Hybrid IT help

A new type of position IS emerging in IT departments called “hybrids,” roles that mix technology talent with business acumen or sector-specific experience to create an employee who gets IT, but also gets the company.

There’s a new type of position emerging in IT departments called “hybrids,” roles that mix technology talent with business acumen or sector-specific experience to create an employee who gets IT, but also gets the company.

Companies should seek and cultivate IT employees who have the skills to analyze how doing their job makes a difference not only to end users, but to the business itself, says Jeff Markham, San Francisco branch manager of Robert Half Technology, an IT staffing and placement firm. These employees “need to know ‘how does the company make money, and if I develop an application, how does it affect that?'” Markham says.

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Technology has become the backbone of information provider Thomson Corp.’s business because it’s the primary way in which the company reaches its customers. “We encourage [the IT staff] to think like the customers and think across [departmental] borders,” says Carl Giaimo, senior director with Thomson’s Technology Best Practices, a small group of technology professionals who work across the many divisions of Thomson. “The way we get there is an experiential approach; teamwork and exposure to the other groups.”

Specifically, the company each year will train about 25 or 30 employees out of its 9,000-member IT department by pulling in directors from all of Thomson’s business units to educate them about company operations.

“The purpose of the program is these guys know the technology, but they need to know the business side. The intent is that they’re going to get a significant increase in responsibility within their tech organization within 12 to 18 months,” Giaimo says. “By rotating them through the company, it gives them such an advantage of really seeing the big picture.”

Community Medical Centers is another business benefiting from this blend of IT and operations savvy.

“I don’t think my company would be in the [strong] position we are today if it weren’t for those hybrid roles,” says Rich Cummins, manager of network services with the healthcare firm in Fresno, Calif. Of Cummins’ 11 direct reports, he says about half of them operate in a hybrid role.

The healthcare company has three major IT initiatives underway — one to replace X-ray film with electronic images, another to let doctors remotely sign off on charts and a third to build a portal with access to a number of crucial applications. Without hybrid employees who understand how doctors, nurses and other staffers use these programs, these critical business applications would not be nearly as effective.

“We would have had a vendor come in and install [the applications] and say, ‘Well, you’re up and running’ and have a group support it, but there would be no integration. The beauty of the hybrid role is the person understands the technology infrastructure and the end user,” Cummins says.

The concept of the hybrid IT worker isn’t new, particularly to transaction-based sectors such as financial services, says David Foote, president of management consultancy and research firm Foote. But the trend is starting to spread to different sectors and reach deeper into the ranks of IT departments. “We’re projecting [hybrid jobs] are going to become more and more common in industries where the percentage of the IT budget to overall spending on business processes is much higher than the norm,” he says, citing banking, healthcare, retail, insurance and education.

Foote points out that what the hybrid IT staffer represents is much more than a company’s desire to align IT with their business. “IT is the business. If you’re talking about aligning, you’re so far behind you might as well talk about leaving the field,” he says.

Despite the benefits these hybrid workers can bring to an organization, it appears they aren’t widely recognized, or even identified. Many IT managers have some key staffers who learn quickly, work well with other departments and can converse with marketing or finance nearly as easily as with other IT employees. But few managers have gone so far as to give these individuals distinct titles or adjust their compensation.

“There are certain individuals who work in my department . . . but go beyond technology and get into business processes and reengineering,” says Autumn Bayles, CIO with Tasty Baking Co., the publicly traded producer of Tastykake baked goods in Philadelphia. “These are high-potential types of people; they can pick up anything quickly. They’re not limited to technical tasks.”

For example, Bayles loaned one of her team members to help a company warehouse troubleshoot an inventory problem that wasn’t an IT issue. Another of Bayles’ employees was requested to join a different department, human resources, at Tasty Baking, even though the department has nothing to do with IT. “The appeal was she worked well with the [other] team and has an overall can-do attitude,” Bayles says.

Yet these hybrid staffers — which make up about 20% of Bayles’ staff of 16 — aren’t formally recognized by the company, although their skills are pointed out in conversations and performance reviews, she says. “And they’re looked upon as [job] candidates for departments outside of IT.”

It’s the same at Community Medical Centers; these key employees are valued, but not necessarily recognized for their combined skills. “I usually have a couple go-to guys on the team, and they’re usually juggling three to four critical projects at the same time,” Cummins says. “It’s not something we’ve consciously decided is a hybrid role — it just evolved that way.”

But Cummins can’t let these workers focus only on the company’s strategic business applications. “You still have to maintain the network, deploy Microsoft patches, back up the network, manage the data center . . . and quite frankly, if you don’t do these things at the back end, the business applications aren’t going to run.”