Several times a year, members of the IT department at Newcastle Building Society spend time learning how to do the jobs of their financial colleagues on the company’s front line.

The job-swap works both ways. Newcastle Building Society has a policy of recruiting financial staff and training them to take on IT roles. The aim is to create more rounded workers with an understanding of both business and technology.

Working outside the IT department can be enormously beneficial to IT professionals, says Colin Greaves, head of IT and operations at Newcastle Building Society. Greaves moved into IT later in his career, originally an engineer then a salesman.

‘Having broader skills definitely helps in my current role,’ he says. Engineering gave Greaves a structured, logical approach to problems, while sales taught him how to develop relationships, empathise with customers and make sure what you deliver meets customer expectations.

Many experts have begun recommending that chief information officers (CIOs) implement executive rotation programmes, whereby IT professionals spend up to six months at a time working in another part of the business entirely.

‘We definitely recommend it as best practice for IT directors,’ says John Mahoney, vice president at analyst Gartner. ‘It can make an enormous difference to individual performance and, in many cases, the performance of the overall business.’

There are a number of benefits to executive rotation from the CIO’s perspective. First and foremost, executive rotation is a powerful career development tool allowing IT executives to develop a better understanding of the constraints, priorities and pressures of the business.

Such knowledge can help someone make the leap from IT manager or director to a board-level CIO, says Phillip Everson, a partner with Deloitte Consulting. ‘As a CIO you need to understand technology, but you also need a wider knowledge of the business, and too many IT professionals focus on the technology,’ he says. ‘In that sense, executive rotation is a perfect way to develop the skills a future CIO needs.’

Executive rotation can also drive innovation in all areas of the business, says Ian Taylor, a vice president with Forrester Research’s Leadership Board.

‘Sending people out into the business means that they see for the first time how the technology is applied, and that perspective can be enormously helpful in coming up with new solutions,’ says Taylor. ‘In the same way, a business leader coming into IT can ask those dumb questions about a system or system requirements that make you look at it in a completely different way.’

Finally, sending IT professionals into the business can provide you with a powerful marketing tool, says Taylor – executive rotation will raise the profile of your department among other areas of the business, and gives IT staff an opportunity to build relationships with senior managers across the organisation.

If you are considering executive rotation, the advice from experts is to ensure that schemes are developed consistently, and have buy in from the whole business. ‘Done in an ad-hoc fashion, it will not create the same benefits,’ says Taylor.

Timing is a key factor – some rotated staff may not want to return to previous roles, and if you’ve rotated too many staff at the same time, it could seriously undermine performance.

A good rule of thumb is to try to rotate IT staff into roles where they will see the application of a technology they have worked on as an IT employee, says Everson. For example, rotating a back-office customer relationship manager to another back-office function, such as finance, would not be as valuable as rotating them to a customer-facing department, such as marketing or communications. ‘It’s about using the opportunity to round out skills, and build these hybrid leaders,’ he adds.

Executive rotation is a practical way to create the near-mythical hybrid manager, says Philip Graham, head of information services and technology at Blackpool, Fylde and Wyre Hospitals NHS Trust. ‘I worked in an information role before moving to IT, which was how I came to understand how admissions and discharges affected the organisation, and the budget,’ he says. ‘That insight is essential for the job I do now.’

But Graham suggests that many IT leaders would find it difficult to take part in such schemes. ‘I know I would benefit enormously from working in communications or the contact centre for a week, but in reality I would not be able to escape being hassled about my regular job,’ he says. ‘We are busy people and I’m not sure how easy it is to extract yourself from IT.’

Graham also worries that executive rotation could be seen as a way for the organisation to fix its IT staff, rather than as a way to develop skills across the organisation. ‘I can imagine a scenario where you send IT people to the business, and the management says great, they can manage projects better, now our IT projects will not fail,’ he says. ‘I would worry it would become my responsibility to make sure all the benefits of technology are realised, rather than business leaders sharing that responsibility.’

Departments could also suffer from spending several weeks without some of their best performers. But as a CIO, your priority is the performance of the whole organisation, says Mahoney. ‘And if you’re also getting people in from outside IT, you stand to gain as much as you could lose.’

Still not convinced? ‘Look around at the CIOs of the world’s top 500 companies,’ says Mahoney. ‘Today, maybe 50 per cent of them have not come from an IT career, and that is only going to increase. If your team want to make it into the top job, then rotation really needs to happen.’

Case study, Betfair: www.computingbusiness.co.uk/2172807