Propel your business forward with a business & tech savvy workforce
By: Arqs Belgium
Tags: Business Strategy, Business Development, Software Development, Business, Tech

How ‘tech savvy’ are you?

Do you really understand tech? If you have a smartphone and use apps, you use technology to enhance your life. Maybe you are young enough to be considered a ‘digital native’, with the implication that technology skills come naturally. But do you know where data comes from and how it gets to your device? Do you know the logic that sits behind the services you consume? When you binge watch Netflix you probably aren’t aware it’s hosted entirely on Amazon Web Services (the biggest cloud going). You probably don’t know how Google Maps finds out which restaurants are near you at the click of a button. Chances are you, and most other users, have little idea how these services function and who keeps them running. For the end user, it’s irrelevant!

How platforms like Netflix work

For companies, having an understanding beyond pure functionality is important. Many use tech tools to improve their businesses despite having only surface level knowledge of how they work. I would argue they need to understand more. It’s time for everyone in a business that uses IT to know about basic concepts like API’s and REST services — all the things that drive technology applications. It’s time for business decision makers to understand their technology choices.

The tech savvy business guy (or gal)

Why do we need a tech savvy business person? In a world driven by technology, you really can’t afford not to know what it’s about. Business people need to seize tech-based opportunities to improve their daily operations, or get left behind. They also need to dismiss someone trying to sell them a lemon, be it last year’s solution or an unproven concept that can’t deliver on its promises. Failing to see how a tech solution can help a business kills momentum. When knowledge is lacking among decision makers, implementing something great takes too long. If it’s ‘too technical’ or they ‘don’t get it’, business interest is lost in a fraction of a second and opportunities slip away.

I’m not saying every manager or business person should know how to code. What they should know and understand are the concepts behind new technologies, their capabilities and complexities. All too often I hear business managers say; “IT decided to switch between databases, and we’re impacted, but we never asked for any of this”. If they understood why a change like that needed to happen, if they were involved in the discussion, it would relieve so much tension between managers and IT departments. No more misunderstandings, no more blame games.

The enterprise architect

Apple, Google and the other giants are far from the only tech companies. Most companies are leveraging technology for their daily operations. What businesses can even run without an IT function? So, in a way, every company is becoming a tech company. Unfortunately, the systems they run are often dated and hard for staff to use. They are expensive and wasteful because they are not standardized or implemented in a cost efficient way.

Enterprise architects work to combine different IT solutions and deploy them at a scale that meets the company’s needs. They aim to make their company future-ready, to standardize and reduce cost, and often to combine capabilities into a single suite of applications.

Architects should be both business and tech savvy — to keep up with what’s relevant to the business you need to think at a different level to an IT specialist. Tech is abundantly present, and you have to go into the technical nuts and bolts, but the focus must always be on business benefits.

Killing momentum

I often see business managers struggle to grasp what is going on, or fully understand the proposed direction. Perhaps they find that switching from an SQL to a NOSQL database is causing downtime that they aren’t prepared for, and they don’t understand the benefits. Maybe they don’t see that using a cloud based solution will allow their staff to work remotely at the same time as reducing costs. They push back and momentum is lost!

Right now, positions are wide open for people who are business and tech savvy. Combined tech and business backgrounds allows the best people to articulate the value of IT. They can create a roadmap for success and propel a business forward.

Written by Sammy De Moor.