The right skills can help you move from IT to a different department.
Three years ago, Autumn Bayles was brought in as a part of a management-turnaround team to rebuild Tasty Baking, a 90-year-old family-run public company in need of restructuring. Bayle’s task as CIO was to revamp the company’s technology infrastructure; with that project under her belt, she’s moving on to head operations at the Philadelphia-based food chain.
Trained as an engineer, Bayles hadn’t thought she’d move out of the IT world. But when the opportunity arose to manage the distribution of Tasty Baking’s cupcakes, doughnuts and other snack foods to 15,000 convenience stores and supermarkets in the mid-Atlantic region, she jumped at the chance.
Autumn Bayles, CIO of Tasty Baking, parlayed ERP experience into an operations role with the food maker. |
“We had put in a new ERP system, and I got heavily involved in the distribution part,” she says. When the company was looking for a senior vice president of strategic operations, management thought of her, and in July announced her new position. “I also have an MBA, so I have a breadth of knowledge and the ability to play in a space outside of technology. But it was also a little bit of luck, too; there was a gap in the organization, so it just sort of happened.”
Transitioning from a technology executive to a business executive is an increasingly popular move caused in large part by the growing trend among enterprises to align technology with business, which is blurring the lines between the two disciplines. This means more technology professionals are becoming business savvy and building the skills they need to one day run another department, or perhaps the company.
“CIOs today are not like they used to be; today they tend to be younger and have more of a business background . . . they really understand how IT should be leading the business,” says Heather Clarke-Peckerman, president of HCP Consulting Group, which coaches executives. “These people may not be the best on the computer end of things, but they have a really strong knowledge of IT, plus business exposure, and they understand how to influence and negotiate.” These skills contribute to making the move from CIO to business executive much easier than it used to be, she says.
Not only CIOs make such moves, as IT professionals at all levels gain more exposure to the departments for which they develop projects. As technology cuts a higher profile within organizations, the skills that IT professionals build in their day-to-day jobs are often in high demand in other departments.
Project management is one skill required in practically every corporate job and one that many IT professionals have mastered, Clarke-Peckerman says.
Amy Pierson, who also used to work in Tasty Baking’s IT department, was recruited for a position in the company’s human resources group in part because of her project-management skills.
“The IT department was very much project- and team-focused, where in HR it’s more responding to business needs on a daily basis,” says Pierson, who is now manager of HR IS and compensation analysis for Tasty Baking. “So I’m trying to put in more structure here in HR to make it more project-focused.”
But other legacies from her days in IT have followed Pierson into her new role; she’s still asked by co-workers to help fix a printer jam or figure out e-mail glitches. “I try to educate people when I respond,” she says.
IT professionals looking to make a transition into different departments should take on technology projects that relate to those departments, recommends Tasty Baking’s Bayles.
“Some IT projects are heavily business focused . . . say implementing a new system for a warehouse, vs. a new e-mail-archiving system,” she says. “Pick the ones with a business slant, that’s going to give you exposure, and you’ll starting working with those people, and maybe an opportunity opens up.”
Other skills that IT professionals can emphasize when moving into different roles include fact-finding and problem solving, Clarke-Peckerman says. “The role an IT professional plays is ‘OK, we have a problem, we have to go in and diagnose, problem solve, and come up with the data to support our recommendation,” she says. “They’re very good at analysis.”
IT professionals need to think about problem solving in more than just technical terms, one executive says.
“Solving the problem isn’t always a technology issue,” says Michael Wilens, executive vice president and chief technology and operations officer with information provider Thomson Corp., who has held a number of technology and business titles. “Philosophically, you have to redefine the goal – it’s not the success of a technology deployment, the goal is solving the problem.”
This often means becoming “a corrupt technologist; you can’t be a purist,” he adds. “It’s the cleverness of the solution, not the purity of the technology” that matters in business.
When working on a technology project, Wilens recommends understanding the goal of the project in its business context, not just the time line or budgetary constraints. “You have to become sensitive to business goals and retrofit the technology,” he says.
An IT professional should do a self-assessment to determine skills needed to make the transition into a new department, Clarke-Peckerman says. To learn one’s strengths and where competencies are lacking, ask questions during job-performance reviews and take tests, such as the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. Research the skill sets required in different careers, she adds.
Perhaps most importantly, IT professionals looking to jump into business have to really want it, Thomson’s Wilens says. “Be careful what you wish for,” he says, adding that he’s seen professionals make such transitions to gain better titles and higher pay. “Having a customer scream at you [for example]; you’ve got to decide if that’s what you really want to do.”
