7 steps to move from IT support to IT strategist
Too often, IT professionals feel like “order takers” for business groups — told what systems to implement or troubleshoot instead of being asked how technology can solve bigger business problems.
Making the leap from support tech to strategic advisor takes time. The people who do it well don’t just focus on fixing issues, they learn the business, talk in plain language, focus on results instead of tasks, and look ahead to prevent problems rather than just reacting to them.
Here are seven steps IT pros can take to move from being reactive support staff to trusted advisors.
1. Stop waiting to be told what to do
The biggest obstacle holding IT professionals back is a passive mindset. Sitting back and waiting to be told what to do prevents IT teams from reaching the strategic partnership level they want, said Eric Johnson, CIO at PagerDuty, a provider of digital operations management software.
“Many IT organizations fall into that trap,” Johnson said. “It’s like, ‘Well, we can’t do anything unless we’re told what to do.’ And I’m like, ‘Have you proposed anything? Have you given them ideas around what could be done?’ And many times the answer is no. You’re never going to get to the level that you want within that partnership if you’re not bringing something to the table.”
Bill Young, CTO and operating partner at IT recruiter RightClick, puts it more bluntly. IT professionals need to shift from thinking “my job is to fix things” to “my job is to improve the business,” he said.
One of the biggest mistakes IT leaders make is treating business requests as boxes to check rather than opportunities to identify the root causes of issues, said Dana Stocking, head of IT at AI recruiting startup Mercor.
“When someone asks for access to software or wants to buy a new tool, don’t just fulfill the request,” he said. “Dig into the ‘why.’ What underlying issue are they trying to solve? You’ll often discover that an employee’s proposed solution isn’t the best fit, and by understanding the root cause, you can solve bigger organizational problems that multiple teams face.”
Noe Ramos, vice president of AI operations at Agiloft, emphasized that strong IT leaders see their work as part of a bigger ecosystem, one that works best when people are open, share information, and collaborate.
“Moving from ‘my system’ to ‘our outcome’ is subtle but transformational,” she said.
2. Understand the business, not just the problems
IT professionals need to show up as partners by truly understanding what’s going on in the business, rather than waiting for business stakeholders to come to them with problems to solve, PagerDuty’s Johnson said.
“When you’re engaging with your business partners, you’re bringing proactive ideas and solutions to the table,” he said. “You’re not waiting for them to lay [their problems] out and put them in your queue, because if you’re doing that, you have become nothing more than a ticket-taking organization.”
But how do IT pros actually build that understanding? The answer is pretty simple: attend business meetings, ask questions, and listen.
Joe Locandro, executive vice president and global CIO at enterprise software support provider Rimini Street, encourages his team to attend departmental meetings regularly.
“Getting that business vernacular comes through attending business executive meetings and being invited once a month, once a quarter,” he said. “It gives them an understanding of the business jargon. It gives them an understanding of the imperatives of what’s important.”
Adrienne DeTray, senior vice president and CIO at Universal Technical Institute, agreed. “Get close to the business, both physically and strategically. Sit in on value stream reviews, understand the strategy and what they’re trying to accomplish, attend operational meetings outside of the technical domain,” she said. “You really can’t align your goals if you don’t truly understand where [the business is] coming from and where they’re headed.”
For IT professionals supporting specific departments, this means spending time with those teams daily. If you support sales, understand how the sales process works, Johnson said. Learn the pain points salespeople face. Know what their quarterly targets look like and how they measure success.
To illustrate his point, Johnson described how his team operates. “They work day in and day out with the sales organization,” he said. “There’s an expectation that they’re going to get that [understanding] by engaging with the sales organization,” which makes them more effective when working with sales to build solutions and roll out new processes.
3. Lead with the goal, not the request
Rather than having an order-taking mindset, IT professionals should ask probing questions about what partners need and what’s driving that need, which shifts toward problem-solving and focuses on outcomes rather than just implementing solutions, DeTray said.
Johnson’s team follows a structured approach. On a monthly basis, they run portfolio alignment meetings where they discuss key initiatives with business partners. “We actually ask those questions,” he said. “We ask them what the target state (i.e., desired outcome) is. And if we know the target state, we can actually have conversations with them about proactively what can be done to help them get to that target state.”
For a finance team that wants to close the books faster, this might mean exploring automation opportunities. For sales teams struggling with administrative work, it might mean building tools that eliminate repetitive data entry.
The key is understanding business goals before proposing technical solutions. What does success look like for this team this quarter? How do they measure progress? What obstacles stand in their way?
Johnson’s data team demonstrated this when it shifted from reactive to proactive engagement. By having different conversations with the business about their targets, the team began suggesting programs to bring in new customers, identifying expansion opportunities, and creating AI copilots to reduce admin work for sales.
4. Focus on the results, not the tasks
One of the most effective shifts IT professionals can make to go from order-taker to strategic advisor is changing how they communicate about their work. Instead of describing what they did, they should describe what it enabled.
Rimini Street’s Locandro saw the old task-based communication style repeatedly in his organization. “A lot of the reports that went to [the] business were on activities: how busy everybody was, or ‘we’ve upgraded this,’ or ‘we’ve delivered this,’” he said. “No one reported, ‘Here’s the value that was generated as a result of this task. Here is the outcome that has been delivered or able to be done as a result of this task.’”
The fix? Change from activity-based reporting to value and outcome-based reporting. Strip out technical jargon and acronyms.
“One of the most effective shifts is from describing activity to describing impact,” said Agiloft’s Ramos. “For instance, instead of saying, ‘We automated this process,’ say, ‘We freed up 200 hours a month for the sales team to focus on revenue-generating work.’ That shift from inputs to outcomes reframes IT’s role as an enabler of strategy tied to business objectives.”
Company leaders aren’t worried about the technical details, said Christopher Daden, CTO at hiring software provider Criteria Corp. They want to understand the purpose of the work and the impact it will have.
“IT professionals should frame every initiative in terms of the business problem it solves, the risk it reduces, or the opportunity it unlocks,” he said. “Language that focuses on outcomes, such as how a solution improves customer experience, accelerates revenue, or strengthens scalability, gives executives a clear line of sight to value.”
5. Look for small wins that add up
IT professionals don’t always need huge transformation projects to make a real difference. Sometimes the smartest move is to focus on a few quick wins that deliver immediate results.
“Small things can add up to a big thing,” Johnson said. “If you see things that are smaller, quick wins that can be a benefit to the organization that they’re partnering with, sometimes it’s a process that could be automated. If you do that for a number of the more and more steps of a process, then all of a sudden you’ve automated a good chunk of a process.”
Johnson warns against constantly searching for home runs. “Those are harder to find and they’re harder to deliver on,” he said. “Within 30 to 60 days, IT pros can build understanding around metrics and target states, then look for opportunities to help, even if they start small.”
That same small-wins approach also applies when IT teams look beyond processes and turn their attention to everyday tools and licenses that employees rely on.
Meg Donovan, chief people officer at Nexthink, which makes Digital Employee Experience management software, described how her IT team provides data showing which software tools are being most heavily utilized at the firm — and which aren’t. “We think we need this tool. Well, do we really need this tool? And do we need 2,500 licenses? Because it can show me that they’re only using 10,” she said.
6. Measure impact, not just completion
Too many IT pros roll out a project and move on without checking whether it actually worked. Strategic IT professionals ensure they follow through.
After implementing a solution, IT teams should measure the delta between the “before” and “after” states to determine actual impact, Johnson said. “I find many companies don’t do as much of that as they should. They’re really quick to find the problem and put the solution in play, but not take that final step, which is probably the most important: Did it make the impact you expected it to, and [are you] measuring that?”
When the impact falls short, strategic IT pros don’t walk away. They investigate why the expected results didn’t materialize and make corrections. Sometimes this means refining the solution. Other times it means finding a different approach entirely.
7. Use AI to free up strategic capacity
AI isn’t the star of IT’s strategic shift, but it can definitely boost the work. The real value comes from using AI to handle repetitive tasks so IT pros have more time for higher-value problems.
Many IT shops are deploying agentic-based solutions to handle level-one support, which frees up staffers’ time for projects the business would find to be of higher impact than answering support tickets, Johnson said.
Daden’s team at Criteria achieved striking results. “More than 80% of our production code is now authored by AI systems, which has increased engineering productivity by at least 30%,” he said. “By redesigning workflows and integrating intelligent automation, the team achieved more than 94% ticket deflection while maintaining and even improving candidate satisfaction.”
Response and resolution times improved, and the job itself evolved, with several team members moving into higher-value roles in other parts of the business.
“Those who remained shifted from transactional support to creating high-leverage assets that make our AI models more accurate and more context-aware,” Daden said. “They moved from answering tickets to improving the intelligence of the system itself, which is a fundamentally more strategic contribution.”
RightClick’s Young pointed to an example of how AI note-taking tools can make the IT team’s work easier and more strategic. These tools free IT pros from the distraction of capturing every detail during meetings. Instead of stopping to write things down, they can stay focused on the conversation and the decisions being made. That means they spend less time on administrative work and more time thinking, problem-solving, and planning next steps, the kind of work that actually moves the business forward.
“There is nothing worse than being in a flow and having to break that to take notes about the things that you are saying,” he said. “These AI note-taking tools enable meetings to flow at a normal pace and can give the team a summary of action items and talking points. They are worth their weight in gold.”7 steps to move from IT support to IT strategist – ComputerworldRead More