How leading CIOs cultivate business-centric IT

It wasn’t long ago that Duke University Health System shopped around to fill out its IT ranks much like any organization, seeking candidates with strong technical chops and prior experience in core systems. Today, its top IT hires have quite a different pedigree. While technology prowess remains an important attribute, many in IT now hail from different functional areas, the connective tissue being a passion for the intersection of healthcare and business.

Duke Health’s 1,000-person IT and technology group made a concerted effort these past few years to organize, recruit, upskill, and align culture to be more business-centric, in support of the corporate mission to “advance health together.” The shift means IT employees have a responsibility to flex their technical muscle, but also to contribute to the business of patient care and enabling the health care team.

“Our employees need to understand first and foremost that their job might be technology, but ultimately what they do is impact and enable the physicians, clinicians, and nurses who deliver patient care,” says Dan Bruno, chief of staff and chief operating officer at Duke Health. “Whether you’re working at the service desk, keeping the network secure, or providing storage for research projects, what you’re trying to accomplish is taking care of patients and their loved ones.”

With digital strategy and technology as the brains behind most business functions and operating models, IT organizations are determined to inject more business-centricity into their employee DNA. IT leaders have been burnishing their business acumen and embracing a non-technical remit for some time. Now, there’s a growing desire to infuse that mentality throughout the greater IT organization, stretching beyond basic business-IT alignment to creating a collaborative force hyper-fixated on channeling innovation to advance enterprise business goals.

“IT is no longer the group in the rear with the gear,” says Sabina Ewing, senior vice president of business and technology services and CIO at Abbott Laboratories. “It’s very clear that the IT workforce must broadly understand the business, know how operations run, and effectively bring their technical expertise to help solve and drive opportunity.”

Despite industry differences, IT organizations seeking to uplevel their teams with a business-oriented charter are running a similar playbook. They are recruiting from different talent pools and reimagining organizational structure to encourage IT-business cross-pollination. At the same time, they are balancing technical training with programs to build out soft skills and business experience through embedded roles, mentorships, and immersive rotations.

Here is a more in-depth look at a four-pronged strategy designed to move the needle on cultivating business-centric IT.

Reimagine IT organizational structure

One of the best ways to make IT more in tune with the business is to build bridges that break down silos and create pathways between the traditional tech organization and the various enterprise functions. Some IT organizations are creating business-facing IT roles that are aligned to specific areas such as e-commerce, manufacturing, human resources, or supply chain operations. Others promote tour-of-duty assignments, in which IT personnel embed in different business functions. Alternatively, they are placing line-of-business workers in IT to foster tighter collaboration and a shared understanding of core objectives, pain points, and possible areas of innovation.

At ServiceNow, newly onboarded IT employees are encouraged to participate in day-in-the-life scenarios, where they spend time in HR, finance, sales, and other departments to get an on-the-ground sense of operations and how and where technology might play an enabling role. Similarly, an informal tour-of-duty rotation helps create tighter business-IT synergy, according to Chris Bedi, ServiceNow’s chief customer officer.

“In one example, we had someone in marketing come in and do a year-long stint in IT and through osmosis, that infused a lot of marketing acumen within different IT teams,” he explains. “When they went back to marketing, there was greater alignment between the two groups. These kind of experiences are great if an organization curates them.”

Duke Health is a big proponent of orchestrating formal arrangements that break down departmental boundaries. Instead of creating pathways that empower IT personnel to spend time in different functions, the IT organization sees greater opportunity in embedding line-of-business representatives into IT. To that end, Duke Health actively recruits (and earmarks budget for) physicians, nurses, and clinicians with some understanding of technology to commit a portion of their time to working with IT. Their role is to communicate and elaborate on business needs while helping technologists better understand what’s required to improve patient care.

Infusing business professionals into IT versus enabling IT workers to spend time in the business provides a more direct route toward gathering customer requirements and identifying specific challenges. “This gives us a chance to listen to customers representing an entire department who can tell us what they need rather than sending someone in to try to interpret their requirements,” Bruno explains. “Someone might be IT-savvy, but they won’t necessarily see all the opportunities that a physician with some IT background might see.”

Expand recruiting strategies and talent pools

While those with robust experience and expertise in highly technical areas such as cloud architecture or cybersecurity are still highly coveted, IT organizations like Duke Health, ServiceNow, and others are also seeking a very different type of persona. Zoetis, a leading animal health care company, casts a wider net when seeking tech and digital talent, focusing on those who are collaborative, passionate about making a difference, and adaptable to change. Candidates should also have a strong understanding of technology application, says CIO Keith Sarbaugh.

“We are focused on attracting and developing talent who can demonstrate our purpose and values through curiosity and interest in making a meaningful impact on our business and in animal health,” Sarbaugh says. “We value talent who can integrate their technological understanding with our business needs to drive significant results.”

To field these types of candidates, Zoetis recruits from the usual technology-oriented sources. It also conducts a broad search, bringing in recruits from diverse industry backgrounds and experiences. Beyond animal and human health, Zoetis has successfully sourced candidates from adjacent industries such as consumer packaged goods (CPG) and other sectors pushing boundaries in customer experience. “This gives us more degrees of freedom and allows us to push innovation further,” Sarbaugh says.

ServiceNow has modified some of its IT job descriptions to reflect a business orientation while restructuring its interview panel and discussion process to suss out how well candidates know the inner workings of domains such as HR or finance, Bedi says. In addition, the IT organization has made it a point to hire people with a non-IT-oriented resume and background.

“There’s not a strategy to get rid of super technical architects and programmers, but to change the mix of what percentage of people are heavy domain experts,” Bedi says. “For instance, we are bringing in people from the sales operations organization who are responsible for the sales process to be infused with the product and technology team. You have to figure out what works for your organization.”

Uplevel education and training

Acclimating rank-and-file IT with a business orientation requires leaders to set the tone and orchestrate change, reinforced by formal education and training programs.

F5 Networks started the process with a skills assessment to determine what was lacking from the perspective of both technical and business competencies, says Yvette Smith, CIO for the company, which specializes in networking and security technologies. “We focused as much on our business capabilities as our technical capabilities and put a pretty rigorous learning plan in place that includes a partnership with the business,” she says.

Part of the upskilling focus is helping workers understand key business processes and how to translate technology considerations into real business value.

“Helping people understand that when they’re solving some technical issue, they’re actually solving a business problem is the heavy lift,” Smith admits. “But we’re turning the tide of our long history of being valued because of IT’s technical prowess versus being valued as business enablers and leaders.”

Financial services firm Edward Jones Investments has structured its internal education platform so that IT associates can just as easily dive into technical content on AI or cybersecurity as they can material covering the constructs of financial planning and portfolio risk. Technical leaders are encouraged to pursue financial industry certifications, and there are learning platforms that deliver role-based pathways into topics such as agile methodologies, product management, and customer experience, says Kevin Adams, head of technology for Edward Jones.

Another skills development differentiator: A formal structure for putting technical folks in the field with financial advisors to learn the contours of the business. “That helps drive more of that cohesiveness, being able to tie actual work to business output,” Adams says.

Rethink rewards and recognition

Recognition for a job well done is a critical part of keeping employees happy and engaged. Beyond the usual performance metrics, some IT organizations are adding business-specific criteria to the review process and establishing rewards and recognition programs that call out initiatives for how they specifically advance business goals.

At Zoetis, for example, any reward or recognition is predicated on its significance to customers and its impact on the business. “It’s not because someone successfully upgraded an Oracle database, but rather that this particular activity reached a new set of pet owners or livestock producers in regions we weren’t before,” Sarbaugh says. “It’s simple, but it’s very different. People are not wired to work that way.”

It’s a similar philosophy at the Federal Reserve. While it’s important for IT personnel to be recognized for their engineering prowess keeping critical systems secure and up and running, staffers are also called out for how those efforts translate into better business outcomes.

“It matters for them to understand the why and so what of what they are working on,” says Ghada Ijam, CIO of the Federal Reserve System. “We connect the dots between the work they’re doing over a weekend to maintain production and the resulting ability to process $4 trillion dollars the next day on that system.”

A high-touch communications and engagement campaign also helps link technology projects to business outcomes. Newsletters featuring stories of how teams come together to solve challenges and Strategy on a Page (SOAP), a single page distillation of the Federal Reserve’s business strategy refreshed annually, help to highlight priorities, initiatives, and achievements, Ijam adds.

At the same time these initiatives infuse greater business-centricity into technology organizations, they are also opening new doors for IT workers. Much like CIOs’ expanding business charter in the post-pandemic period, business-savvy IT professionals can expect to benefit from new responsibilities and previously untapped career paths.

“As technology evolves, the more you learn about the business, the greater fluidity there is,” says Abbott’s Ewing. “Success is driven off an ability to bring technology expertise to business conversations to help solve problems and drive outcomes.”