Building business smarts is like building a great sports team. With the right mix of talents, your IS staff can become more effective in IS and the business. Business smarts, which comprise a combination of skills and competencies, can be built in three ways: leveraging the smarts already present in IS, developing smarts across IS and importing people with business smarts into IS. Some roles in IS need more business smarts than others. Leverage your staff by putting those with business smarts in roles where they can do the most good; just having a few people in the right roles makes a huge difference. Develop business smarts in IS by using a mix of formal and informal approaches to achieve both classroom and experience-based learning. Bringing business people into IS rapidly builds IS's business smarts. But make sure you assess their fit carefully, plan their work and support them with technical know-how.