Too much business or too much technology. That’s what you’ll be presented with when getting introduced to individuals in the IT leadership space. Each have their benefits and each have their flaws. The ultimate goal is an individual with both technology and business sense, but it consistently seems difficult to find.

I primarily interact with IT leadership positions that have either of the two qualities, but not both. It’s a difficult concept to explain to each since they’re so focused and set in their ways. It’s counterproductive to the organization to have either, unless the organization is solely focused on new technology; then there can be made an argument to have an individual that’s focused on tech.

Most organizations are there to make money and they do so through sales. They either sell physical products through various sales channels or they sell services. Either way, the differences in the approach are somewhat negligible when it comes to presenting the information to the organization and planning for the future. Let’s take a look at some approaches for these two concepts from a business perspective and an IT perspective.

Presenting to the Organization

You would think that the business individual wins this one since they can communicate with other business leaders. Unfortunately, although they can “talk the talk” their knowledge of the underlying systems is limited and any form of a deeper discussion below the highest-level usually yields the “deer in the headlights” look or a reiteration of the same talking points.

The highly technical person is no better. They have the underlying knowledge but cannot effectively communicate that to the leadership position. This frequently hurts IT efforts since they cannot simplify and justify the reasoning for their actions or the need for the increase in spend. Sometimes this can be remedied with “presenting to the board” seminars where you learn how to speak to board members or other non-tech-savvy individuals.

Planning for the Future

Let’s start with the tech lead first this time. The person highly focused on technology will frequently ignore business goals and agenda. If they’re asked, “why is your team working on this project and how does that relate to the company goals,” most of the time they will not be able to answer that. I’m not talking about the basics, like “why do you have a website?” Instead, what I’m referring to is strategic questions that IT leaders do not ask themselves like, “why are you hosting your applications on your own servers vs moving them into the cloud?” The response might be “because it’s easier for the team to maintain and it’s more cost effective.”

What they fail to see is when critical team members leave. How does that affect maintenance now? How likely are you to hire someone that knows your infrastructure vs some cloud provider’s infrastructure? How does this affect business continuity if your server fails and you have to wait a couple of months to get another one in? What is the company’s overall objective? Is it to sell the company? If it is, do you think that the buyer wants to see a fully built on-premise server room that they now have to figure out how to maintain or will they be much happier if the applications live in the cloud? Those are the questions that IT leadership will have a tough time answering since they’ve never thought about it. It ventures too much into the business world.

Heavily focused business leaders will lack expertise in knowing what to tackle for the future. It’s easy for them to understand where to go once they know where they’re going, but thinking of solutions to the problem is challenging. For example, let’s say that your company just bought another company and you need to consolidate the data. How do you do that between multiple ERP systems, web-applications, etc? Business Leaders will lean on one of a couple of possible solutions:

• Hope that the functional department heads (like Finance) will solve their own problems.
• Use Excel to solve it.
• Outsource the work to an agency.

The first two solutions sometimes work, but the outsource to the agency will work most of the time, for 10x the cost. With smaller companies, this becomes a heavy lift due to budgetary constraints.

Smart IT-Business leaders will utilize agencies to get the architecture in place and then transition the work to an internal team. They’ll have that agency for support while saving hundreds of thousands of dollars in the process.

Together as One

Once business and IT come together, project decisions seem to make sense from both sides. The IT-Business Leader can strategically drive focus to certain projects, like moving the server room to the cloud, and deprioritize others, like reformatting the code deployment process to your on-premise setup.

Although individuals like this do exist, they’re not nearly as frequent enough in the wild. As an ever-increasingly more amount of businesses move into the tech sector, whether that’s by offering a tech service or using technology to drive decision and sales, these individuals are going to become key players in the space. We need more professionals like this.