The Rise of the Business Technologist
[Music] welcome to thinkcast i'm casey panetta on today's episode i'm speaking with jaime kapia distinguished vice president at gartner about business technologists we'll talk about how the role is shifting entire operating models why they now make up 41 of employees and the major impact they have on accelerating digital transformation hi jaime thanks for joining us today thanks for having me casey so i want to jump right into this and we're going to talk about a lot of different terms today but the first one we're going to tackle is the democratization of digital delivery so what exactly does that mean it means putting the tools and the responsibilities and the accountability for building digital capabilities in the hands of business technologists staff that work in business areas not in it departments and it is something that has been gradually gaining momentum through the combination of multiple factors you know cloud computing low code no code development platforms that have reduced the barriers to entry demographic factors with digital natives now comprising the bulk of the workforce people that are far more comfortable coding and the recognition that technology and analytics are are critical for most jobs at the enterprise nowadays in a way that goes far beyond what a single corporate department could hope to provide and the pandemic has given this trend renewed urgency renewed focus because we've had to democratize technology delivery to work remotely to serve clients or serve our citizens remotely to digitize the way we work and so the need for tech work clearly goes beyond what i.t departments can fulfill by themselves and it's causing many companies to reconsider how they draw the boundaries between what i t departments do and the kind of technology responsibilities that people outside of it have that's what we refer to by democratizing digital delivery it's a big change in ways of working it's a big change in operating model but it's a very important driver of organizational performance and the companies that do it well are far more successful in the marketplace than the ones that are struggling so i want to go back to a term that you used in your first answer which was business technologist and i know it's something that i've seen in our research but what does that term mean it refers to employees that create technology or analytics capabilities for work but work in business areas not in formally structured id departments and so what we found in our research was that 41 of employees on average are actively involved as business technologists in creating technology or analytics capabilities so percentage varies a little bit by industry so it's lower in less technology intensive sectors like government it's closer 25 percent and in more i.t intensive sectors like high-tech it's closer to 50 but we pretty much see it across industries everywhere right now i know for a lot of years we had this term called shadow i.t which is essentially groups outside of i.t
using different technologies that it couldn't see and didn't have insight into is this the evolution of that or is this something completely different how do the two relate shadow it was traditionally used to refer to efforts by business areas to circumvent it's infrastructure and go their own way and put their own kind of emails servers and it's often very duplicative business technologies tend to work on mission-critical things that have high visibility and more often than not they are collaborating very closely with rit departments and in fact when we surveyed business technologists they view working with it as something very valuable that helps them with innovation security and speed so i would say most of this work is not in the shadows it is a new way of collaborating with i.t departments now having said that not all i.t departments are fully cognizant and accepting of this some mighty staff tend to be threatened by it others are part of it about one-third of business technologists used to work in an i.t department at some point in their previous career so it's very telling where this movement tends to come from these are a third of them rit professionals that just went to work at a business area or a corporate function so i think it's interesting that you use the term threatening because it is i mean i could definitely see how from maybe an i.t perspective it might seem
like people are sort of treading on their territory but it's really more just giving them insight right into what business units are working on and giving them more influence without having to take on a lot of projects that they can't really handle resource wise yeah absolutely in many ways this represents something that an i.t we have wanted for quite a while right more money devoted to technology just happens to be outside of the cio's budget it is more people working on technology they just happen to be in business units and it is more value from technology but driven by business technologists and so it does require that we help our our staff in it kind of adjust to it but it's really a big expansion both in the role that technology plays at the enterprise and frankly in the role that it plays at the enterprise it's a more strategic role equipping and empowering others to build digital capabilities but it's a very very significant and very strategic role so it is different it is a departure from kind of the traditional systems operation focus of i.t departments and it will take some time for it departments to get comfortable with it and to develop the capabilities to engage business areas in this different way but it is a it's a pretty exciting and and pretty significant evolution that is making cios very strategic far more visible with greater resources and a much wider impact across the whole enterprise it's kind of interesting gartner has talked for so many years about the business value of i.t and
really establishing what technology can do to support these real business initiatives and this seems like sort of a awesome step in that direction for sure and with the i.t departments that most successfully equip business technologists and empower business technologists are we found in our research are two and a half times more likely to accelerate their digital business transformation they conclude digital initiatives faster they get value from those digital initiatives far quicker and overall they're more successful at dealing with competitive threads with threats of disruption from startups and and digital competitors so it's a pretty it puts it front and center of some of the more most strategic and significant conversations that the c-suite can have these days i want to pause quickly to invite our listeners to learn more about fusion teams and a new model for digital delivery at least 84 of companies and 59 of government entities have set up fusion teams which are multi-disciplinary teams that blend technology and other types of domain expertise and are often designed to deliver products rather than projects learn more about fusion teams by clicking the link in our show notes and downloading our research report i want to pivot slightly to talk more about projects that business technologists are actually working on and and get a little more specific about different things that they're doing to support the business the work of business technologists can be grouped into four main categories of digital capabilities first is what i would refer to as the pursuit of insight and personalization using advanced analytics artificial intelligence and applying that to things like pricing marketing and modeling the second one would be optimization of complex systems using things like predictive diagnostics to minimize downtime very common in engineering intensive enterprises the third one is the automation of manual tasks using things like rpa to boost productivity very common in accounting in hr in customer service and then last is the integration of customer journeys across channels e-commerce mobile apps the whole of my channel experience that's a big area of focus by business technologists so it's pretty clear from the things that they build that business technologists are not just amateurs building excel macros they are doing real development work and working on some pretty mission critical capabilities so this would require an evolution not just in the way i t departments function but also this will affect how other executive functions work right absolutely so this affects the whole operating model of the enterprise right first you need general managers of business units to embrace the idea that they're going to have to resource business technologists infusion teams right they're going to have to research these teams with their own staff to take a much more active leadership role in digital initiatives then you also need to change what the corporate functions tend to do they historically focus on bureaucratic control and they're going to get comfortable devolving digital accountability to business technologists so the finance function needs to fund persistent fusion teams procurement needs to help them connect with innovative vendors rather than just seek economies of scale hr which is so traditionally focused on role clarity will have to promote role flexibility and rotations of staff across teams information security which traditionally enforced checkpoint based compliance with security now needs to focus more on on helping these teams work autonomously but with the judgment necessary not put the enterprise at risk so it's a pretty significant evolution in how the other executive functions operate and relate to business technologists but we see it underway in the most progressive companies and and it's a very interesting change to be sure you mentioned you know very progressive companies that are obviously kind of all over this but are you seeing in your interactions with clients or or whoever are you seeing that they're open to these changes like is the the cso are they into it or are they kind of hesitant that it's going to change too much of their role or their function well both i think particularly when it comes to security right the visibility of cyber security threats and data breaches puts a tremendous amount of pressure on those executives to ensure that they're keeping enterprise information assets secure but the most effective way to do that is by ensuring that security is viewed as everybody's job not just the job of the information security function and so a lot of the focus of csos these days is to help distributed teams be more aware be better informed be more responsible and ultimately accountable for the work that they do and so federated approaches distributor approaches are definitely something that the information security function has been working on for quite a while now and then for the other sort of i'll call them just for the sake of this question more traditionally business oriented roles so like hr finance procurement are they struggling with this at all because i would imagine the cso is at least more comfortable with the technology piece of this i think so and part of the role of cios is is helping those other executive functions be more comfortable taking on the reins of their own technology we have a case study of a major industrial company whose cio of corporate functions has focused very intentionally on helping the hr function develop internally the capabilities to lead their own agile teams for their hr systems and developing the technical skills and the product management skills and the agile ways of working to do so effectively and it's part of their expansion in responsibility i should say of the cio that they're acting as evangelists and catalysts for some of these changes and other functions i know it sounds like a big change but the inspiration is very visible if you look at the way that software companies and digitally native companies structure their corporate functions this is what they do it's just that now we have more traditional businesses recognizing that they need to adopt some of the ways of working some of the operating model principles that characterize the digitally native companies maybe not for their entire business but for the parts of their business that need to become more digital and and that's what we're seeing again not not invented from scratch but there's some some templates and some models that they're adopting within the context of established companies how is this shifting talking about functions and roles how is this shifting the role of the cio we talked about it a little bit at the beginning but i want to get into it a little bit more yeah absolutely the the way that the cio role is is shifting you know the cio role traditionally had a big set of operational responsibilities providing systems for end users increasingly the cio is providing digital platforms for business technologists to use equipping and empowering them to build their own digital capabilities to build their own digital products so in terms of the technology evolution it it represents a pretty significant shift from there there's a fair amount of orchestrator duties i like to refer to them as orchestrator because they entail empowering business technologists coordinating some of their work ensuring that they build digital capabilities securely following proper security and architectural guidance doing it efficiently leveraging existing patterns and so it's a it's a pretty different way of relating to the rest of the company but i would venture to say that a far more strategic far more impactful way you know to the extent that it involves using information technology to improve the performance of the enterprise to operate more efficiently to get closer to the customer to potentially launch information or digital products it it certainly gets a lot of attention all the way up to the board and it has a big impact on the fortunes of the enterprise we've seen during the pandemic that the companies that have performed best in the sectors most affected like retail or transportation or services are the ones that have been able to most quickly deploy digital channels and digital ways of working and that's through the hard work of cios and i.t departments in equipping their employees and their business technologists with the necessary platforms and tools to build additional capabilities to expand the reach of digitalization before we continue learn more about the trend shaping it in business at gartner i.t symposium expo you will uncover new
ways to approach critical challenges accelerate digital transformation and become an even more effective leader for more information check the show notes or visit gartner.com so in terms of action based insight if you will we've talked a little bit about each of the functions roles within the context of how they're affected by business technologists but who i guess in the executive team who's leading this initiative is it the cio is it the ceo is it a combination like who's taking the first steps to kind of say this is what we need to be moving towards or you know we're already here this is how we need to be managing it the enterprises that are most successful it's usually the cio that acts as an evangelist for change as a catalyst for change that heightens the awareness of the ceo and the senior leadership team that the operating model of the enterprise needs to be updated to more formally equip business technologists with both the skills and the tools and the accountability to drive digital transformation and the cio provokes that the c-suite embraces it and everybody moves forward you know it and you see it when when digital ceases to be this like compartmentalized thing that is only some people that work on and it becomes more mainstream a shared responsibility of the senior leadership team it cannot happen without the cio but the cio by himself or herself cannot push this forward alone this needs to be this is one of those moments where the cio needs to catalyze change across the entire c-suite that's why i like to say it's it's the most significant strategic moment for cios of recent memory yeah that makes complete sense that's really interesting i want to kind of break away a little bit and talk about some terminology that people might see when they're talking about this and that is uh the difference between a dedicated business technologist and a citizen technologist and we do talk about this a little bit in our research but can you just clarify what the difference is between the two of them and if there are any sort of the pros and cons of each sure business technologies just refers to people that work outside of an i.t department that work in a business unit or a corporate area to building and managing their own technology they break into two groups by the level of task specialization if you will dedicated technologists are the people who tell you that their job is technology work building capabilities for others these are people like python developers in the marketing department to run analytics or data scientists in financial planning and analysis that help with forecasting and modeling or software engineers that may be working in product development they're dedicated technologies they happen to be in a business area not in iat department citizen technologists are people that have other jobs that are done through technology work so you may be a pricing manager and as part of that job you happen to use artificial intelligence and then you have to train and explain algorithms in order to develop your pricing program but your job is to be a pricing manager not to be a software developer we're thinking about a customer service rep that creates an rpa bot to automate a customer transaction or doctors in a clinical setting that build their own pandemic apps so that distinction is more of a task specialization now having said that the level of technical dexterity of business technologists tends to be very high the vast majority of them are highly conversant in multiple technology domains and do a fair amount of development work and that probably has to do with the fact that we have digitally native generations uh constituting the bulk of the workforce nowadays so i just want to ask you one final question and then we'll kind of get into our ending thoughts but part of your job as a gardener analyst is to work with our clients and and talk to them about specific concerns that they have so what are some of the questions that cios have on this topic when you're talking to them you know there's tremendous curiosity on this topic how to change the operating model of the it organization how to change the enterprise operating model to support business technologists and cios are very curious to know how prevalent is this how widespread is this and we have some pretty unique data to share with them based on our surveys of employees across companies across industries and then they're very keen to understand you know what are the common pitfalls and how are other companies avoiding those and so we have case studies that help illustrate that among the most common challenges cios face is how to convince the rit leadership teams to embrace the idea of engaging with business technologists and not view it as a threat because not everybody in the leadership team is quite as open to this change but once people see the prevalence and see the opportunity is actually a pretty significant expansion in the strategic reach of the it organization kind of equip and empower others and so they get on board the last area where we get a lot of cio questions on how to help them is how to educate the rest of the c-suite on this trend of business technologists how do we convince you know the heads of the other corporate areas in hr or finance or business units to dedicate some of their own people to managing technology into resource fusion teams as a new way of collaborating with the it department that's a very common area of question for us so if you have any interest in these topics feel free to seek out jaime or check out our show notes we'll have more content for you there but thank you so much for joining us today do you have any final thoughts you'd like to share with our audience yeah one of the things with that has happened during the pandemic is that more and more companies have come to the realization that there are parts of their business that need to behave more like software companies either to serve customers digitally to manage digital channels or to offer digital products or more integrated cross-channel experiences and they're coming around to the realization that the way to do that well is to democratize digital delivery to empower business technologists that are closest to the customer closest to the operations or closest to the product to build and run their digital capabilities they can't do this without the cio and corporate i t but the cio and corporate can also not do this by themselves so it represents a new partnership far more strategic far more impactful and that is gaining renewed urgency as we can tell the difference in business performance between the companies that are more effective at digital transformation from the ones that are not and the pandemic has kind of heightened that digital divide very clearly so in many ways this is a terrific time to be in it and to be a cio and to guide this evolution of i.t departments to equip and empower others to build digital capabilities thanks jaime thanks casey gartner think cast is a production of gartner the world's leading research and advisory company equipping executives across the enterprise with indispensable insights advice and tools to achieve their mission critical priorities you can learn more at gartner.com all
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2021-10-31 08:20
