If you’ve ever played, coached or watched a youth soccer game, you know the difference between technical skill that sparks oohs and ahhs from the crowd, and technical skill that puts the ball in the net. In the world of IT, there is a similar divide among coders. There are the programmers who enjoy challenging themselves with the coding equivalent of juggling soccer balls off their knees or their heads. They have deep skill sets, and they want to put them to use by creating complex applications (whether or not complexity is called for). And then there are the employees who have the dexterity to perform freestyle tricks all day long, but their focus never strays from the primary objective – moving the business down the field toward its goal.
For chief information officers, the trick in building an IT team is to find players with the technical prowess to handle any challenge in the game, as well as the business acumen to recognize when they can best achieve objectives by running straight toward the goal without any fancy tricks along the way.
Here are a few hiring tips for CIOs looking for IT all-stars:
Want to save money? Hire more expensive IT candidates. The way companies use technology has changed over the past five, 10 and 15 years, and the way CIOs and other IT leaders staff projects and manage their solutions has to do the same. Successful IT teams today understand business value, end-user needs and the metrics that matter to non-technical colleagues. This is a paradigm shift that should push CIOs to change some of their hiring practices. In today’s world, a software-as-a-service (SaaS) application or managed service can supplant the need for much of the coding, dba and system administration resources required to enable the right business analyst to tailor an application to the business’ needs. A smaller team made up of the most productive people results in better, faster operations. And more than ever before, the most effective IT professionals aren’t necessarily the flashiest coders or programmers, but the ones who know how to meet business needs with little or no programming required. The savings are exponential, as less coding to meet the need means less code to test, maintain and upgrade.
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Need to reach numerous, aggressive goals? Field a smaller team. Finding IT pros who can balance technical skill and business needs often requires bigger salaries, but CIOs can offset the costs by building smaller teams that understand the nuances of that balance. IT leaders can then augment those reduced teams by leveraging SaaS applications, ranging from customer relationship management (CRM) to enterprise productivity suites and cloud integration platforms. This makes it easier to manage extraneous work and focus on hiring and team-building for only the most productive positions, where productivity is measured in business value output. Employees with a track record of understanding end users and customers – particularly those who grasp the value of an elegant solution tailored to business goals rather than an overly complex one – are preferable to those with more exclusively technical backgrounds, no matter how impressive those technical skills may be.
Wowed by technical expertise? Don’t forget to check for other critical skills. One of the key questions to ask in an interview, right after a discussion about how a candidate handled a technical challenge, is why that solution mattered to end users. The way in which a prospective hire answers this question will tell the CIO whether the candidate would be able to serve line-of-business units as well as the IT department. The job seeker who can answer that question might be an experienced pro who has found the balance between IT and end-user needs on the job, or she might be someone entering the profession with the benefit of a recent education that teaches this concept. Students still, of course, need to learn the advanced skills all computer scientists and technologists need. However, they’re also developing the kind of thinking that places as much emphasis on the logical progression of business tasks as it does the constant need to improve technology. We can see evidence of this shift in mindset with programs like Hour of Code, which focus on process and logic as much as any specific language – including options that don’t even require a computer. Technologist in business thinking are the hires CIOs need today and in the future.
There will always be a place in IT for most valuable players (MVPs). The technical challenges companies face are growing, not shrinking, and solving those challenges will require an athletic level of technical knowledge and experience. However, the MVPs on modern IT teams know that they serve the business, and the only score that matters is the one that measures the success of the organization as a whole.
Date: July 28, 2015