By Joaquim P. Menezes
How has the role of corporate IT departments changed today from just a few years ago?
That’s a question I posed to Rod McNaughton, a professor from the Department of Management Sciences at the University of Waterloo, when I interviewed him recently.
Professor McNaughton’s regular interaction with a broad spectrum of businesses – IT firms in particular – uniquely positions him to assess and comment on shifting trends and expectations from IT staff.
In our discussion he zeroed in on one trend in particular.
Over the past few years, he said, “there’s been a move to see IT as something that services outside customers as much as it does employees within a firm.”
In other words, the mandate – the very raison d'être – of corporate IT departments has changed.
IT, said McNaughton, is no longer just responsible for the different functional or operational areas within the organization. “Rather the IT department is now increasingly required to provide value and services to external customers as well.”
If that’s the expectation how are Canadian organizations measuring up?
The response has been varied, McNaughton said. “In some organizations that transition has gone very smoothly. In others, the [company] hasn't adapted IT's positioning to facilitate the change towards servicing external customers.”
Of course, if IT folk are to take on this new role they need to have the necessary skills.
McNaughton suggested one very effective way companies can equip their IT staff for their new role – cross-training. This strategy is already starting to be adopted by many large organizations.
One of the best ways of doing cross-training, according to McNaughton, is by forming multi-disciplinary teams.
“If you take someone who has the technical knowledge and the experience of a lot of different vendors' products, and put them into such a team, you can come up with a much wider range of options, many of which are more likely to more technically feasible in the first place.”
Another strategy some companies are experimenting with is “job swap.”
This involves offering up opportunities for people to change jobs temporarily, and move into other areas of the organization for a short period of time to learn about what those operational areas do.
McNaughton believes that moving IT people for brief periods into either marketing and/or sales so that they have direct exposure to customers and can see how the different applications that they are familiar with could be used to create new products or services to meet customer needs.