Michael Pote has seen the future,
and the future is Joe.

As Senior Vice President of Nashville-based HealthStream Inc., a provider of e-learning solutions to the healthcare industry, Pote has seen a generation of information technology professionals enter the workplace lacking the skills to be well-rounded members of an organization, and he’s more than a little frustrated by that fact.

“You could talk about any subset of individuals within an organization - an accounting department, a sales department, a marketing department - and you’d expect that group, regardless of their specific training, to understand the product, mission and goals of the company. If they only knew the mechanics of their department, that would be completely unacceptable,” Pote says. In IT departments across the country, this type of attitude is prevalent. IT is an underpinning to many other areas of a company and needs to have a strong understanding of both internal, and external customer requirements.
But perhaps this is less of an attitude issue and more a function of training and preparation. “We’ve done a disservice to IT staff. They are graduating with IT degrees but are ill equipped to make an impact in their companies. The attitude seems to be ‘I know C, I know C++, I know Cold Fusion, but I have no idea what a balance sheet is, and I couldn’t present my way out of a paper bag, nor do I have any interest or desire in learning to do so.’ The concept of being a well-rounded, well-informed staff member who can understand and contribute to the company at many levels appears to have eluded our IT professionals. Skills sets critical to success in all other areas of business do not appear to be embraced in conjunction with programming and networking skills.

Pote’s frustration level is underscored by the fact that he once employed an IT professional who was the prototype of what he thought a well-rounded, multi-functional IT worker should be. “Not only is he the finest programmer I’ve ever met, but I would send him out to meet with a customer, and have the confidence that he would represent our products and services well with that group,” Pote says. “They’d respect him because he’s a good listener. He knows to listen from the customer’s point of view,
a difficult skill for anyone to acquire. He knows how to come back to the office and translate those customer wishes into what is possible technically.”

“I think it is not a big request to ask other IT professionals to do what this gentleman does so easily, and yet because so few professionals are equipped to perform with internal and external customers, he stands out in the crowd.” In the highly competitive environment facing our IT professionals today and the drive from companies to access these skills from overseas workers, the need for IT professionals to bring these customer-oriented skills to a company has never been more important. Pote believes the creation and education of IT professionals who can contribute on multiple levels to a business can help stem the tide of IT jobs flowing out of the country.

“The central question is ‘Why are we losing jobs to overseas IT workers?’ And the answer is that the verbal communication I have with my IT staff is so poor, that they might as well be working in India. As a group, they tend to be non-communicative, they don’t inform me of issues, we don’t have a dialogue, and so if I outsource this function at this point, what’s the difference?” Pote says. “Now I’d never be able to outsource the work Joe does. He’s irreplaceable because not only does he have tremendous technical skills, he can listen to customers like I can’t. He can listen with a technical ear. He can bring to the table skills I don’t have, which is exactly why I hire people. Joe will never be replaced by an outsourced individual.”

Pote suggests that significant impact can occur on the educational level, without a radical overhaul of the core curriculum of IT education. “I’m not suggesting that there need to be classes on ‘listening to customers’. I would not expect IT professionals to take Presentations 101 or Business Logic 105,” he says. “I am suggesting that as a teaching technique, we infuse those IT classes with these skills. Don’t just send these students home to read the
book on C+ code. Have the projects worked on as a team, review the code in presentation style, have students critique each other’s work – dialogue. Each student at some point in the semester should have the opportunity to present something they’ve written, requiring presentation skills as part of the course. “I might juxtapose a coding class with another adjacent business class, and have them work on a project together – solve a business issue. The IT students would work with a cross-functional team on a technical project with a business emphasis. The business students would have to figure out how to market and sell this product,” he continues. “The technical people would project how long it will take to build it, what the manpower costs are, what type of platform to work on, etc. This would help IT students explore accounting, finance and labor management issues. And the business students would learn from the technical students as well. At this point, you haven’t changed the core curriculum at all but teaching is enhanced and learning, more productive. The students experience a scenario that is closer to what they will experience as employees and come into their first jobs better prepared to make a real contribution to the mission and goals of their employer.”

Lucas Hendrickson
Staff Writer