How to build a culture of business learners in IT
Navigating the future of IT talent leadership will require more than simply hiring whiz-bang data scientists, security experts, and cloud computing gurus. To ensure your IT organization succeeds in these times of rapid business and technology changes, you must focus on developing the business consulting skills of your staff.
To respond to the changing enterprise landscape, IT teams need to be technology-focused business consultants, leading business partners who may or may not be technologically savvy. Technology teams need to understand their business in depth to provide that leadership.
Of course, baseline technology responsibilities will remain. Regardless of their experience, business peers aren’t often focused on technology tasks like how to choose a vendor partner, the implementation effort involved in getting a solution deployed, managing technology change, and sustaining a solution over time. In addition, the technology organization must show partners improvements in business outcomes, whether that is increased revenue, lower cost, or an improved risk posture.
When I joined Ellucian three years ago, our IT team was very focused on learning new technologies and implementing IT and information security best practices. That effort is still very important and still underway, but we’re undergoing a fundamental shift from simply honing our technology expertise to simultaneously increasing our business expertise. We’re helping our business partners implement new solutions in a new business environment, which means our IT teams must understand the business problems we are all trying to solve. The IT team must also understand and execute the change management effort required to make the implementations successful.
To continue to generate good business results, our IT employees have adopted a growth mindset that goes beyond staying abreast of the latest changes in technology. More than ever, IT teams must have business awareness, possess the ability to influence, know how to lead change, and demonstrate strong communication skills. That doesn’t mean technology skills are obsolete, but these new business skills are essential to providing maximum benefit for the organization. At the core, our IT teams must now be business consultants with great technical skills.
How does the typical IT team make this transition? There are a few fundamentals that are essential for building successful consultants.
