IT Careers in 2010 - Learn a business

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.'"

Yea!

That's always been the case. Business skills, especially salesmanship is what's most important.

Re:Anyone can pilot the ship in calm weather.

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)

Re:Until push comes to shove.

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.

Nothing new

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

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.

Hey, I got a question...

Who will be solving the technical problems?

Re:Hey, I got a question...

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...

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.

Do they just make this up as they go?

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...

You mean that business will stop treating IT
like janitorial staff? Start acting on the ideas
that IT brings to the table?

BS Bingo Anyone?

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

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.

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?

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!

A nation of managers

... where all the actual work is done by immigrants or off-shored because no one local knows how to do it anymore.

Learn a business?

What the hell does that mean?

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

Offshore

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

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

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.

Rather than become a jack of all trades

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 and outside the company.

I think the article is anticipating administrating software and software systems will become easier over time. Probably.

But I would rather trade to something more technical, but close to CompSci, like Electrical Engineering, if I were in school. Or get more into Computer Science, but really get into the math aspect. Engineers and their types will always be needed.

I know several MBA graduates that are having problems getting jobs right now for over $12.00 an hour because of the glut (in their area) and I don't believe becoming a jack-of-all-trades (versatile as the argument puts it) will lead to anything but lower wayes.

Knowing the business, as the article says, should be good for anyone in any position - if not to help the business, then just to see how stable your position is in it.

Pointy haired IT workers?

to go with the pointy haired boss?

TRANSLATION

TRANSLATION TO IT WORKERS:

I can't UNDERSTAND our H1B slaves.

I need a middleman who'll be willing to work for entry-level IT wages, but do essentially all my management work for me, keeping my servants on task and getting the job done, meanwhile able to speak to me in plain MidWestern English and occasionally pick up my dry-cleaning.

That will be all.

I am sick and tired of this...

...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.

if you want to stay hardcore tech, what's hot is

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

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 author is happy with "dumbing down".

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.

So the question remains . . . . .

Which bozo post-dated the article by 3 days then released it on the net?? Tomorrow's "Versatilest" or today's "regular" manager?

Maybe I Haven't Been Around Long Enough, But...

I've only worked in corporate America for 3 years now, but I see a couple trends: 1. There are 3 basic types of IT: - Production Support - the folks who run the systems from a day to day standpoint - Admins - the folks who keep the systems running on a slightly longer time frame than day to day - Developers - ie programmers who write the code to do the above two functions Prod support and admin functions can be outsourced relatively easily. Dev functions often require a good deal of business knowledge. What pisses me off are the developers who on the one hand complain about management's shortcomings, yet when backed into a corner play the whole 'well, that's not what the spec says' card. Lame if you ask me. You may be intelligent, but intelligence is rarely the limiting factor in corporate america (by, 'rarely' i mean never. if you think otherwise, typically that implies you are probably arrogant.)

stop and think about it

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.

And yet . . . .

Intel just canned 1000 MANAGERS and not 1000 IT people?

Not surprising...

What else did you expect to hear out of a business school?

Make sh*t work

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...

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.

If I know the business, why bother to work in IT?

I've worked for over 15 years in IT. I've seen in more and more cases that programmers are being put futher and further from the business side of anything. Most jobs I've worked introduced the concept of a busness analyst.

The problem with the business analysts I've encountered is that they know neither the business nor technical aspects of IT. They're hired because of people skills which doesn't help get the request from the customer to the programmer. Too often they lack even simple logic skills.

This puts the programmer in a position of knowing their system and being removed from the busniess.

Why would I want to spend time learning a business only to be placed in an area where that knowledge will likely go stale? If I were in the finance dept., why move to IT especially when it's viewed as a cost center in most companies and thus worthy of budget cuts and outsourcing.

I guess business people are tired of the responsibility of knowing their business and having to actually think through the business rules they want IT to implement.

Knowledge engineering

Knowledge engineering. knowing a knowledge domain well coupled with technical IT skills, has always been in demand. Architecting a good enterprise business database requires good knowledge of the business plus a good database skill set.

Pure coding is being shipped elsewhere, methinks.

My Feedback to them (you may not care (:)

As someone who has to actually envision these technical system which you describe in your article, I feel completely misrepresented. These people will simply not be able to function as an IT department since, as it states, they do not have IT "roots".

There is a reason why people go to school for programming, networking, graphic arts, and various other subsets of these general types of programs. These subjects are _hard_. They require a lot of time and dedication. If such time is not put into studying various aspects of technology, then quite frankly, the designs will be horribly unmaintainable, useless, and obsolete.

The point is, experienced developers, system designers, and graphic artists, still struggle to create even a workable system. This is why good systems drive up costs so much. There is _no_ blanket solution to this, other than realizing that it will take programmers & analysts to design and implement these things. To delegate this task to someone without even the basic knowledge of complex tools such as software and its inner workings, will not help anyone.

As a recommendation, allow someone with real-world IT experience, someone who has built a large, maintainable system (still in use today), to read your articles on the subject before posting it, and then analyze what information you can gather. Some people, whose expertise are in a different field, may actually think this is a good idea and put themselves in undesirable situations.

Thank you for your time.

Come to think of it, I hope they don't get the impression that I'm volunteering :\. I'm not.

Mods: If it itches, just go with funny.

Bcom IT

I'm currently studying Bcom IT in South-Africa, it is Financial and Management Accounting, basic programming of excel and java, system analysis and design, both theory and practical, and oracle sql databases. Because it is a Bcom degree we have a few other business subjects. Hopefully I will find good employment with this degree when I leave this country.

doing the business ...

I once worked for a 'business' manager and spent two month collating accounts data into a spreadsheet. He couldn't understand the concept of backups and stored the one copy of the file in the C:\progra~1\excell directory and was in the habit of deleting the entire directory once a week.

"they will use outside vendors to gain those skills"

What he means is when they want to appear 'managerial' they hire in a systems analyst to tell them what their own staff already know. You get the work done in spite of them. And usually better when they are out of the office.

"business analysts in business units answer to business executives, with a dotted line to the CIO"

And the PHB gets to pretend to know what he is doing to earn ten time your salary. That article is just so much self congradulatory wishfull thinking. 'Oh, for the day when us PHB don't need the IT dept'.

When they start making up bogus cod technological tets you know it's just so much hot air.

See here for a software application masquerading as Business Intelligence [microsoft.com]

Now excuse me while I go upstairs and show some idiot how to email an attachment - for the tenth time.

perfect

My local state college knew it was ehading this way .Thats why I took my bachelors in Manament of information technology. Half computer courses and half business administration. NOw I know ill be ready :). it also helped that I had an Associates in Network Administration.

This service industry trend is crazy...

Engineering skills in the US are already undervalued.
We are just heading to a point where no-on at all in the US will actually DO anything. Everyone will just be middle-men managing everyone else. It's like one of those pyramid schemes.
If someone somewhere in the business pyramid doesn't actually produce some tangible product (i.e. made by engineers) then you've got no basis on which to exist.

Consider the source

Bentley College is known for its part-time MBA program, they sponsor NPR in MA to get a plug for the program on Morning Edition. Not suprising that a school in a high-tech area which awards MBAs is saying that all tech workers will need an MBA in 4 years...

Meanwhile, back in the real world...

I've been on a few interviews in the last few months, and no matter how well the interview seemed to be going, the conversation pretty much ended when it became clear that I didn't have experience with Websphere or Weblogic, or I hadn't used Struts in my current position.

Sure, I could write off these interviewers as being short-sighted, but that doesn't change the reality that employers are looking for people who know a particular set of skills, and have used them oh-so-recently.

One interview, I had to keep saying "no, being a startup, my current employer can't afford solutions like that, BUT MY PREVIOUS EMPLOYER..." to almost every question, because they kept asking if I was using these technologies right now.

Business schools and even C-level management may give lip service to the idea of having employees with both business and technical skills. But, the people in the trenches are the ones doing the hiring, and they are more concerned with the day to day technical realities of the operation. They need people with particular technical skills fresh in their minds who can jump in and start reacting to said C-level managers' demands.

I just re-read what I wrote, and it sounds like I'm standing on both sides of the fence. I'm whining a bit because I don't have the exact skills they're looking for and they don't seem to be considering my business skills or even my ability to apply prior knowledge (Oracle Application Server, Tomcat...) to new problems. But I also understand that they need people who can start solving problems for them right now. My solution? I guess there's going to be Websphere & Weblogic certification in my future.

Don't listen to this article. Business skills wont get you in the door.

C2 wiki on this

I have found that companies generally don't seem to value domain (biz) knowledge, and others seem to agree. Here is more on this phenom:

http://www.c2.com/cgi/wiki?WhyIsDomainKnowledgeNot Valued [c2.com]
     

Nothing new.

Before university, I worked with a comp sci university grad, and was so disappointed in how little he could apply his skills to the business at hand. It's what led me to take a B. Comm. in University. I followed it up with an M. Sc., which was a good mix. The computer technology, I always found I could easily learn; the business skills were better learned in the University environment. I never regretted that approach. (Led to me being able to found one business that employed 100 people for a few years, and another that employed a half dozen for a copule of years, and another one on the go now.)

Ohhh...I can't wait

I am looking forward to the day when the business requires us IT folks to be straight up pimps! I personally love wearing a large purple hat with a 3 foot long feather, and the platform shoes....oooooohhhh!!! How about they leave IT people alone, quit trying to remake us into some fucking image they think should be, and let us do our fucking jobs!!! I wonder what Jesus REALLY looked like...and I wonder how many years it took for the powers to be to make him into the tall, bearded, gentle hanson man you see in pictures...

Since when has IT been so technical

Has IT ever been the place where hard-core development goes on? In high-tech companies, IT generally doesn't directly participate in product development.

Re:Work, little NeoSlaves, work hard, harder, hard

>>You haven't an answer for my ideas, so strike back in ignorant and sullen silence, ever the domesticated animal.

An answer for your ideas? Your ideas are questions? Huh? Too much ambiguity....discard.

Re:business skills is always neccessary

Very true. Actually what's described in the article is already happening. Sure there will be a ndeed for programmers/sysadmins etc. _but_ if you want to move ahead you _will_ have to understand your business. This already is the case, and actually was the case over 10 years ago.

I have alwais made an effort to get more business knowledge and I must say it has alwais created lots of new exciting opportunities for me. Dowside is hat you become less of a geek...