Communicate to Innovate

These days, a successful IT staff must be as well-trained in communicating as in technology.

Sure, every business needs a technology-driven IT staff and the right hardware and software. But in addition to this, you also need the right business processes and workflows in place which is where communication comes in. A key HR application is unlikely to work if the IT manager and the HR manager remain strangers.

Contrary to popular opinion, the responsibility for getting the most out of your data center investment lies not just with the IT staff, but also with the managers in the business units that use the applications.

If your IT staff and business managers don't communicate effectively with each other, your applications and processes are likely to fail, causing interruption to your business. Make no mistake: Managing your infrastructure is key, but cross-silo communications is critical.

To improve communication between IT and other businesses, organizations should follow these guidelines:

Mention data centers, and most people immediately think about servers and mainframes rather than the people who manage them. This is a mistake – particularly if your IT staffers remain invisible to the other people working in your organization.

It no longer makes sense to lock IT people away in their data centers and computer rooms, isolated from the rest of the business. IT has a key role to play in driving the business forward by creating innovative new products, creating customer-facing applications, and helping the business get the most from technology investments. Both IT people and those in other areas of the business need to understand this better.

If you want to get the most out of your data center, you need to ensure that your IT team develops a broad understanding of specific business processes and transactions. They need to know, for example, how an e-commerce transaction works its way through the business, or what systems are used to generate the payroll from beginning to end.

Some IT staffs lose sight of the fact that technology can actually be used to drive the business forward. This is a cultural shift, transforming the perception of IT from being a cost center to being a profit center.It can take a while to make this change, but it has already been achieved in verticals such as financial services, telecom, and the service-provider market. Competitive advantage in these verticals is driven by technology investment and IT's focus on business innovation. Other industries have been slower to catch on, such as education, publishing, and parts of the aerospace and retail sectors. However, even these businesses are starting to understand that IT can be a profit center instead of just a cost center.

The enterprises that succeed in 2005 will be run by executives that understand how to combine people, processes, and technology.

—Stephen Elliot, Senior Analyst, Network Management, IDC