Is tehnical knowledge necessary to manage IT?

When I speak to small business owners, I often find them uncomfortable with technology. They know they need it to run their business, but they aren't comfortable with it and tend to stay away from it, if they can.

They often have found some useful aspects, such as searching for information on the Internet, but see IT as that PC that is always causing them problems.

In many cases, they hire a junior person on staff, or a technician that fixes the equipment when it breaks. This allows them to ignore the technology.

While they shouldn't be spending their time fixing PCs (they have a business to run), assuming that getting someone technical to manage the equipment is not necessarily the best thing for their business either. The technician is probably very good at fixing what breaks, but is that the best thing for the business? If reliability is a problem, or slow response, this is affecting their business productivity. The technicians are unlikely to focus on preventing these problems, unless they have experience at managing technology. This is very different from fixing technology.

Making technology work for your business has little to do with technical skills, but a lot to do with management and leadership skills. Management skills bring you processes for maintaining technology so that it works consistently and reliably. This ensures that outages do not keep you from doing the job that you bought the equipment for.

Leadership skills in IT are another element. This does take a little technical knowledge to understand or be able to envision the use of technology in a way that improves your business. This requires education and awareness of capabilities, something few courses provide. It also requires a focus on your business and a vision of where you want your business to go. If you have this vision of your business, then you need to look at how technology can support your vision.

Technical skills in your staff and suppliers are not likely to help you develop your business vision. Neither will the next silver bullet software product. Develop the vision of where you want your business to go. Then look for software that can help you get there. Once you set yourself in that direction, you will gain the technical skills that you need to use technology effectively. And those skills will have nothing to do with fixing your own PC or installing your own software.