IT 2020: More Business Than Tech

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Originally published at Internet.com

CIOs are feeling the pain of a skills shortage, according to a recent survey by Computer Economics. But if they are able to address the shortages they're experiencing on the business skills front, there's the potential to achieve greater business-technology alignment in the IT organization of the future.

According to the survey, Managing Challenges in IT Staffing , the IT function that will be most difficult to recruit for through 2007 is IT business analyst. The combination of someone with industry-specific business and technical skills is rare, says Mark McManus, VP of IT Research at Computer Economics.

"There are not enough people who have a full set of business skills to understand what happens in the accounting department in a large retailer, for instance, as well as the IT skills to play on both sides of the fence," he said.

There's no magic bullet for this-it's really a matter of training internally within organizations, as well as putting more of a focus on business issues in IT curriculums at the university level, says McManus. The latter is starting to happen, though the problem is enrollments in IT courses are down.

As for the former, one option for IT leaders is to draw from the pool of business-side power users who may not be technical on a granular level but have a good understanding of what goes on in IT. The other, of course, is to develop the talent from within their own ranks.

An interesting finding of the survey is many IT professionals prefer to stay within their industries because they've worked long and hard to get certain technical certifications that make them hot properties. CIOs may want to start thinking about how they can foster their teams to be just as eager to gain similar credentials on the business side.

One way they might do that is by drawing attention to what McManus sees as the typical IT department 10-or-15 years from now. "Flash forward and I wouldn't be surprised to see that the typical IT (end-user) organization may not have a lot of technical people on board," he said.

Those technical people didn't lose their jobs, necessarily-in many cases they'll just move over to work for outsourcers.

"The key for IT professionals from here on out is to make a decision: Do you want to work in the technical field and at some time be working for an outsourcer, or stay within a vertical industry like retail?" says McManus. "To stay in a vertical, they are going to have to be the business-savvy person. By 2020 that will very clearly have happened across most medium-to-large organizations."

And that changeover can be a good thing for business-technology alignment. As IT departments in vertical industries increasingly are comprised of people who are technically competent but have even stronger business skills, the opportunities for the IT and business groups to really be communicating on the same plane grow.

Not only that, but the individuals staffing these new IT organizations are probably going to be better positioned to manage the relationship with the vendors to whom they outsource their projects-"if they can get the service agreements to be well-polished so there are very clear cut deliverables, and it's the business deliverables that are emphasized in those contractual relationships," says McManus.

McManus points out that those IT people who do want to primarily have a technical focus needn't fear that those opportunities have all gone overseas. Of course, as part of this trend, tech jobs will continue to be lost in the U.S. to offshore organizations, but he says that most North American companies still outsource stateside.

Offshore outsourcing, though growing, is still a very small percentage of total outsourcing, he says, and companies' preferences to work with people in closer proximityy to them will keep onshore outsourcing an important option for businesses.