From Tech Geeks to Process Gurus

The priorities of CIO and business executives have undergone are remarkable change in the past five years. In the past IT executives would typically move up the corporate hierarchy while building their management skills on top of their technical expertise. Nowadays the profile of the IT executive has evolved into an outward looking individual with business skills, process thinking and customer focus.

The relevance of the IT organisation is evolving to ‘being a partner’ rather than a ‘technical black-box’. The expectations and requirements from the IT or MIS organisations are much clearer and more specific than a decade ago.

Today, the competencies that an IT organisation brings to the business are shifting dramatically from managing the provision of IT services to support the business as a whole – this can include managing outsourcing (vendors), supply chain management, managing shared services, regulatory compliance and the budgeting of IT services (competing with IT vendors and BPO houses). This signifies high relevance of IT Governance across an organisation. It’s no surprise that Business-IT alignment has now become the top priority for IT organisations.
With this shift in the role of IT, the competencies required to run IT successfully have gained prominence in recent years with the adoption of international best practice frame works such as COBIT, ITIL and Security Management (ISO 17799). These frameworks are designed to govern and manage an IT Organisation more efficiently.

Figure 1:Addressing the needs of the key stakeholders

The New IT Professional
As companies realise that the IT organisation can have a significant impacton the business, they also realise that in order to be a good partner to the business, IT professionals must have a strong business perspective. It is imperative that the IT organization should have a set of processes to remain connected with the rest of the organisation. Companies are starting to invest in developing these skills among their employees at all levels within the organisation. These include crucial are as such as IT governance, IT service management, process engineering and project management.
The bottom line is that a wave of new-style IT professionals is starting to emerge. Business skills and process competencies are very important to complement technical abilities.

A sum of ‘individual competencies’ makes the ‘organisational competence
’The smart enterprises are taking a structured approach to developing the ‘organisational competence’ in best practice frameworks.
The competency development process is best undertaken as a programme, with various stages to be completed during the lifecycle of this programme. The competency implementation roadmap includes various stages from initialising, to managing and sustaining the competency lifecycle as an organization traverses the maturity curve and moves towards adopting these best practice frameworks. This requires thorough planning to:

• Enable a shift towards a business competent IT organisation.
• Identify the target audience – define theentire IT organisation, key business users and suppliers/vendors.
• Define the internal skill matrix, processes and gaps.
• Map functional roles against knowledge requirements.
• Align with the right training partner(whether internal or external).
• Identify the preferred learning methodology, medium & timeframe.
• Think through the right means to institutionalise the training programme for new staff.
• Define annual refresher and delta training courses to keep employees up to speed.
• Use the internal tools such as Learning Management System (LMS) and HR trainingrecords to track the progress of overallcompetence.

Building Sustainable Competence
As the new skills are becoming the ‘core’ competence that organisations are adopting, the approach to competence development needs to be a sustainable one– after all, the ability to excel and apply these skills can translate to a competitive edge.
Companies have an increasing number of instruments available like knowledge sharing, learning delivery and performance tracking to construct a long term competency programme adapted for their organisations and to fit budgets.
The new IT professional will be required to work well in teams, work well with customers, have great communication skills and be able to run their IT organisation as a ‘service’ organisation. Enterprises are starting to get a picture of what their IT executives need to be good at, in order to speak the language their customers speak.