When I started my career, the first thing I did was to say, “I want to be on the business analyst side, because I want to really understand business first.” Nearly 30 years later, I think this mantra still holds. The only way you’re going be able to have meaningful interchange with others in your company is if they respect that you can talk their language.
As a football guy, I think of it like this: if you’re the quarterback you have to know what everybody should do on every play, at every position. And at the end of the day, I do think that when it comes to process, we in IT are the people that really understand that. Even if we’re a bit more like offensive coordinators rather than quarterbacks.
Today, if I were going to tell somebody going into a CIO job what to do first, it would be to really focus on what cross-functional means in your organization. Even today, as an IT guy, it’s still easy for me to fall into the infrastructure-side speak. Then you lose people because not everybody understands that.
