But that is not where I am going today.
Today, I want to brainstorm a bit on the best way to support technology decisions and efforts as the get more and more distributed across the organization. All of Gartner’s work on Fusion Teams and Business Technologists started this thinking (and related thoughts).
One of the things that has perplexed me in some of our buying research, is that respondents in Business Unit IT roles gave answers that didn’t make intuitive sense to me. They felt more tactical, more about control, and less focused on business value. I still don’t fully understand this (so have not published anything on this specifically).
But then, this weekend, I was talking to someone who works in IT for a large organisation. He described their BUIT resources as largely viewing their job as being the interface between business and IT. If you’d asked them which group they identify with more, it would be IT. They often work to find out what the business wants, but don’t always dig deeper to discover what they really need. This is not the universal behavior, but it did seem to be the general expectation and assumption of what the job means.
As an interface (and this is where I may get the analogy not quite right), the assumption is you don’t need to know everything about the other system. You just need to know how to connect and exchange in the right way—procedurally. That’s fine, if the person using the interface knows how to connect and exchange effectively. You are effectively observing from the outside.
Then, you have the idea of embedded. Imagine if, instead of an interface, technical resources where embedded in the business (this is basically what is happening with business technologists). Their job should not be to do the work of the business unit and some tech on the side (that’s okay, but not what I am thinking). Instead, they live in the BU, participating, watching, learning to discover what they business folks really need, how it really needs to work, and (with an eye to corporate IT and standards) how to make this align to relevant corporate standards and concerns.
Embedded feels so much better to me, how about you?
I can’t tell you how excited I would be if I (or researchers on our team) could be embedded on a B2B buying team, sitting in on all the meetings, participating (listening) in the side discussions, etc. (hey most teams are virtual now, so it is easier to make this real). I think the insights would be amazing, and add much needed clarity to what we discover through an interface (survey, or “after the fact” discussions) approach.
What makes this interesting, as alluded to above, is this seems to be happening anyway. Gartner is seeing many cases where the number job requisitions that include requirements for strong technical skills (e.g. Python Development) are often much greater in business units than IT. Business technologists tell us they play a big role in decisions for their teams – and in some cases, the organisation.
The opportunity for more embedded thinking; for associating your role as primarily being the voice for the Business Unit you support vs. an extension of the team you are on; for digging deeper to make sure that giving people what they want is what they really need; for getting more value from tech investments has never been greater.
To get there, think and act differently – whether you work in an enterprise or for the vendors and service providers that serve them.
This post was originally published on the Gartner Blog network and is reproduced here with permission.
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