Enterprise Technology By Phil Edholm

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Top 10 Most Wanted IT Skills

By Phil March 18, 2008 6:10 pm

I saw this article in eWeek about the most wanted IT skills and it got me to thinking about skills as a representation of either transformation or challenge. Of the 10 skills listed, Numbers 1,2, and 10 (1 - Security, firewalls, data Privacy, 2 - General Networking, Network Infrastructure, and 10 - RF Mobile-Wireless) are all areas where the networking world is limiting the movement to advanced Information and Interaction solutions due to the complexity of what we do. While the needs in this area can be related to growth, to a great extent it is a reflection of the complexity of the solutions and the inability of the technology and the products to come down the complexity curve with mass deployments.

It is always amazing to me that complexity continues to grow in the network and in systems at this point in the maturity of our industry. As we grow to a billion network connections, it would seem to me that we should learn how to simplify the overall network as well as the other aspects such as security and wireless.

I alos found it interesting that the skill of applying technology to the business and it's associated processes is not even mentioned. In most if not all of the meetings I have with CIOs, the challenge of using technology in relevant ways to transform the business and gain competitive advantage is a, if not the, critical challenge. And there is a great sense that the skills of this role are very hard to come by and incredibly valuable. Yet this is not even represented in this view which seems to be a more traditional operational viewpoint.

I believe the focus of the next five years in networks will be just that, to simplify the overall installation, configuration and operation of the infrastructure so we can focus on the real value, which is how we can change businesses through the convergence of interaction, Information and transformed business processes.

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Comments

  1. Phil,

    Back to my previous rants:

    The sad act is that “eighth layer” of the OSI network stack is politics. It is hard to build and maintain and empire when you are simplifying the organization. I have heard cisco argue that a single vendor (coincidentally cisco) is the best way to “simplify” the network :) So again, the complexity and layered hierarchy of the organization is most often reflected in the network.

    Equipment manufacturers product managers add to artificial complexity due to their sometimes Byzantine efforts at “differentiation”

    If organizations were serious about security and simplicity we would have deployed IPv6 already.

    In the organizations I work with lately apply technology to the business most often falls into the realm of the marketing and sales organizations. All of whom could use training in writing good requirements :)

    Many companies want the cheapest labour, not the best. The point is that there is plenty of talent out there, just that 1) HR departments and Headhunters do not know how to write accurate job descriptions 2) Some of the most talented people’s resumes are filtered out by “expert systems” such as people soft because the job of screening candidates has been reduced to specific buzzwords, products, certifications or degrees without regard to applicable experience and 3) Many companies do not *want” North American employees and cynically use the first two response stated here to throw up their hands and offshore or justify H1-B visas.

    March 19th, 2008 at 9:34 pm by many

  2. Thats because management skills are easy to find or create but IT skills are not. Soft skills such as people management, procedure creation and control are easily learned on the job. Big companies can even make their own managers using online training and some handouts.

    Technical skills are based in fact and knowledge, and answers cannot be blurred or modified to fit an outcome. It either works or it doesn’t.

    Note that not everyone will be a a good manager, but very few people will ever be a good technician or engineer.

    March 20th, 2008 at 5:18 pm by Greg Ferro

  3. Not having much experience with these systems, I do not know how they filter, but the comments seem to reflect that the issues are both in the number of folks and their relative level. I wonder if this is a reflection of things that used to be intellectual are now becoming more service value? In the networking world i have long argued that basic functions like L2 and L3 need to become more utility like so we can focus on the higher level values.
    I agree that the drive for technology today comes from the revenue generation side. The challenge of having them define what they want is hard as they are typically not trained to do that. In many ways, this is the greatest challenge of the IT organization today.

    March 25th, 2008 at 8:14 pm by Phil

  4. Phil,

    Could be. I know I have seen postings asking for five years experience in a two year old technology :) I also see very little effort on the part of the recruiter to probe past a particular name brand language or tool kit for underlying concepts. So unless the resume is and “exact fit” capable candidates are overlooked. Then I hear the complaint that “we lack qualified people”. IMO what is lacking is in the recruiting.

    As far a higher level functions go, the example I use is services/applications/feature interactions. The huristics are largely the same no matter what the underlying transport or networking. Yet very few companies seem to have a handle on how features should behave together in their own networks. These interactions and behaviors are inconsistent between networks and worse between vendors in the same network giving the user a very bumpy experience.

    To solve that challenge, I think that the definition and requirements elicitation process needs to be greatly enhanced, not for the purposes of software design but for the purposes of service/application/feature interaction behavior in the network and at the systems level.

    March 25th, 2008 at 11:56 pm by many

  5. Security and network infrastructure aren’t getting more simple for the same reason the tax code and laws aren’t getting more simple: we have more people using the network, with different (and often conflicting) goals and the network has to become more intelligent and apply more rules to make it work for everyone. The network was very simple back when we had just a few honest users all using it for research.

    March 27th, 2008 at 1:44 pm by Aleks

  6. Flat Tax = Flat Networks……there must be a Presidential candidate in there somewhere!!!!!!!

    March 27th, 2008 at 9:36 pm by Phil

  7. It could be the election year in the US.

    BTW have you had a chance to check out at&t’s new pogo “3D” browser? I have not, I don’t have an invite :( I would be interested to see what they are up to though. I am really wondering if they will support HTML 5.
    http://www.pogobrowser.com/beta.php?destination=/

    I’d also be interested to hear opinions on the now completed spectrum auction (I expected a post from John on that actually, but it seems as if he is busy with other things at the moment) :)

    March 27th, 2008 at 10:16 pm by many

  8. I don’t have an invite either….

    March 28th, 2008 at 2:42 pm by Phil

  9. I think a large part of the problem starts as young as grade school… where tinkering with networks is still considered a fairly nerdy/geeky pastime.

    Certainly nothing as cool as dancing around with your iPod in an Apple television commercial. Or IM’ng your buddies in a cell phone provider commercial.

    If more public high schools put more emphasis on teaching real World IT skills, rather than confining these courses to vocational or magnet schools, more teens would consider IT careers.

    …which would fuel more interest in IT-related majors in major colleges/universities

    …and more specialized, real-World curriculum re-writes

    While learning on the job is certainly an admirable workaround, IT really needs to be recognized as mandatory alongside reading, writing, and math.

    March 30th, 2008 at 9:01 pm by Joshua Feinberg

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