The argument for befriending your IT department

Your IT team builds products; business and marketing teams use them. Business and marketing encounter glitches with the products or new features they’d want; IT fixes them or starts building again. And the wheel turns.

But that’s not really a wheel, is it? Something has to happen for something else to trigger. It’s a start-stop instead of a continuous movement (or improvement). As a result, innovation stalls.

This is why we built Contentstack — to make space for marketing and IT to work together on vision and have the freedom to innovate within their areas of expertise. You don’t want your marketing team holding a campaign for six weeks while an IT ticket is addressed. And you don’t want your IT team constantly beholden to requests from other departments.

In a recent episode of "People Changing Enterprises," Andreas Westendörpf, chief technology officer of Emma Sleep, reminded us that IT used to be metaphorically locked away in a closet. Then, giants like Facebook and Google came around, paving the way for disruptors like Spotify and Airbnb, proving that technology and business are now forever intertwined.

We’ve come a long way. And here’s why it’s always in an organization’s best interest to continue getting close to their IT colleagues.

IT drives value, with business context

Andreas shared that “IT or technology by itself is a function that does not create value unless you put it into a context where it can create value.” An IT expert can’t create value without the right tools and a greater purpose and team.

That’s where business and IT alignment comes in. The strongest cultures have a roadmap for the future created by a cross-functional team of leaders, including IT. That roadmap lays out short-term and long-term business goals and how technology can enable those goals.

So, how can you achieve that necessary level of day-to-day alignment? Consider a combination of a centralized and decentralized IT department, where IT is part of a central organization and embedded into business units. Andreas described this as technology needing to be “concentrated to create excellence, but also distributed to make an impact.”

You can also create tiger teams focused on specific tasks, such as prioritizing and responding to customer requests. (More about that from our CTO here.)

IT knows how to get creative

Technologists are typically pigeonholed as the analytical kind — great with numbers and tools, but lacking creativity.

Let me set the record straight: Analytical minds are, by nature, creative. They look at issues from all angles and think up solutions. It might not be the challenges a creative director may attack, but the role still demands creative approaches.

In Andreas’ case, the fact that “software is never finished until it’s decommissioned” is a reason the role is a creative one. It’s not like building a car where there tends to be a conveyor belt process and a beginning, middle and end. To create value, software requires a deep understanding of the context in which it will be used and the potential it holds for the future. Your IT team is not just blindly writing code — they are thinking about how to constantly innovate so the business performs better.

Business leaders should tap into that creativity as needed outside of just building software. Bring in IT to reconsider training and development, solve productivity or remote work problems or even inspire employees to build innovation into their everyday work.

There’s a reason why computer science-related jobs are expected to grow more than two times faster than the average for all other occupations through 2031 (14.6% versus 5.35). Or why even nontechnologists enter the workforce with deep technology understanding and skills. (Hey, I’m a nontechnologist, three-time tech founder and CEO!)

It’s because tech touches everything we do. Many companies want to be technology companies, but the only ones that will get it right are the ones where business and IT are intertwined. That’s when IT can fulfill the roles they should be playing in enterprises — enabling, protecting and unlocking innovation.