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IT Careers in 2010 - Learn a business

Posted by Zonk on Fri Jul 14, 2006 08:58 PM
from the in-the-year-25-25 dept.
IT
feminazi writes "Business knowledge and domain specific skills are becoming more important to IT workers, according to Computerworld's special report on IT careers in 2010. The most sought-after corporate IT workers in 2010 may not have deep-seated technical skills at all. Traci A. Logan, vice president of information technology and vice provost for academic affairs at Bentley College in Waltham, Mass. says, 'That [business skill set] is going to be more important than the straight technical skills they know, because you're going to see a closer marriage between the business and IT.'"
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  • Yea! (Score:2, Insightful)

    by rbannon (512814)
    That's always been the case. Business skills, especially salesmanship is what's most important.
    • Sure, what's "most important" is being able to sell. Particularly when the corporate network was just cracked and you have to explain to the CEO why all the clients have been looking at "j00 b33n pwN3d" on your website all morning.

      Technical skills? Not so important.

      That's "sarcasm" for those of you unable to see it.

      Being a good salesman can get you in the door and on the project. But nothing will help if you don't have the tech skills to deliver.

      Particularly as more and more of the business is being put on
      • I think the point being made is that business/sales skills are more important for your career not for the business. As long as the technical skills are available to keep the tech going, sales etc. will put you at a higher level in the business than tech skills. I agree though, I would hate to be a good businessman trying to sell broken products, or products made on a broken production line.

        Business skills being more important doesn't make tech skills non-essential.

        • I think the point being made is that business/sales skills are more important for your career not for the business. As long as the technical skills are available to keep the tech going, sales etc. will put you at a higher level in the business than tech skills.

          The flaw in that approach is that it depends upon nothing going wrong that you cannot blame on someone else.

          Which is not to say that you won't get lucky and succeed with that approach. Just that it is a flawed approach.

          And that is the essence of "tech

          • Re:Anyone can pilot the ship in calm weather. (Score:4, Insightful)

            by rohan972 (880586) on Saturday July 15 2006, @01:38AM (#15723761)
            I think you missed this part of my post:
            Business skills being more important doesn't make tech skills non-essential.

            And that is the essence of "tech viewpoint" vs "business viewpoint".

            May I dare to suggest that you develop tech skills and business skills? I am not employed in management, and don't intend to be, but understanding some of the skills/viewpoints of management allows me to:
            1. Better understand the priorities of management (you know, those guys that sign the cheques?)

            2. Be more skilled at promoting my ideas to management (the stuff alot of workers find really difficult, but is really valuable to the company)

            3. Deal with customer issues more succesfully (for some reason our customers are more concerned with being profitable than with being assured by me that our product is within the ordered specification. This sometimes involves coming up with solutions that require some knowledge of business)
        • Depends on what you want for your career. Personally, I'd quit before taking a management job. So no, buisness skills are not necessary and do not help.

          • Re:Until push comes to shove. (Score:5, Insightful)

            by Ranger96 (452365) on Friday July 14 2006, @10:10PM (#15723181)
            It's not about taking a management job. In corporate IT, it's all about understanding the business you are supporting. If you are a great coder but have zero understanding or interest in the business processes your systems support, you are not near as valuable to the company as the average coder who can successfully translate business requirements into a technical implementation. Or, as is more likely, translate those business requirements into a comprehensive technical spec that can be handed off to the contractors performing the actual coding.

            Coding is skilled labor that the company prefers to acquire as needed on a contract basis. The 'professional' job is the business analyst, technical analyst, and architect.
              • I agree you with, and grandparent, except with one caveat; learning advertising helped me in my previous job of writing advertising delivery and reporting software. (No, it wasn't straight spamming, it was legit.)

                I'm still left wondering if that was worth it because I feel so dirty to be able to make marketing employees and managers drool when I 'talk the talk'. Probably an easier croud to please than most, but I do agree with you; learning what customers were looking for when they ran campaigns and contrac
      • But the tech skills are the most important.
        When you find a company that recognizes this and compensates the technical people accordingly, please let us all know.
        • When you find a company that recognizes this and compensates the technical people accordingly, please let us all know.

          Just ask the people working for Google. In fact, just look for any of the companies that the tech people are trying to get into.
        • Why search for a company? Start your own. You will be directly compensated on the value you produce; no layer(s) of management to blame for ciphoning off the fruits of your labor... Of course, some of those sales & biz skills will rapidly start to feel pretty important! :-)
    • A strong set of business and a strong set of technical skills combined is what will make you successful in my experience. Being able to deliver a strong product and keep customers, coworkers, investors, etc all happy isn't easy at all but it can really pay off.

  • Nothing new (Score:5, Insightful)

    by CastrTroy (595695) on Friday July 14 2006, @09:05PM (#15723001) Homepage
    This has always been true. This is why you can't just replace coders. Even though there's lots of coders out there, having someone who understands your business on a higher level will help you create a much better product. You can't just high someone who's been doing financial software for 10 years to go write a game. Maybe it would be nice if companies started realizing this, and didn't just bring in contractors to do everything, who have no idea about the business, or the business's real needs.

    • Flipside (Score:5, Informative)

      by mgkimsal2 (200677) on Friday July 14 2006, @09:15PM (#15723026) Homepage
      The flip side of contractors not knowing anything about a business is companies with internal software developers who don't know how to develop. I've been on both sides of the fence, and there's no simple answer to the issue of corporate software development. I can tell you that I've worked in some places where the existing software was put together so poorly that it was little more than a deck of cards waiting to fall. "But it addresses the business needs!" is a valid point, to be sure, but when small enhancement requests which should take a day start taking >1 week solely because the original software was put together so poorly, you've got bigger problems than whether someone understands the unique business needs or not. The first core business need is that the software needs to be available and known to be functioning properly - you need to have confidence in it. Without skilled developers with a track record of proven success, that trust is harder to come by.

      The best middle ground is to have hybrid people - people who have thought and can think from both sides of the aisle, so to speak. When contractors are brought in, if there's no one who can explain the business requirements at *any* level (and I've been in some places like that over the years), it's not the outside contractor's fault.
    • Ideally, the company wouldn't just bring in "generic" contractors, but would select firms (or groups within large contract houses) that specialize in that company's specific industry & market. Sure there's some learning curve to the specifics of that company, but that experience not only helps narrow the gap, but it brings insights of what others in the industry do and different points of view that a company insider may not have.

  • Hey, I got a question... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by hazah (807503) on Friday July 14 2006, @09:05PM (#15723002)
    Who will be solving the technical problems?
    • The businessmen with a technical background, thats who.

      • Re:Hey, I got a question... (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Umbral Blot (737704) on Friday July 14 2006, @09:12PM (#15723016) Homepage
        That's like assuming that business men with a mathematical background will prove that P = NP. It's not going to happen, because some problems are so hard that it requires a full time devotion to the subject in order to simply to understand them, and an exceptionally bright mind to make progress. Technical work is like this, it requires a full time devotion to stay on top of technology and to master it. Solutions created by people who think of themselves primarily as business men will be atrociously bad (even worse than normal), and businesses that rely on such people will quickly go under.

        • Re:Hey, I got a question... (Score:4, Insightful)

          by radtea (464814) on Friday July 14 2006, @11:06PM (#15723357)
          Technical work is like this, it requires a full time devotion to stay on top of technology and to master it. Solutions created by people who think of themselves primarily as business men will be atrociously bad (even worse than normal), and businesses that rely on such people will quickly go under.

          You are vastly over-rating the time and effort involved in running a business. If you are technically good, and have invested in acquiring a basic set of business skills, then running a business is no big deal if you're talking about a single person consultancy.

          The things you need:

          1) Basic accounting (and I mean VERY basic--my accountant does all the hard stuff. And besides, most of advanced accounting is learning ways to lie with numbers while still remaining a respected if not respectable member of the community. The least honest developer I know once voiced a desire to become an accountant, and I can well understand why.)

          2) Basic business law, especially contract law (lawyers are a lot more expensive than accountants, but the cost of failure is also higher. Tread carefully.)

          3) Presentation skills. Stay away from all the bullshit seminar stuff. Join your local community theatre group.

          4) Reputation. Every business contact you have, ever professional contact, is marketing. Every arm's length interaction you have is marketing for your future business. Businesses don't start in a vacuum and they are essentially based on relationships of trust based on reputation. Build yours carefully and it will be your greatest asset when you strike out on your own.

          It just isn't that hard to be in business for yourself. There is a certain level of complexity you have to deal with, and a lot of discipline required to deal with it (I update my books religiously ever Friday morning, for example--keeping on top of the paperwork is vital.) But 90% of my time is spent on purely technical work. I just get to keep 100% of the profit from that, instead of paying most of it to support an ignorant manager with a big ego.

          It took me five years to move from academia to being in busines for myself. Every career move I made within that time was aimed at getting me closer to the goal. I took jobs so I could learn particular business skills or get a closer look at how a small business is run. Anyone with a brain can do this, and acquire sufficient business skills to run their own show. It just isn't that hard.
    • I've never understood why business people, management, basically any non-technical position is considered the top part of the totem pole. Put 4 engineers together and they are going to make something really interesting that just may better this planet. Put 4 businessmen together and they'll probably come up with a new cover sheet for a 3 letter report.

  • Do they just make this up as they go? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by walterbyrd (182728) on Friday July 14 2006, @09:07PM (#15723003)
    Look at the job boards. Employers are looking for the right mixture of product specialized knowledge. Usually that want a combination of about six different products, and it's different for every position: one may want cisco, solaris, citrix, windows, oracle, veritas. The next may want: windows, redhat, ms-sql server, perl, php, html, css. And so on.

    I always get the idea that the "authorities" who right these articles don't have a clue about the real world.

  • So... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Duhavid (677874) on Friday July 14 2006, @09:07PM (#15723006)
    You mean that business will stop treating IT
    like janitorial staff? Start acting on the ideas
    that IT brings to the table?
    • No, it doesn't work like that.

      The business requires the support of IT to push their *business objectives*. Its nothing to do with technology.

      So many IT people fail to see that the reason their is an IT department is to support the needs of the business.

      IT is just a vehicle to delivering faster, and more effective business drivers.
      • I'm hopeless and should quit IT. When I read your last sentence ...

        IT is just a vehicle to delivering faster, and more effective business drivers.

        I visualized IT as a minivan delivering the likes of Tony Stewart, Jeff Gordon, Little E, etc. to their retirement assignments: Driving business executives around.

        It's bedtime kiddies.

      • Re:So... (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Duhavid (677874)
        You are exactly right, except I would say that
        it is business that fails to see that the reason
        for the IT department is to support the needs
        of the business. My admittedly anecdotal view
        is that most "business" types just expect IT
        to keep the machines running, and dont come to
        IT and say "we want to do 'X'" or "can we do
        'Y' more efficiently", or "what can we do next
        to improve how IT can support the business".
        In fact, advice from IT seems to be rejected
        with a "it will cost too much".
    • Bwahahahahahahahaha

      *gasp*

      *wheeze*

      ahahahahahahaha

      *choke*

      Thanks, I needed a laugh!

  • BS Bingo Anyone? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by rowama (907743) on Friday July 14 2006, @09:08PM (#15723007)
    Sorry, but I bingo'd before page 3 and had to stop reading.

    Bottom line is diversify your portfolio of skills. Pick one or more of the math, engineering, financial, public speaking, etc. skills and you will have a better chance in the future.

  • Not consistant with my observations (Score:5, Insightful)

    by amightywind (691887) on Friday July 14 2006, @09:13PM (#15723021) Journal
    IT and business unit employees will work more closely together -- and in some cases, interchangeably.

    This runs completely counter to the outsourcing and cost focus of todays businesses. Indeed even people hired "permanantly" are usually seen as expendable at the end of major projects. These are the ones with the most domain knowledge. Business types tend to be "visionaries" and whip crackers. Rarely do the excel at requirements or planning. I have worked for major corporations since 1990 and I see the gulf between management and software professionals growing widerthan ever with the increasing sophistication of tools and the increasing complexity of projects. Engineering culture has all but disappeared.

  • 2010? Bad year to choose. (Score:3, Funny)

    by krell (896769) on Friday July 14 2006, @09:18PM (#15723035) Journal
    Can't get the idea of Roy Scheider using an Apple //GS (the true technology of the future!) out of my head, along with the damn spinning sand-covered pacman spaceship. Arthur C. Clarke surely would have been rolling in his grave over THAT movie if the damn old coot had died long ago like the other scifi grand masters.

  • How many? (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 14 2006, @09:22PM (#15723045)
    Geez - these IT career planning stories are getting tiresome.

    You want to make money? Quit beating around the bush and
    just go to law school!
    • Amusingly enough, I finished my law degree and went into IT... and I'm still not rich. You may be onto something! On the other hand, "do what you love" has definite merits.

  • A nation of managers (Score:3, Insightful)

    by 0racle (667029) on Friday July 14 2006, @09:25PM (#15723058)
    ... where all the actual work is done by immigrants or off-shored because no one local knows how to do it anymore.
    • Hear Hear!

      I'm the IT manager for a small advertising company. I was hired as the company was just starting, and built a small network of Macs and PCs. As I was being hired, we also got an outsourced IT company. I'm a person that tends to do things himself, and then ask for help only after I have given it my best shot... otherwise, how the fuck do I learn anything?

      However, we are a company of managers, and I find that I get praised for doing a good job when I call the outsourced company to deal with an is

  • Learn a business? (Score:3, Funny)

    by TrappedByMyself (861094) on Friday July 14 2006, @09:27PM (#15723063)
    What the hell does that mean?

    I think we need to start with: "Learn how to communicate"

  • Offshore (Score:4, Interesting)

    by jours (663228) on Friday July 14 2006, @09:28PM (#15723066)
    Anyone who's worked with offshore resources knows this is exaclty true. A couple of years ago I was contracted at a large 401k company when they brought in massive amounts of Indian labor. They were bright, spoke English well, and did passable work...but they didn't know a thing about retirement accounts or any other American financial practices. I was far, far more valuable working with them as a business analyst then I was as a coder. Yeah, those of us Americans who are left in IT in 2010 are going to have to know the businesses very well.

  • IT != R&D any more. IT = Production (Score:3, Interesting)

    by tyrr (306852) on Friday July 14 2006, @09:37PM (#15723092)
    There was a time when IT was a part of R&D and it's gone. A natural cycle of every technology kicks in. During emerging stages a technology is a research. After a technology comes out of the woodwork and mass-adoption starts, a technology becomes a production.
    There is no magic in computer development any more. Adoption and demand are so high, people literally code for food. Take a look at your ten year old coding his website and think how many people could do that fifteen years ago.
    The fact that there are so many companies nowadays in 3rd world counties (no offence meant) who act as major players in outsourcing means we are far beyond research and development stage in IT.
    We did not need business people to manage IT when it was R&D simply because any R&D requires tremendous dedication and you can't do both research and business.
    A production can and has to be managed. Business skills mean more than research capabilities in production. Why approach the problem with your mind if you can approach it with your pocket book and do not pay an arm and a lag?
    I'm not worried a single bit about IT researchers. They are very bright, hard working and will be able to adapt. One year in an MBA programs is all they need.

  • Purely management-esque article (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Servo (9177) <dstringfNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Friday July 14 2006, @09:38PM (#15723095) Journal
    The person writing the article is clearly seeing this from a managerial point of view, and not as someone who actually understands the technical side of IT. What I read between the lines was that the expectation is that FTE's will be more business and vendor/project management oriented while the pure IT skills will be contractors or PS engagements with vendors.

    As someone who's seen this first hand, I don't think the author has hit the mark at all. Instead of shifting high level responsibility on day to day IT folk, they would be better to invest in key architects and engineers who can bring all of the existing reponsibilities together. These positions require leadership and long term planning/project management. These types of folks will replace the VP of IT types that write these articles, not the specialized IT skillsets that we have today.
  • From TFA:

    The most sought-after corporate IT workers in 2010 may be those with no deep-seated technical skills at all. The nuts-and-bolts programming and easy-to-document support jobs will have all gone to third-party providers in the U.S. or abroad. Instead, IT departments will be populated with "versatilists" -- those with a technology background who also know the business sector inside and out, can architect and carry out IT plans that will add business value, and can cultivate relationships both inside a

    • There are job titles for the jack-of-all-trades type...Professional Services, Consultant, System Integrator, and informal titles such as guru, subject matter expert, generalist, visionary. These people tend to know much about many things, and know how to research what they don't know. They aren't afraid to say they don't know something, and to roll up their sleeves and get dirty reconfiguring the guts of machinery.

      It's been my experience that there is a need for someone like that, and they get paid enough

  • I am sick and tired of this... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by gweihir (88907) on Friday July 14 2006, @09:55PM (#15723143)
    ...bullshit I keep hearing for over a decade now. Ths most sought after people will still be those that understand what they are doing. I am really fed up with management types tryinf to convince the world, that IT people are actually sort-of failed managers. The real reason is that the managers have an inferiority comples, since they do know that they can never, ever, under any circumstances replace an IT specialist. Too much air, greed and selfishness in their heads. On the other hand many managers are so bad at their job, that most IT people would do at least as well.

      • I have a technical background that includes Windows Desktop and Server, Routers (WAN and Layer 3), hardware including cabling, ability to interface with vendors and deal with complex issues and get them resolved in short order.

        You and everybody else.

        The first half of this sentence includes facts. The second half includes valuations. Pretty much any admin has experience with MS-Windows (desktop and server), and most have dealt with their share of routers and L3 switches. I'd wager most of those have also had
  • explosion in job market for certain hardcore tech skills: storage/SAN; disaster recovery including replication, failover clustering, archival and backup; security including networking and system hardening and vpn/remote access; consolidation and virtualization with vmware and now I'm getting calls for xen and other Linux vm; network engineering.

  • Look whose talking (Score:5, Insightful)

    by DoofusOfDeath (636671) on Friday July 14 2006, @10:16PM (#15723192)
    Bentley is a business school. This is basically them saying, "Wahhhh... we wish IT people know our line of business... wahhhhh...."

    Duh, or COURSE they wish IT people knew their line of business. So why don't we start looking at the courses they'd like CS majors to NOT take in order to make time for the business courses. Databases? Obvious nope. Programming languages or operating systems? Not a great idea if you want them to pick up new platforms / languages quickly. Algorithms? Don't hire that person to a project where you need advanced warning that something won't scale well. Computer graphics? OK, maybe that one is rarely necessary, but that's just one course.

    My point is whether or not the author knows it, they're asking to eat their cake and (still) have it too. They want someone to study the line of business more, but ignore the dumbing-down effect that has on their IT skills. Taken to that extreme, you may as well just offer a few extra "IT" courses within the business department, and let those people be your company's IT staff. Which in most cases is moronic for well-known reasons.
    • The first line of the first FA:
      The most sought-after corporate IT workers in 2010 may be those with no deep-seated technical skills at all.

      I don't know about you, but that's a huge warning to me.
      Instead, IT departments will be populated with "versatilists" -- those with a technology background who also know the business sector inside and out, can architect and carry out IT plans that will add business value, and can cultivate relationships both inside and outside the company.

      So, the "most sought-after" IT worker will be one who can ... "cultivate relationships" with "outside" people who do have the "deep-seated technical skills".

      Why? Because ...
      The nuts-and-bolts programming and easy-to-document support jobs will have all gone to third-party providers in the U.S. or abroad.

      Translation:
      2010 management will demand IT staff who can understand the business and technology sufficiently to manage the out-sourced projects.

      Said out-sourced projects will be the actual writing of the software that supports the company and the end-user support of the remaining company employees who use the software that was written by other people outside the company.

      Welcome to the "Titanic" business model.

      I'm sure you can all imagine the fun that that will be. With the out-sourced support staff blaming the out-sourced programmers and the out-sourced programmers blaming the support staff ... while your users struggle to just get their work done.

  • stop and think about it (Score:4, Insightful)

    by moochfish (822730) on Friday July 14 2006, @10:30PM (#15723227)
    Wait, so where do these IT people get all these conglamoration of skills? Seems like you can't do it without several years of working history. If anything, that tells me the industry will start to heavily focus on internal training to ensure new and old IT staff can fill this new gap.

    You aren't born with business/writing/accounting know-how, nor with IT knowledge. People already spend a lifetime trying to be an expert in their respective fields. You can't be an expert in every field, especially those that require distinctly different skills.

  • Not surprising... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Refried Beans (70083) on Friday July 14 2006, @11:01PM (#15723340) Homepage
    What else did you expect to hear out of a business school?

  • Make sh*t work (Score:5, Insightful)

    by MrNougat (927651) <{ckratsch} {at} {gmail.com}> on Friday July 14 2006, @11:10PM (#15723366)
    The IT people who are always going to be in demand are those who make sh*t work - whether those are managers pulling projects together under time/budget, or coders/networking/systems people who fix broken stuff and build the right new environments.

    Yes, you'd damn well better have the needs of the business in mind in any position. But if Company A decides they're going to have manager types who don't have IT skills doing skilled IT work, they're going to find out real quick that sh*t don't work and there's no one around who can fix it.

  • Let's cut to the chase... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by tyrione (134248) on Friday July 14 2006, @11:26PM (#15723437) Homepage
    We want to hire one person not only to do the tech skills of four but we now want you to be our point of sale and make it all happen. We'll pay you for the talents of 1.5 employees while we keep costs down by 3.5 employees.

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