I recently had the pleasure of participating in Mike Gualtieri’s Technopolitics podcast. We discussed why digitally enabled customer experiences are no longer a nicety; they’re an obligation. But the problem is that IT and business don’t always work well together because:

  • Business relegates IT to a uncreative computing utility.
  • IT chuckles at business’s technology naïveté.

I think the gulf between business and IT is closing — I don’t see that the clash is quite as big as it used to be, and the IT pros I speak with already have been working on getting closer to the business. But often, they’re not going fast enough. Why? You cannot separate technology from customers’ digital experience and you cannot separate business from technology.

My solution: You need to hire IT pros who have the digital experience X factor. This is going to be increasingly important as the emerging role of “marketing technologists” and tech-savy customer experience professionals continues to evolve. I discuss in the podcast what I think the X factor is, but some of its major components are:  

  1. Customer-oriented, customer-centric values (even if they’re not customer-facing or customer service agents)
  2. A marketing and business mindset
  3. Creative and design thinking (not just technology-minded)
  4. Strength in strategic and design skills
  5. A “digital first” mindset
  6. Competancies in a  breadth rather than depth of skill sets (e.g., developers with knowledge of multiple programming languages instead of just deep knowledge of Java)

These may seem too soft (they seemed that way to me too at first!), but the majority of organizations I interviewed for my latest organizational report claimed that their success was due in part to hiring IT pros with the X factor. I also found many organizations have their own X factor definitions. My favorite quote was an organization who told me that its X factor was “someone who is creative, with a little snarkiness and a tinge of bitterness on the side.” So what’s your X factor?  I’d love to hear your experiences in the comments below.