Getting Ahead BY DAVID DeHAVEN
BASELINE JULY/AUGUST 2010
12
IN THIS COMPETITIVE ECONOMY,
professionals looking to get ahead
need to have a well-rounded skill set.
Technical knowledge in their area of
expertise gets them into the game.
However, to stand out from the
crowd, they must possess more than
just technical expertise. IT professionals also should be able to deliver
the organizational productivity gains
that employers have come to expect.
While IT has been a key component for enhancing an organization’s
productivity, there is still considerable room for improvement. It is not
unusual for business managers seeking IT’s help to be told that their
requests to change processes or initiate new ones cannot be accommodated. Some common explanations
they hear are that the change would
be too disruptive for the IT systems
or the work is too expensive or cannot be done quickly.
This deficiency in IT service highlights two issues: first, that the architecture of many IT systems is not
adaptable and scalable, and second,
that IT teams often do not view their
business colleagues as “customers”
and focus instead on serving their
own needs. Overcoming these issues
could result in productivity gains for
entire organizations and could lead
to the promotion of IT professionals
who are instrumental in delivering
those gains.
To contribute more significantly
to businesses, IT managers and professionals must understand business
strategy and management. They can
no longer confine themselves to
working only with technology, but
must also understand both their customers’ needs and their organization’s
business objectives.
By learning about the business and
its likely avenues of growth, the IT
team may be able to anticipate the
upcoming demands on IT systems.
Building close working relationships
with business colleagues can improve
IT’s understanding of the daily issues
their co-workers face and then anticipate where they will need help.
IT managers and professionals
who are interested in advancement
must think about the services they
deliver as integral to a system. The
questions then become: Are these
services adequately serving the needs
of our customers? How are those
needs likely to change? Is the architecture of the infrastructure (
hardware and software) that delivers the
services easy to change or expand?
Professionals on a typical IT
career path start with a focus on managing specific IT components in an
organization, rather than managing
the entire system. Today, those who
want to advance will have to prepare
themselves for designing system-level
architectures that are easy to expand
and reconfigure.
Moreover, the IT team must
not constrain the ability of busi-
ness users to modify and create new
processes to meet evolving
organizational needs. I T teams
should be more customer-
oriented by meeting their
business partners’ specified
timetables and perhaps by
providing technology tools
that users could deploy them-
selves. Professional develop-
ment needs to include train-
ing to design scalable and
adaptable architectures for
IT systems.
David DeHaven is the assistant dean of
the School of Information Systems and
Technology at Kaplan University.
