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.