Here is a brief excerpt from a transcript of an interview of James Kaplan for the McKinsey Quarterly, published by McKinsey & Company. To read the complete transcript, listen to the podcast, check out other resources, learn more about the firm, obtain subscription information, and register to receive email alerts, please click here.

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There’s no silver bullet, but success requires being able to identify technologies, understand their implications, and deploy them in an effective, structured way in your organization.

Successful business technologists need more than pure technical skill: they must know how to solve strategic and operational problems in an integrated way, across multiple technology domains. In this episode of the McKinsey Podcast, principal James Kaplan talks with McKinsey’s Luke Collins about the skills companies are seeking from business technologists and how to acquire them, expanding on the themes identified in his article “Ten books to make you a better business technologist.” An edited transcript of their conversation follows.

Collins: Welcome to this episode of the McKinsey Podcast. I’m Luke Collins, an editor with McKinsey Publishing. Today I’m speaking with James Kaplan, a partner in the New York office, about business technology and, more specifically, the skills required to be a business technologist. Last year, James was the author of one of our most popular articles of 2015 on McKinsey.com, “Ten books to make you a better business technologist.” Good morning, James, welcome to the McKinsey Podcast.

Kaplan: Good morning. Glad to be here.

Collins: Let’s talk about not just the article, but what inspired you to write it?

Kaplan: Last year I wrote a book, Beyond Cybersecurity: Protecting Your Digital Business. That was extraordinarily rewarding, but also an exhausting process. I sometimes point out that it consumed my Sunday mornings from 5 AM to 9 AM for about six months.

Given how much I put into it, I really started to think about what I wanted others to get out of it, which in turn caused me to think a little bit about the books I had read over the years, which impacted how I think about business technology, and which, I like to think, made me a better business technologist.

Collins: That’s an interesting term. Tell me exactly how you define a business technologist?

Kaplan: I try to define it relatively simply, which is, it’s an executive or a manager who’s responsible for making sure an enterprise gets the most value from its investments in business technology. It includes not only the CIO and all the CIO’s reports who may be working on issues of technology strategy, or in technology delivery, but also many people in business units, or business functions, who are charged with thinking about what technology investments will create the most business value.

Collins: It’s not a title you’re necessarily going to find on someone’s business card, “I’m a business technologist.” But it’s a skill set that infuses a whole bunch of different roles within the organization?

Kaplan: You find all sorts of things on business cards these days. I won’t comment determinatively on whether it shows up in someone’s title or not. It very much embraces a range of disciplines. You know, operational disciplines, engineering disciplines, IT architecture disciplines, business-strategy disciplines, management, and talent-development disciplines.

That’s one of the interesting ways that the role is evolving in recent years. We’ve spent a lot of time talking with senior executives, inside and outside of technology functions, about what type of people they need to help their companies get the most from business-technology investments.

The traditional skills of technical and operational sophistication continue to be as important as understanding business strategy, communicating effectively, being able to perform economic analysis, being able to drive innovation are increasingly important as well.

Collins: You talk about that evolution, and I’m guessing that would necessarily mean some skill gaps have emerged, because I’m guessing that initially people might have been very strong technically, but now they’re required to have a whole bunch of skills that previously they weren’t—which gets to some of the books you recommended in your article.

Kaplan: We’re seeing that skill gap as a pressing problem at many companies. A number of senior executives have told us that they’re worried that traditional IT talent-management models make it harder to develop the types of senior business technologist they require.

Many CIOs and CTOs have told us, “We hire storage guys, and then we promote them for being more and more sophisticated storage experts. We hire application developers, and we promote them, according to their technical skill and application development.”

That does not facilitate or foster the type of integrative, cross-cutting business-technology problem solving that’s required to address the most sophisticated challenges around applying new types of technologies, about addressing new types of business problems, about creating delivery models to creating innovative delivery models to capture opportunities as they arise in the marketplace.

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Here is a direct link to the complete podcast, including transcript.

James Kaplan is a principal in McKinsey’s New York office. Luke Collins is a member of McKinsey Publishing and is based in the Stamford office.