The days when the IT department floated, satellite-like, in the orbit of a company’s core functions, are over.
However, C-suite and other high-level executives interviewed for Cisco’s survey said IT departments are missing the skill most necessary to for them to inhabit this new role: business acumen.
It found that 93% of respondents feel that an IT talent gap was “preventing them from transforming fast enough” in our era of digital disruption.
Among those surveyed, 42% said business savvy was a significant worry, making this a slightly more commonly shared concern than a gap in soft skills, which are also in high demand and scarce supply.
The more future-proof skills are written communication, oral communication, team-building, and leadership skills, according to Weiner, <a href="https://qz.com/work/1423267/linkedin-ceo-jeff-weiner-the-main-us-skills-gap-is-not-coding/">who spoke at a Wired forum on the future of work</a> last fall.
Anyone already in IT or considering it for the future will applaud one other finding in the report: This next stage of IT development will require respecting and compensating IT professionals accordingly.
“The way CIOs compensate, assess, and measure the performance of IT has not involved business acumen,” Martha Heller, CEO, Heller Search Associates, an executive search firm, told Cisco’s researchers. “A compensation plan is a behavioral plan, and if you’re never compensated to get smart about the business, you won’t do it.”
Some tech watchers <a href="https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/age-digital-everything-it-time-to-eliminate-it">would argue for an even more extreme position</a>: Ditch the IT department entirely, and weave IT into the fabric of a company.
“It’s no longer about aligning IT with the business,” Joe Peppard, the lead scientist on that survey, explained in a news release. “That sort of sets you up to fail, because in many ways, it suggests that technology is subservient to business,” he explained, adding that “[i]t doesn’t recognize that today, in a digital world, technology provides tremendous opportunity to actually shape not just the strategic direction of an organization but meet operational ambitions too.”