Article: IT careers you never thought of
Here’s an interesting article from Computerworld that I read today about the “future” of IT in major organizations. I found it extremely relevant to the discussions in my IT department recently, especially how to interact with our internal business partners.
This article has mostly to do with how job titles are changing in the IT world but they are doing so to reflect the changing way IT is used in other large-scale businesses. This is not a “dot com” thing. This is a real world industry change being done by multi-billion dollar companies - results of which can easily be seen at dice.com and monster.com.
Key quotes:
“Key factors driving the evolution of IT job titles and roles include the commoditization of technology, plus an ever-growing base of new workers who are technologically savvy and quite accustomed to having technology play a background role in just about everything they do.” -Jonathan Thatcher, director of business integration for the Chicago-based Computing Technology Industry Association
“IT is no longer a subset specialty. IT is integrated into whatever work you’re trying to get done,” -Patti Dodgen, vice president at Mosaica Partners LLC
“The IT department is being disintermediated, but in a good way. It is being pushed farther up the food chain,” says Kamud Kalia, CIO at Toronto-based Direct Energy, an $8 billion integrated energy services company. “A lot of stuff IT would have done, they no longer need to do. The problems have been fixed or the technology has been commoditized.”
“At Direct Energy, job titles — especially titles in the 350-person IT organization — are purposely kept vague. “We keep the titles generic, and people can apply descriptive labels to what they do,” says Kalia. “I want them to think of themselves as people who work for this company, not people who work for this company’s IT department,”
“IT will focus more on analysis and be more involved in the early life-cycle tasks [of developing products and services] and less on technology delivery. IT will focus more on simulation, content and information architecture,” The bottom line: “Moving away from technology management doesn’t take IT out of the picture. It changes what IT does.” -Anthony Hill, CIO at Golden Gate University
The biggest take away I had from this article is the fact that finally businesses are seeing past the “IT as order taker” role of the past. I once sat down here with an end-user to do some field work on her business processes and how they could be optimized. When she found out I was in the IT department, she wanted me to replace her mouse as aparently it wasn’t working well. This type of huge gulf in understanding what an IT department is all about is all too common in many businesses and it can be really tiring. I’ve found it to be a constant uphill struggle, one where I repeat over and over what value an IT department who is a partner can bring to a company. And frankly, it sometimes has limited success. I’ve used the analogy of “It’s like trying to explain the wiring of a 747 when the person I’m explaining it to has yet to see fire.” It makes me wonder if companies or groups who are so far behind the curve will ever be able to catch up?
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