Technology and business makes a balanced match

Finally there's agreement that successful technology management requires more than just technology skills.

This article at Computerworld details a report released by the Society for Information Management that shows organizations are desperate for IT people who have business skills.

Really, it's always been a requirement, but like so many things in technology, the requirement has been largely ignored in favor of finding someone with the technical skills to make an application or solution sing.  But as with everything technology-related, attention to detail changes.  Or more accurately, the detail being scrutinized changes.

So where technological abilities alone were enough in the past, today businesses need people who have both technological skills and some understanding of how businesses are run.  Specifically, job candidates need to understand the business value—not the concept, but the actual value—of a technology and they need to understand how to communicate that value effectively.

This piece of the puzzle has always been missing, and the result is that organizations invest in technologies that sound great, but don't really meet business requirements.  Unfortunately, this is one of the most important pieces of technology management and unless students choose to gain business experience, they just aren't getting it from the technology programs that universities offer; not yet, anyway.  Universities are beginning to change degree requirements to meet the actual needs of the organizations that are hiring.

Until the change is complete, however, students shouldn't turn their noses up at business courses in favor of additional technology training.  Nor do they need to kill themselves getting a dual degree.  Instead, there needs to be a balance of technology skills training and business skills training.  How students go about reaching that balance is another story, entirely.