ALT-1 Is an MBA the new Route to it Success
What happens when your technical personnel start telling your business experts how to run the business, and why should IT be headed by a businessman?
Suppose you have opened up a new business, and called it the "Acme Lemonade Stand." In your first summer of operation, you sell a lot of lemonade, and finish up with a nice tidy profit. However, when you open up your lemonade stand the next year, the first thing you notice is a person across the street offering his or her own version of a lemonade stand.
What do you do?
You start to look for ways to reduce costs, save money, and offer the same nice, ice-cold, and sweet glass of lemonade that you had success with last year, while lowering the price that you charge the customers.
Therefore, you look around, and determine that you want to use plastic reusable cups, rather than the Styrofoam disposable cups. You also decide to buy more ice trays, and make your ice rather than buying bags of crushed ice from the market every morning. You may even decide to provide more of a variety in your offerings by selling low-cal lemonade (using sweetener) rather than natural sugar. It means more work on your part, but you definitely save more money.
Once again, your business is a success, and you make a nice tidy profit your next year as well.
Your third year starts, and now there are three lemonade stands on your street. What can you do?
Now, imagine that the person who sold you the pitchers from which you dispense your lemonade showed up, and started to tell you that you had been doing it wrong the whole time, and that really, you can still make lemonade; however, you have to change how you are doing it. You also have to go back to buying ice from the store, and you may even need to change back to the more efficient disposable cups.
What would your reaction be? More than likely you would kick that person off your property.
Yet what has happened in our IT departments?
The company IT department is now, and certainly always will be, a cost center' for most companies. In other words, it is a department that generates no revenue towards the bottom line, while costing those departments that are profit centers' a significant portion of their income.
Most IT departments that I have been in, have maintained an attitude towards the business units of a company that, "We are the experts, trust us, do what we say, and everything will turn out all right!" And business units, wary of the forced changes that modern technology brings, accede to the demands of IT.
Business units around the world have changed the very way they operate their business, on the sole premise that, "IT said so!"
Unfortunately, most IT departments are headed by persons trained in technology, not business. Therein lies the problem. Having a manager who knows nothing about business, making business decisions, is a recipe for disaster.
For a company to thrive, IT managers must support the business requirements, not rewrite business requirements to meet the IT standards. Historically, whenever IT said, "You have to do it this way." Business units have complied, allowing IT personnel to dictate not only the method of filling the lemonade pitcher, but also the way to buy the ice and the brand of ice to buy.
Now, companies that hire people with MBAs to staff their IT management have found significant success in converting IT into a business support organization. An MBA is trained in how to administer and operate a business based upon the bottom line, something most IT director's know intellectually, but seem to forget during budgeting season.
Businesses have found that hiring a person familiar with business concepts, and cross-training them to technology, ensures a technology unit that will have more of an interest in providing efficient solutions to the business units.
Is an MBA a new route to success in IT? If I had it to do over again, I think the MBA would have served me much better.
