Chief Product Officer, AppDynamics, part of Cisco.
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Being a technologist was never easy, but it has become infinitely more challenging in recent years.
The seemingly insatiable appetite for innovation across all industries has dramatically altered what it takes to win. As a result, technologists today find themselves urgently needing to re-imagine their organizations’ applications to meet constantly rising customer expectations for brilliant digital experiences. At the same time, they’re having to innovate at speed to enable remote and hybrid work for entire workforces.
Against this backdrop of seismic change, 84% of technologists report that the skills and qualities that define success have evolved over the last four years. Elite technologists have had to adapt their approach, learn new skills and implement new solutions in order to stay at the top of their game.
The New Skills That Matter
Here are five critical areas that ambitious technologists should focus on to accelerate their careers in the months and years ahead:
1. Become results-oriented. For IT leaders, it’s not enough to implement and maintain IT environments; you must also be able to monitor and observe your IT stack and directly link performance to business outcomes. Using real-time insights to optimize the digital experience is critical to making this happen.
2. Improve critical thinking. As an elite technologist, you must be able to interpret data and identify trends to inform your actions. This means finding ways to cut through overwhelming data noise across an increasingly fragmented and dynamic IT environment. This will help you generate actionable insights that can inform your approach.
3. Work across the organization. Today’s leading technologists must be able to collaborate with a wider set of stakeholders, both inside and outside the organization. This means taking the time to engage, understand and upskill teams in every corner of the business, while forging close relationships with trusted partners and vendors.
4. Be proactive and agile. Elite technologists have to be able to embrace a proactive and agile approach that can help them prepare for future technology and business demands. In particular, this means ensuring that you have the skills and knowledge you need to lead the shift to a cloud-first application strategy based on cloud-native solutions. This shift will help deliver accelerated innovation and meet customer demands for seamless digital experiences.
5. Think like a business leader first. Technologists at the top of their game must be able to demonstrate the insight, vision and credibility to shape strategy based on real-time business metrics. The traditional disconnect between IT and the business is disappearing, with 88% of technologists, as cited above, now considering themselves to be business leaders.
New Tools And Culture For A New Era
These new skills must also be joined by new tools. Having a business lens on IT availability and performance data is critical to being able to identify the issues that really matter. This helps prioritize the issues that have the maximum business impact.
Culture also counts. Elite technologists must be able to operate in an environment that allows them to grow and thrive, with a supportive culture and leadership. This culture change is happening. We’re seeing more technologists leaving behind the firefighting of the last two years and adopting a more proactive approach to innovation, ready to seize the opportunities that lie ahead.
But they can’t sit back and wait for it to happen. Now is the time for all technologists to invest in themselves and ensure they have the skills, support and tools they need to drive innovation and re-imagine their applications in a cloud-first environment. Do this, and they will soon be joining the ranks of agents of transformation at the very top of the IT profession.
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