Creative Innovators
IT has
spent the last 40 or some odd years automating business processes.
Now it is being called upon to step forward
and be a leader in business process innovation.
As studies show, the demand for IT people who are innovative
will only keep increasing. This requires specialists who
have both the technical skill and the creative vision to
create
new products and capabilities. In conjunction with this trend,
companies are also looking for IT workers who possess relationship
management and project management skills.
When researchers
at the Society of Information Management (SIM), asked IT
leaders in a 2005 survey which skills they
felt might
disappear from their departments by 2008, the top ranked
responses were: programming (with the exception of Java,
.Net and Linux),
operations, and desktop help.
Reasons for the decline in demand of these skills is that
they are likely to become either obsolete, automated or
outsourced. Application engineers,
systems engineers and network analysts,
on the other hand, are the areas where employment in IT has
made the biggest gains since 2000.
The same survey also revealed that the top skills IT leaders
believe to be the most important to keep “in-house” are
those related to project management and business processes.
The top skills in demand include: business process reengineering,
user relations management, negotiation, change management,
communication and managing expectations. Only two technical
skills (systems analysis and systems design) made the top
15 skills list.
.Tacit Knowledge
The above skills are defined by economists as being tacit
work, meaning that they require the ability to “analyze
information, grapple with ambiguity and solve problems, often
based on experience,” writes Christopher Koch in a
recent article for CIO Magazine.
According to consulting agency McKinsey, tacit jobs have
been growing three times faster than employment in the entire
national US economy.
Tacit knowledge can be defined simply as “personal
knowledge,” as it is what is intuitively learned through
the experience of doing a task over a long period of time.
The technician who can tell the health of a machine from
the hum it generates is an example of tacit knowledge at
work. Hard to extrapolate, tacit knowledge cannot be easily
reduced to simple rules or codes. Because it resides in people’s
minds, it is lost when employees leave an organization.
The shift to tacit work means that automation could disappear,
with more pressure being placed on inventors to now make
technology think, rather than automate.
People working in IT have the advantage on this as they can
envision what business people often can’t. Through
the combination of their skills and understanding of technological
processes (i.e. Broadband connectivity, the Internet, software
and gadgets like cell phones and PDA’s), IT workers
are the most likely candidates to design our new processes
and capabilities. But to effectively do this, IT departments
must now adapt to understanding how the business side of
things work.
“The discussion that business wants to have today is: How
are you going to partner with me to win in the marketplace?” says
Shaygan Kheradpir, CIO of telecommunications company, Verizon. “They
see that the world is full of IT innovations that the customer
never asked for. When did a customer ever ask for the iPod
or Google? Yet once they get them, they can’t live
without them.” (Source:
CIO Magazine)
A few schools in the US are responding to the demands set
by these new trends by offering programs that combine both
IT and business curricula. Certainly, being a programmer,
systems engineer, innovator and project manager
is not a career path that comes naturally for many people.
What
is
likely to occur more frequently is that a few key, in-house
employees will be assigned to a particular project from
beginning to end, with other personnel being employed as
they are needed
based upon their competencies.
Even still, IT Departments will be looking for people that
they may have trouble trying to find. “I think the
universities and colleges will not produce enough people
to keep up with the demand, and the same goes for Europe,” says
Andy Maier, CIO of Zurich in North America. Maier’s
point echoes the concerns of many CIO's as they begin
the search for their next generation IT.
Do you have a comment or feedback on
this article? Email
us and let us know what you think.
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