Being a Bridge Between IT and Business

Kris Scott (MSIT ‘20) was already leading a team of engineers and developers when he decided to pursue a graduate degree in information technology (IT). As director of IT development at Preferred Hotels & Resorts, Scott enjoyed his work, but he wanted to do more than solve problems. 

He wanted to make a difference.    

“Even though my teams and I were doing some very fun and impressive technical things, they were mostly behind the scenes,” Scott said. “I wanted to work for a more technical company, where what I did was actually contributing to the purpose of the company.”

Scott began searching for a part-time program that would help him reach his goals without pausing his career or compromising on educational quality. He attended dozens of events at Chicago-area universities armed with a bevy of questions. Only Northwestern Engineering's Master of Science in Information Technology (MSIT) checked all his boxes.

During his time in MSIT, Scott cultivated his confidence in business strategy while strengthening his technical acumen, preparing him to be a more well-rounded IT leader. He understood business operations and communication and computer systems while still translating complex technical ideas in a way that made him comfortable facilitating conversations with upper management.  

"The variety of skills you have to master throughout MSIT really prepares you for IT management roles," Scott said. "One day you're performing a statistical analysis, the next you're presenting the impact of it to the executives. You're figuring out the resource requirements for a new system, then putting together the budget for it."

Scott also found tremendous value in Agile IT Leadership, a course taught by Lowell Lindstrom that teaches the importance of scrum meetings and agile project management while preparing IT professionals to lead across organizations in order to adapt to rapidly changing marketplaces. Inspired by the course and mentored by Lindstrom, Scott earned his scrum master certification, which boosted his resume and was immediately applicable to his daily work. Today, he trains his colleagues on how to use the scrum framework and still references lessons from Lindstrom’s course.

“It is really easy to run scrum badly, which I think most places sadly are,” he said. “Lindstrom did a great job of explaining why that is and how to avoid it.”

Scott’s MSIT degree accomplished exactly what he hoped it would: signal his business mindset and attract the interest of local tech-centric companies and recruiters.

He took a job after graduation as senior manager of software engineering at Cision, a global provider of earned media software and services. In October 2021, a recruiter on LinkedIn noticed Scott's MSIT degree and approached him about working as manager of engineering at the Chicago-based, real-time video streaming service Phenix RTS, a company trusted by Fortune 500 companies like Verizon, Disney, and ABC.  

Scott saw an opportunity to bridge the gap between business and tech and jumped at the opportunity.  

"So many technical projects crash and burn in spectacular fashion just because the business people and tech people aren't on the same page," he said. "They think they're speaking the same language, but they just aren't. Being inside one of those projects is not fun. It's not fun when it starts, it's not fun while you're working on it, and it's really not fun when it fails.  

"Being able to bridge that divide allows projects to start well, go well, and end well, which means me, my engineering teams, and the businesses we're working for get to have a lot more fun at work. I enjoy being able to create that kind of environment for people, not to mention myself."