IT Understanding by Business

What is Technology?
The dictionary meaning of Technology is "Applying skills and knowledge towards use of Tools and Techniques to serve a purpose". In the Insurance domain, IT Technology is the use of Computers and its associated tools and techniques so as to solve a business issue or serve a business purpose.
Let's say an organization goes for the latest and greatest Policy and Claims administration system investing millions of dollars to phase out their rigid and inflexible legacy Policy administration application. They have hired tens, if not hundreds of IT workers who must work with business and try to get the job done by understanding the business objectives and painpoints and resolve them by using the IT solutions based on the functionality supported by the product and use of their own years of experience.

IT side of Business and its Advantages
To achieve this and similar objectives, it is very important for business to be aware and be abreast of the IT world, to understand the IT jargon that goes on today. Parallely IT also has to understand the business processes, their jargons and painpoints and try to bridge the gap that exists between the two so as to make the job easier.
But the focus for this post is the Business side understanding of IT - Why do we need it? and how do we culminate it?
There are a lot of technology areas that are closely associated with business and having a fair understanding definitely helps and makes your job easier as a Business analyst. For e.g. in the Insurance world, understanding XMLs for sending data across applications, configuring policy, claims and billing applications for user administration, organizational setup, permissions and access, rating rules configuration etc are all areas that are closely associated to the day to day working of the business folks. Lots of Policy, Claims, CRM applications nowadays have a business rules configuration engine which will allow business users to setup business rules without the intervention of Technical group and will thus save cost and time to rollout. The output will also be of a better quality due to the involvement of business who will ensure all day to day and boundary scenarios are well tested.

Knowledge of IT would definitely give business users a good perspective on how things progress from requirements to design to development to testing before making it to the floors. They would be able to better understand the estimates provided by development, cross question and correct the estimates to more real world numbers.
Sometime business people get intimidated and lost in the technical jargon. So it definitely helps to know the tech talk so both Technical and business folks are on the same page. Business definitely stands to gain if they understand the nuances of the functional and technical features of the application along with knowing the tools of usage just as IT would gain if it understands the day to day business process of the applications they work on.
Business should be and nowadays is getting more and more technology savvy. The Gap between Technology and Business is reducing.faster than an ice cream cone in a hot afternoon. There exists a set of business SMEs who not only understand their busines but also the Technology aspect to an extent, but they may not get the whole picture due to various reasons,
1> Not enough technical inclination
    - There is a set of business users who have got so used to their own way of doing things that they do not want to change. For example - Some people are so used to use to the abacus for doing calculations that they do not want to switch over to using the latest calculator. Agreed, Abacus has its advantages, but certainly calculator gives you more features and does it faster and with rapid scalability and flexibility.
    For e.g. Calculating Rates and premium in an excel though worked as a solution in the old ages, in the new world we have application features that will do the  calculations for you or using a desk calendar for policy premium, insured letter reminders rather than using the latest automatic activity and diary reminders that the applications provide out of the box.

2> Know as you go attitude
    - I will learn about it when i get there. Procastination is another reason that many smart and intelligent business people do not use their knowledge in understanding IT which otherwise would serve as a great benefit, not just to that individual but also to the organization as a whole.

3> "Who needs this" attitude
    - Mr. know-it-all attitude is another detrimental roadbock that delineates project progress faster than you can imagine.

Why does business need to understand IT?
1> Improve solution efficiency
    - To efficiently and colaboratively work on Projects. It is necessary for IT and business to understand each other and make sure information does not get lost in translation. e.g. Business says, "Customer service should have the latest billing and payments information so that they can effectively communicate with customers"
    Now business has to know and understand
    - If financials are stored in the same "Policy & Claims System" or are retrieved from a different system altogether
   
    - Is a realtime integration possible between the financial system and customer portal

    - If not, is a nightly batch an option? How long? when does the process run?

    - What information is available in the financial system so the type of information to be retrieved can be designed and developed.

    - Last but not the least, design and develop a solution that is technically feasible, scalable, flexible and is intuitive to customers, business and the end operations teams alike.

2> Save costs and improve quality of output
    - Business involvement in Technology will save lots of back and forth communications and confusions, unnecessary meetings between IT and business.
    This will also improve the final quality of output due to the clear requirements and also final real scenario and boundary testing done by business
   
3> Functionality
    - The more business understands about technology, the easier they will be able to put their ideas across and inturn will be able to develop and suggest solutions that are more closer to the real needs and are also technically feasible.
   
4> Advance knowldege
   - Doing all of the above will not help the project and overall organization, but will also help and develop your individual skillsets and improve and expand your area of knowledge. Thus it will help you be more competitive and assist in reaching your career goals

How to achieve this?
1> Explore and understand Technology and business
 - Read articles related to technology and business. Be curious, try and understand the daily happenings in the IT world.
 - Explore applications
   The applications that you work on, spend sometime to understand the fine points, nuances, the small functional quirks that they provide and try to build on that. This will help you not only understand the application's current capabilities but will also help you improvise on them so you can build a better product.

2> Ask Questions
 - Ask questions when something is not clear or does not make sense why it is happening. Find a mentor who has a role similar to yours or is from the IT domain. So he/she can explain and resolve your doubts.
 
3> Training
 - Finally training, nothing beats getting trained on the system that will be your source of "if not bread and butter then Jam and Honey"
 - If possible, undergo training where you can learn all about Business analyst responsibilities and profile, What does it take to be a successful BA and a technologist?

4> Organization Culture
 - IT understanding of business depends strongly upon on the organization culture, the methodologies that are followed for executing a project. How much intearaction and collboration exists between IT and business departments.
- Organizations should also focus on mentoring business folks and having something like a buddy system in place so business and IT work in an aligned fashion.

Doing all this is definitely beneficial to the organization and will help build a stronger and a knowledgable workforce who will help curb the overall organization costs and help in successful project implementations.