarded for increasing their technical knowledge. While this is necessary, it’s not enough. Furthermore, many IT practitioners are technology elitists who expect business colleagues to adapt around IT. This perspective is fruitless. IT professionals who remain willfully ignorant of business knowledge waste huge opportunities for all.
Most changes occur from the top down in an organization, which means that CIOs must lead the perspective shift in IT professionals. To get started, create a vision for the future where IT professionals are champions of applying technology to the business. This vision serves as a vivid picture of a positive future where the IT department and IT professionals enjoy a strong reputation for helping the organization use technology to serve its customers significantly better than the competition. This isn’t just the CIO’s vision but the vision of all IT professionals. This shared vision will create a common purpose and an emotional connection for each IT professional.
Early on, incorporate incentives (recognition and rewards) for expanding business knowledge. Get help from the training department, which can contribute techniques for accelerated learning and knowledge transfer. Persuade an influential business colleague to partner with you to enhance IT’s value through increased business knowledge. The success of this partnership will encourage other business leaders to work more closely with IT.
I recommend you hold a meeting to unveil your vision and brainstorm ideas to bring it about with the entire IT department. You and your business colleague must be prepared to answer questions about this vision and your joint commitment to make it happen. You want all employees to contribute ideas during the brainstorming session. So have a good facilitator who will get everyone contributing to the discussion. Remember to consider all ideas and get the employees to decide which are best to move ahead. Produce a road map of activities and intentional actions to increase business knowledge in an aggressive but achievable time frame. This will reinforce your commitment and show everyone the path forward.
I know one CIO who created an “academy” to change the mind-set of his department and increase the value to his $2 billion services company. He partnered with his training department to develop a four-month program for IT, and he used training, mentoring, role-playing and discussion to foster learning and skill development.
There are innumerable ways to enhance business knowledge. The key is to stimulate the desire in each IT practitioner to do so, and implement a plan that employees can trust to occur. As Peter Drucker wrote in Management Challenges for the 21st Century, “Organizations are no longer built on force but on trust.”
Drucker points out that people in organizations don’t have to like each other — however, they must understand each other. Trust within your IT department and beyond is critical in order to get started and achieve success.
Robert Johnson is a veteran of the IT industry.
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