Isn’t it great that I had a pro photographer with me when I guest lectured? What are the odds?
Every so often, I get the privilege of guest lecturing to an introductory MIS course at the university I work for. This class is required of all students who plan to graduate with a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration degree. That means that anyone who wants to become an accountant, marketer, manager, sales rep, or any other specialty has to take this class along with those with a concentration in information systems. In my experience, only about 15% of the class is really interested in IT as a career. So here I am, in front of 30 first- and second-year college students talking about IT and there’s an 80% or more chance that they don’t actually care that much about my day job as Associate CIO Steve Athanas.
The first time I did this lecture it bombed horribly. I tried to explain why I thought IT was important through the lens of virtualization. I spent thirty minutes just trying to explain what a hypervisor was and the last twenty minutes wondering if anyone in that class would ever forgive me for the first half hour. It was an unmitigated disaster and I promised the professor that I would do a better job if there was ever a next time.
There was, in fact, a next time and I decided to take an entirely different route. I focused my talk around one central theme: why anyone who isn’t in IT should care about “it.” (Ha! See what I did there? No? Nevermind...) I figured I had an opportunity to do two things:
Get the folks in the room who have no interest in an IT or tech career to understand why they shouldn’t just consider IT a cost-center to be managed to as small a number as possible and see some actual value in IT. I figured this would especially be important if in the future they were ever in a position to decide on budgets.
Get the few students in the room that were planning on being in IT as a career to understand why they have legitimate value to an organization.
This one. It’s this face that I make.
On that second point, when giving talks to seasoned pros, I have asked rooms filled with professional IT staff – some of them very good at their jobs - why we have IT at all. The most common response I get is: “to make the tech run better.” Then, when I make a face like the uncle in Home Alone, someone says something like “to maximize ROI of tech investments.” This is a predictable rhythm that has held up on multiple continents. Is it really possible that many of us who have spent decades in this career cannot articulate why we do this at all? Apparently – yes, it is.
So while I wanted to provide value to the future accountants, I was really focused on my second point – to get the future IT pros to understand why we do IT at all.
I work in Lowell, Massachusetts – which if you have studied American industrial history at all you know is a pretty pivotal city in the American industrial revolution. The city of Lowell exists because it was the epicenter of the textile industry in the 1800s. One of the big reasons is because Lowell had the know-how to make textiles better, faster, and cheaper than anyone else. In other words: it was a technology story.
If the 1800s is too modern for you, trust me when I say that this is nothing new. Technology has been a major factor in businesses’ success or failure since the dawn of time. Think of it this way – someone, somewhere, way back when was able to get their goods to market faster because they figured out how to hook up a horse to a wheeled cart. They were able to sell their farm goods faster than someone who didn’t. Soon, every farmer had to have a cart and horse, or they couldn’t sell as well. More recently, in the 1920’s and 30’s farmers routinely lost a portion of their goods to spoilage – and then they started using refrigerated trucks. The companies who had them had less spoilage and therefore made more money.
Simply put technology has always had an impact on business success. It used to be wheels, refrigerators, looms, or canals that made a company more effective, efficient, and competitive. Today, it’s being able to get insights out of data faster than the competition. It’s being able to get your app to market faster that sets your company apart. So, yes – IT is there to manage the technology of our day, but why have that technology at all? Because it makes your business more effective or competitive.
So if you are one of those accountants or other concentrations in business, that’s why you should pay attention to IT. Because when aligned properly to the business, it’s a differentiator that makes the company better at whatever it does. Imagine a hospital without a records system or a school without a student information system. Both would be much less effective. And if you have the right people running IT, that group can be a huge innovative asset for your company, but that feels like a whole separate post.
And for you, IT professionals, your job is to make the company more effective. I wrote previously about how being able to tie your tasks to something larger can be a strong motivator, and this is what keeps me going. To know that the innovations that we’re pushing in IT are moving a company forward is a real thrill. And frankly, one I couldn’t get from accounting (with apologies to all the students I’ve lectured to over the years.) Always look at the bigger picture. So yes, you may be being paid to manage the storage infrastructure, but that storage infrastructure is holding the database that the analytics engine is using to come up some predictive analytics. And those analytics can make your company more successful.
If you’re having trouble tying your work back to the bigger picture, you should ask your manager about how it’s connected. This will not only show that you care about more than your functional area, but also that you’re thinking critically about the work that you do. IT is important, and the best pros can tell you why and connect the dots from what they’re working on back to business performance.
Be one of the best.
I want you to be passionate about technology and what you’re doing!
I also want you to be passionate about why you’re doing what you’re doing.
I want you to stay focused on this, so here’s a few questions:
What company can you think of that doesn’t have a product in the technology space made a name for themselves because of a technological innovation?
Can you see how your work supports the greater goals of your employer? Can you see how your contributions make the company more effective?
Review your last performance evaluation. Do you think that anything would have changed if you had kept the real purpose of IT in focus?
