I stumbled onto an article and blog entry at eWeek today, and provided some commentary on the eWeek site which I'll repeat here, below (see it in context at Now Online: CIOs Put Out 'Help Wanted' Sign - reading the mini blog entry and following the links to the real stats will help frame this much more directly for you.
Commentary follows:
re: Now Online: CIOs Put Out 'Help Wanted' Sign: "Allan - Interesting findings, and heartening to see executives from the technical side of the C-Suite looking to build business smarts inside of the shop.
Now of course, a reasonable flip-side question is, how many business managers are expected to be even mildly technology saavy? Not coders, troubleshooters, or implementors, but in sync with technology enough to cross the business to technology bridge back in the other direction when working with IT personnel? Many are not, and that is an impediment to strategic use of technology across organizations.
When we are doing consulting work, we are very frequently the people who are providing a bridge point between IT and Business in an organization, and our goal is to raise the ability of both sides to speak in a common language. Business people will still bring up 'bizspeak' that the IT people don't understand, as will the IT people have 'geekspeak' that the business people fall asleep over.
Until there is at least one person on each side of the fence who can translate between these otherwise separate layers, major disconnects can and will occur. This is where the fiery bombast of Nicholas Carr is dead-on, but is then left to lie.
Does IT Matter? Of course it does, Nicholas is just pushing some easy buttons with that title, but if IT *is* to matter, then it should matter to the business managers and executives *as well as* the technical staff.
Education and collaboration on both sides and across the business/IT chasm is what is driving the best organizations on the planet - when one side is left to call all the shots, look out... the worst is yet to come!"
Comments