by Jason Davis on Tuesday, August 24th, 2010 | No Comments »

Steve Jobs of Apple used this image to explain their approach to product development, saying:

We’ve always tried to be at the intersection of technology and liberal arts, to be able to get the best of both, to make extremely advanced products from a technology point of view, but also have them be intuitive, easy to use, fun to use, so that they really fit the users – the users don’t have to come to them, they come to the user.

Yesterday I was following the analyst updates from #workdaytech, primarily updates from Naomi Bloom and Jason Averbook, and it became apparent that the market leaders in the enterprise software space will be the ones who have a defined roadmap that allow them to compete, figure out social integration (i.e. conversational transactions, micro-blogging, social ‘tool’ integration, etc), and most importantly are able to articulate the benefits of their product to both IT AND business sponsors.  In Workday’s case, this means selling the advantages of true-SaaS/multi-tenancy, and it’s ability to deliver significant cost-savings due to more efficient delivery of their software, not to mention being able to drastically reduce implementation timelines and simplify future upgrade planning.

That isn’t rocket science right?  To sell enterprise software you must appeal to buyers with different agendas and priorities, in this case IT users whose concerns are around infrastructure costs, data security, authentication, and a slew of other technical areas to the HR user, who cares most about usability, employee experience, and being able to intuitively perform transactions in the system to manage human capital processes for the organization.  But the question remains – are we training and preparing the workforce for today’s word of blended technology and business responsibilities?  Are they prepared to operate in the gray area of defining application security around business processes, configuring applications to meet business priorities, and understanding of often-complex IT and business hand-offs to manage the applications supporting the enterprise?

I would argue that today’s marketplace demands professionals on both sides of the fence that understand their counterparts to a greater degree than ever before.  Authors have preached about the differences between IT and Business professionals in books like The Geek Gap and Leading Geeks.  Today, HR professionals, you are amongst the ‘geek ranks’.  The successful HR professional sits at the intersection of technology and business, and understands how they compliment each other to turn human capital management into a competitive advantage, instead of a cost center.  The successful HR professional doesn’t code or manage environments, but they understand how to leverage data within the HRMS to generate information that ultimately affects compensation programs, retention, talent acquisition, and other critical areas of HR.  Similarly, the IT professional supporting HR needs to understand the business.  They need to talk the language, and understand what drives projects, business requirements, and application configuration decisions.

Today, the intersection of technology and business is a crowded one with blurred center lines.  It’s the dangerous intersection with the flashing yellow lights.  The most prepared to learn and adapt will survive, and excel.  Those who prefer to stick to a narrow view of their job responsibilities might as well pull over and get out of the way.