Bridging the Leadership Gap Between Tech and Business

This article originally appeared on MIT Sloan Management Review.

IT has a brand problem. It has lost trust with its customers—from C-suite stakeholders to individual contributors—who have come to associate IT with bottlenecks, frustration, constraints, and cost overruns. In fact, if IT were a consumer brand, it would have been discontinued years ago.

Perhaps worst of all, the persistent separation of the IT function as a far-off, siloed corner of the company where decisions around technology are made perpetuates outdated ideas about the role of technology in an organization. This limits the reach of technology, and it sets up a false dichotomy between IT and the business.

For so many organizations today, technology is the business. Technology needs to be understood as a critical enabler in every part of the organization from the front line to the back office. It creates new value by crunching data to deliver new insights, it spurs innovation, and it disrupts traditional business models.

Senior executives from both technology and business silos are the only ones who can help their companies shift this mindset. These leaders are the ones who most clearly understand the direction in which their organizations are headed and the important role that technology will play along the way.

For business and technology leaders alike, new actions and behavioral changes can help their organizations make this shift.

Read the full article at MIT SMR.

Will Poindexter is partner with Bain & Company in Chicago. He leads Bain’s Technology and Agile Innovation practices in the Americas.