What is a ‘business role’ in an IT firm?Author Tapan Rayaguru, Career Coach at Sunstone Business School

It is very common to see technical folks express a desire to move into a more ‘business role’ within their firms in search of variety/enrichment in job content or better career growth. While this a good goal to pursue one needs to be aware of what these roles are and how one can go get them.

Here are some principles that can help you look for the right roles:

The business of your customer

Look for functions in your organization make a significant amount of difference to the business of your customer. For example functions that are responsible for making a certain client business process more effective, helping clients adapt a business process based on what the best practices in an industry are, creating a new business process/model based on best practices from another industry after suitable adaptation, making a certain process more efficient by reduction of low/no value adding stages, executing a process with a lower cost through the use of technology etc. In an IT services firm these roles could be any of these client partner, management consultant, functional consultant, business analyst, client manager and the likes. When dealing with technology products as your core business, these roles could be that of a product manager, functional consultant, management consultant, process architect etc.

The business of your own company

You could also consider getting into the business of your company as a long term career option in which case your ability to understand the core business through the eyes of all the stakeholders of that business: customers, investors, employees and business partners.

Customers – What value do customers see in your firm? Why do they engage with you? What change in your organization would make them realize more value from you? How do they view your competition? Let’s take an example – a Fortune 500 firm has engaged your company provide a service – the value that they see could be converting a fixed cost at their end to a variable cost with your firm, an assurance of quality and a fee based on achieving that quality, providing a certain skill in technology/process they don’t want to build in house, provide cost advantage over their internal cost, allow them to scale the teams up or down faster than they could on their own etc.

Roles that help in impacting the value to customers could be around engagement structuring, delivery management, quality assurance with customer in view, pre-sales solution design, pre-sales process design etc.

Now think of similar roles that impact value to investors, employees and business partners…