You’ve heard that IT must align itself with business goals, but that’s just the beginning: IT and business users must in some cases merge operations and become experts in each other’s fields, technology executives and analysts said Tuesday.

“One of these days, it’s going to be very difficult to tell the difference between IT and the business,” said analyst Bill Swanton of AMR Research, one of numerous speakers at the research firm’s Executive Leadership Conference in Boston.

Rockwell Automation of Wisconsin embraced a collaborative approach over the past three years in a project to upgrade legacy systems and implement SAP enterprise resource planning, all with the goal of taking business units spread throughout the globe and making them run on common systems. Five hundred people are participating in the project, and a full 80 % of them are from business units, not IT, said Lou Klein, Rockwell’s executive director of IT.

Rockwell’s leadership started the SAP implementation with consultants, but then realized it could get better advice internally from a lot of the younger employees who are both technologically savvy and familiar with what business users need. The approach to new hires was adjusted accordingly, Klein says, as the company began looking for people experienced with SAP systems, but not necessarily from the IT perspective. Technical skills aren’t always crucial, he says.

“There are only a few areas that need the deep technology focus, but the rest of its fairly broad,” he says.

Rockwell has rolled SAP out to 30 sites across the United States covering $3 billion in revenue, and is focusing next on customer-facing functionality and extending SAP to overseas sites, according to Klein. Rockwell is starting to transform from a stodgy company that’s “business-unit centric” to one focused more on end-to-end processes, he said.

Employees from the business side are increasingly moving into full-time IT roles, executives said. Many move from finance into technology, said Terry Brown, vice president of information systems at General Mills. 

Brown himself spent 29 years in finance and says the experience has given him a great appreciation for business processes and the needs of customers and suppliers. He draws on that experience today, he says.