InformationWeek

July 31, 2000

Trickle-Down Theory: Management Skills Spread Through IT

here's a trickle-down effect taking place in IT organizations, but it has nothing to do with economics. While leadership and interpersonal skills remain crucial to CIOs, they're also becoming important to the success of midlevel managers and staff.

At J.D. Edwards & Co., a vendor of enterprise applications, each IT manager must work with Ken Migaki, VP of IT infrastructure, to develop an improvement plan based on a company-created profile of an ideal manager. The plan guides the manager toward achieving business and customer goals. "We run IT as a business," Migaki says. "Customers want service, and we have to focus on them. It used to be a 'you just have to deal with them' attitude." The trickle-down won't stop there. The company plans to train the entire IT staff in the business message so they can participate in applying that message to IT.

But within most companies, the IT staff remains unskilled in leadership and business acumen, says Meta Group analyst Maria Schafer. "It hasn't trickled down far enough yet," she says. "So far, it's at about the project-management level."

Changes are also taking place in the structure of the IT organization's staff. As IT becomes central to the success of a company, it's more attractive to workers in other business units.

Tony Wells, founder of training company Knowledge Development Centers, sees an increase in the demand for courses in Web applications and Web-development tools. "Companies are saying, 'You'll be our Web support person-go get some training,'" he says. "That person could be an accountant or a marketer, but they can retrain to learn some IT."

IT work used to require a strong background in math and computer science, but not anymore. "IT is a good opportunity even for liberal arts grads," particularly when skills such as HTML are relatively easy to learn, says Meta Group's Schafer. "You no longer need to be a math whiz to be a success in IT."

Mike Caruso, VP of customer support and former CIO at Candle Corp., says there will always be a place for people with math and computer science backgrounds who can serve in traditional IT roles. "The lines will continue to blur," Caruso says. "But we will always need people who understand performance and capacity."

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