Could technology drive IT out of business? | GulfNews.com

The most significant shift ever seen in IT
growth and innovation is now well underway. Indeed, the move to what is
known as the ‘third platform’ — built on mobile devices, cloud services,
social technologies, and big data — is set to take on increasing
urgency in 2015 as the market matures past the ‘exploration’ stage and
into full-blown competition.

In essence, the third
platform is changing IT’s relationship with business, and is therefore
mandating a new focus on productivity. And as businesses across the
region increasingly take the leap to embrace these transformative
technologies, there are a number of significant implications that IT
executives must begin addressing immediately if they are to remain
competitive and relevant in this exciting new era.

Chief among these
implications is the irreversible transformation that is beginning to
take shape in the IT job market. My regular discussions with CIOs
throughout the Middle East and Africa reveal a heightened sense of
urgency to begin preemptively strategising for their staffing needs of
the future. And this is with very good reason.

The IT department is expected
to undergo a sea change as it adopts cloud, mobile, social, and big
data/analytics technologies. These technologies will transform IT from a
department that delivers IT systems to one that delivers IT services,
from a department that is focused on IT agility to one that is focused
on business agility, and from a department that drives information to
one that drives innovation

The upshot of all of this is that IT
staffing needs are set to change forever, with the shift to third
platform modes of delivery impacting where new positions are created and
which roles and skills are phased out by market forces. As such, the
CIO must now act as a gardener — cultivating, growing, reshaping, and
gathering a veritable pool of IT talent.

There is a pressing need to
ensure that the IT department remains truly relevant to the new and
constantly evolving demands of the business, and I advise CIOs to act on
this issue posthaste. They should start by assessing their existing IT
job roles and classifying them in terms of whether they’re currently of
high or low importance and whether they are expected to grow or decline
in importance over time.

Armed with
the information, the CIO will have a much clearer picture of his
next-generation IT workforce. This will include roles that are currently
less important to the enterprise mission but are expected to gain in
importance going forward, such as the emerging fields of mobile
development, social developers, social community administrators, and
business analysis. And as the IT gardener, the CIO’s primary goal is to
begin sowing the seeds for these up-and-coming roles before demand for
them outstrips supply.

This new generation will also
include roles that are currently important to the enterprise and are
expected to become even more so over time — security, service
management, enterprise architecture, and business intelligence and
analytics. These roles typically require both a specific set of
technical capabilities and a breadth of experience that are instrumental
to the current and future states of the IT department. CIOs must start
focusing now on attracting and retaining these highly sought-after
positions as they will serve as the lifeblood of the IT garden.

It goes without saying that
not all will be rosy in this garden. There will of course be
traditionally important roles whose value will diminish in the
marketplace as the 3rd Platform becomes more firmly entrenched — data
architecture, management, and storage; application development;
application operations; IT management; and network operations. In other
words, the core IT workforce. As such, I urge CIOs to fully understand
how these roles are being impacted by the 3rd Platform and to reshape —
or even prune — them to allow for the continued fruitfulness of the
overall garden.

Even after all this, there is
still one group unaccounted for — the peripheral IT workforce. These
roles are currently of low overall importance to the overall corporate
mission, and they are expected to remain so, or to decline in
significance over time. This includes technical support, help desk,
training and documentation, and sourcing, and while attracting employees
to this workforce will not be difficult, the IT gardener must determine
which crop of employees to gather and potentially cultivate into more
valued roles.

This latter point is
particularly pertinent as the 3rd Platform is creating a skills gap that
is becoming more and more costly to fill. For new technologies such as
cloud and analytics, CIOs are increasingly complaining of a near absence
of relevant skills in the marketplace. And given this reality, it is
crucial that they start identifying high-potential candidates from
inside their own organisations. Difficult-to-hire IT roles command a
very hefty premium, and while retraining an under-skilled employee who
shows potential may cost more upfront, it is a far less expensive
strategy in the long run than recruiting a fully skilled and experienced
resource.

There is a certain sense of
irony that the emergence of new technologies is spelling the end of the
IT department as we know it. But by embracing this era of change and
intelligently preparing for their future staffing needs now, CIOs can
ensure that they and their teams remain as relevant and indispensable to
the overall business as ever before.

The columnist is group
vice-president and regional managing director for the Middle East,
Africa, and Turkey at global ICT market intelligence and advisory firm
International Data Corporation (IDC).

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Could technology drive IT out of business? | GulfNews.com