Hiring the Wrong IT Staff to Achieve Your Goals?
Are you having problems with alignment? Is your IT staff unable to provide
the business with the support it needs? Does it seem like your IT staff just
doesn't understand the business? Perhaps they don't.
For years, authors and top-ranked CIOs have complained about business and IT
alignment. CIO magazine articles like Why
Is Business-IT Alignment So Difficult, How
to Close the IT-Business Alignment Gap and The
ROI of Alignment, coupled with the ongoing presence of alignment as one
of the top ten information management concerns every year, indicates that the
problem of aligning information technology with business goals and processes
is much deeper and more fundamental than we realize.
The real problem underlying the IT
business alignment conundrum is that we're not hiring the right people in
IT. The right people need strong backgrounds in both business and technology.
Most IT hiring managers place too much emphasis on strong technology backgrounds.
A recent CIO.com article, Why
Business Analysts Are So Important for IT and CIOs, depicts how critical
it is to have a meaningful combination of business and information technology
know-how. The article states that the most successful business
analysts (e.g. the ones who most effectively apply IT in business environments)
possess the ability to "communicate, facilitate and analyze" not technology,
but business. In addition, the article propounds that these positions "tilt
more toward business functions such as operations, marketing, finance or engineering."
Although the article hits the nail directly on the head when identifying the
capabilities that will enable your staff to "turn business-requested, IT-delivered
applications into tomorrow's dynamic business applications," it fails to
address why these individuals are so difficult to find.
The reason? These people are hard to find because businesses are not asking
for them.
Computer Science Versus Information Systems Degrees
Job announcements for business
analyst and business-related IT positions specify that the candidate should
possess a degree in Computer Technology or Computer
Science. The problem with that degree requirement is that computer science
and technology degrees do not require business courses. How can you expect alignment
to occur between business and IT when the technology staff has no business training
or background? You can't.
There are two broad areas of computer-related degrees: One is computer science,
and the other is information systems. Although the two are often lumped together
under the heading of computer technology, they are vastly different at both
their core and their objectives. Simply stated, the computer science degree
focuses on the science and development of technology, while the information
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