The Impact of Core Competencies of IT Professionals on Business Success in Malaysia

The purpose of this research is to examine the impact of core competencies (Business Knowledge, Market Awareness, Leadership and Entrepreneurship) of IT professionals on business success. The research includes review of key concepts, theories and existing empirical research to outline key competencies that creates impact to business success. This research adopts positivism paradigm with deductive approach using explanatory research design. The research also adopted non-probability sampling focusing IT middle management in Malaysia group from multiple sectors with a sample size of 147 to examine the impact of defined competency on business success. The research findings outline Business Knowledge and Market Awareness as the most appropriate and have significant core competencies for IT professional to achieve business success. Overall research with the support of literature study, existing published empirical research using underlining theories and data analysis of the research evidently prove Business Knowledge and Market Awareness competency should be focused in the Malaysian IT context. Conversely Leadership and Entrepreneurship competency derives low significant impact against business success whereby researcher has justified the cultural and racial differences are one of the reasons of the negative correlation using relevant studies in Malaysian context. Researcher also suggested Leadership and Entrepreneurship requires awareness in Malaysia to address the globalization in future. This research finding contributes Malaysian organization to address the gaps and fuel up IT department competency model to increase IT productivity which relatively increases overall business productivity to promptly address aggressive business competition.