RSSIs it time to look to business users as IT staff?
So when I talked about the importance of retention the other day, I didn’t really take a look at what skillsets are most valuable to hold on to. Retention, in an environment where IT is projected to continue to shed jobs (Hackett estimates that 3.6 million backoffice jobs will be eliminated by 2014, extending the IT productivity streak that finally emerged in the shambles of the dot-com implosion) overall, is mostly about keeping experience on board. Technical skills, in that environment, will continue to be an available surplus from which CIOs can shop as needed. But as a facet of those trends that are driving the job losses, aren’t technical skills themselves increasingly unimportant?
Forrester’s Mark Cecere has a short post up covering the shifting skill sets supporting IT, noting that recent moves toward social-based, Enterprise 2.0, and cloud-based systems require different skills than more traditional IT systems. What Cecere doesn’t note is that many of these specific skills aren’t really technology skills at all, but business skills.
IT staff with business skills are rare, and will probably remain rare; the crossovers are few and many of the paths that lead to IT skills expertise do not encourage the simultaneous development of business skills like communications, accounting, coordination, and public speaking. So; is it time to start looking to the business side of the house for IT job candidates, and expecting to have to train them on the technical aspects in exchange for the ready-made business skills? Or is it still easier to find someone with technical chops and send them to communication seminars until they can communicate with users using plain English?
From back in the mists of time, I seem to remember a quotation by the founders of one of the first financial software applications that basically stated;
It is easier to teach an accountant programming, than a a programmer accounting.
Ithink that in many cases – this answer will remain the same
Regards
Thanks, Elliot. I’ve heard that old saw, and lived by it for many years. I guess that is the heart of the question I am asking: is it genuinely still true? Or has “programming”, at least in the sense we see it happening as an amalgamation of mash-ups, blog widget assembly, and other non-technical process automation, become sufficiently easy that even accountants can do it?
I suppose the problem comes with the term “programming.” It still means hacking around in C++ (or perhaps even Java if you’re feeling liberal) to most people familiar with the intricacies of coding. But isn’t it true that functional applications that once required C++ to execute can now be slapped together by someone with a Squarespace account and a boxful of drag and drop widgets? I’m not sure programming is everything it used to be.