What are the new key skills for IT
BPMG.org points to an article on SearchCIO.com that talks about the rise of relationship management skills over technical skills in IT organizations. This is driven by the automation and outsourcing of IT capabilities. The IT employee of the near future will be more likely to be handing customer service requests and managing vendor relationships than plugging in hardware, installing or configuring software, or writing code.
“Morello said IT organizations will become increasingly automated and outsourced. As a result, IT employees will be asked to fill multiple roles, rather than just focus on a single job. And one of their most important roles will be managing "points of interface" with other parts of the business. “
“IT employees will need to speak the same language as business stakeholders. This means less demand for specialists (IT employees with a deep understanding of specific technology) and generalists (IT employees who have a broad set of relatively shallow technology skills). IT will still need technical skills, but the most valuable technical employees will know how they can apply those skills to different situations in different parts of the business.“
So project management, collaboration, and customer service will be the key capabilities of IT. And new capabilities to create a common business framework to focus and align a distributed organization will be necessary. How many of your key employees are being hired or developed with these skills in mind? What framework are you putting in place today to create a common understanding of what the business actually does?