Develop or Import?

If you've tried to find individuals with underutilized business smarts, but have been unsuccessful, then there is nothing for it but to embark upon organizational development and learning.

As with most things organizational, there are many different ways of approaching organizational development. The principal idea is that effective learning strategies must combine formal (classroom, planned) with informal (serendipitous, real-world) approaches.

In addition, there are two types of learning environment that need to be created: the passive type, where participants are essentially locked into a classroom for awhile, and the experience-based, where they are put into a simulated or controlled version of the real world and left to sink or swim.

Unfortunately, there is a downside. Embarking on a broad program intended to develop business smarts can be a long, slow and expensive process. Worse yet, many deliver at best equivocal results. If speed is of the essence, and the CIO simply can't wait for the development program to produce results, a more direct approach is called for to raise IT's business smarts: import them!

Importing businesspeople into IT is both an obvious idea, and one fraught with great difficulty. It is surprisingly difficult to make a success of what appears at first blush to be such an obvious and simple idea. There are a couple of lessons that I've seen work which I'd strongly recommend.

First, businesspeople brought into IS need a proper orientation process. They might come with a business pedigree and a good network, but they do not know their way around an IT department, its processes or its constraints.

Next, businesspeople often need mentoring and ­technical support throughout their early exposure to IT. Mentoring because they need continuing feedback on how they are doing and what they need to do differently. Technical support, because they'll find themselves adjudicating over often challenging technical decisions that they are ill-equipped to deal with. What seems to work, especially if you've brought in a senior businessperson, is to pair them up with an experienced IS person. A director of the program management office or the chief architect is a good choice of mentor.

Playing the Percentages

How many people with business smarts do you need in a new IT organization? That depends in large measure on what type of IT organization you run, and what sort of roles it is being asked to fulfil. One of the CIOs that took part in some of our recent research inherited an IT department where many of the application development professionals had a business background. The problem was no one had an applications development background. The result? The business analysis was done beautifully but the execution and testing was terrible.

The answer is "a balance". Several case-study CIOs offered this rule of thumb: You need only 20 to 25 percent of your IS staff to have business smarts to be effective in the business. But you have to locate them carefully. They are best placed in customer-facing roles. Put them in a process expertise group or bring them in as a relationship manager.

So in response to the continuing trend for the in-house IT department to provide a broader range of business services in addition to the technical services that it always provided, it is vital to continue to build the business smarts of the IS organization. Whether you do this by leveraging the business smarts you already have, developing the business smarts of people that need them, or importing them from the business, the inescapable truth is that business smarts have become a crucial part of the value proposition offered by the in-house IT team.

Andrew Rowsell-Jones is vice president and research director for Gartner's CIO Executive Programs