Every week, I share the most interesting and useful tech articles that I’ve found over the past week. This week’s top articles focus on the hottest IT jobs, how to bridge the Business/IT communication gap, and more. I hope you find them useful:

IT Cause And Effect: Applications Are Money
While CIOs get inundated with experts telling them which trends to watch and which priorities deserve their attention, it really all boils down to one area: Application development. How quickly can your development team create business solutions? Fix that issue, and many other problems will instantly fix themselves.

10 hottest IT jobs: Developers, developers, developers
As the push towards mobile increases in the enterprise, and business apps steadily move to the web, developers have become a hot commodity. Now, what happens if your company can’t afford to bring in new talent? Are you stuck with outdated features and applications? That’s one of the issues covered in this recent paper, which outlines 8 problems facing CIOs right now, and one way to fix them all of them.

4 Ways to Bridge the Communication Gap Between IT and Business
In a follow-up to “5 major IT/business alignment stumbling blocks,” Carlos Pardo of CaApex expands on perhaps the biggest stumbling block of all: Miscommunication. Most alignment issues boil down to a communication gap between the business and IT, and this article explains four ways to bridge that gap.

How to bring self-service BI to your small/mid-sized business
While self-service BI is a growing trend among large companies, the topic is rarely viewed through the lens of small to mid-sized businesses. It’s a shame too, as those are the companies who stand to gain the most from self-service BI.