IT pros: Choose a side

What they're talking about is IT benchmarks, and the fact that they're constantly shifting. First you're told to know a single technology like the back of your hand and then you're told that being too entrenched in a technology can be a career-limiting move. You've been told to stock up on certifications to justify your piece of an organization's payroll and then learned that some of the letters after your names weren't worth the paper they were printed on. One year you're assigned a desk in the dark room at the end of the hall and another you're told to put on a suit and get an MBA if you want a job destined to stay on this continent.

Constantly re-marketing oneself as the IT professional du jour can be exhausting, to say the least.

"I've seen a lot of different flavors of The Solution. There's training, certifications, new skills, new roles... The process of shifting gears every 18 months turns us into puppets," a consultant in Southern California with nearly three decades of IT experience told me.

"Whenever Manager Bill decides to change his paradigm, we end up going through six to nine months of redoing our work and then bridging two very different environments, and very few people want to talk about standards so we're not always reinventing the wheel."

Well, here's one more to add to the pile: In a recent conversation with Forrester vice president and research director, Alex Cullen, he told me that they believe it is the IT organization that going to go through a drastic change in the next decade, with some splitting off from the departments we recognize today to become what he calls "renegades." And not surprisingly, IT pros will have to figure out where and how they want to fit in.

"You have to pick," said Cullen. "The traditional IT organizations will stay in the traditional IT mindset--they're all about IT excellence. IT is a factory, and they're running it that way. The people who know Java and databases and configurations will go to this one."

But at the fork in the road, some IT leaders will take a risk and aim for full integration with business by becoming all about peer relationships, product insight and service innovation. The department heads will be top company executives, and the people within the organizations will barely touch technology.

"The MBAs will ultimately go here. They're in their own separate organization and they'll spend all of their time on business stuff, and thinking about customer loyalty. They'll have a team in India that does all of their development work," said Cullen.

In some ways, Cullen's views about the new direction of some IT departments could be a relief for techies who have been perplexed as to why they would need to be DBAs and MBAs and IT project managers--i.e. everything under the sun. But there's going to be little left for pure techies among the IT renegades.

So does this mean that some IT professionals should drop everything and become pure business technology players?

"If you're looking towards the renegades, you're training yourself for a job in a place that doesn't exist yet. But CIOs are telling me they are having trouble being both types of orgnanizations, and that down the road, they are likely to choose one side or the other," said Cullen.

The Southern California consultant, however, doesn't see the future of IT so divided.

"IT has always been in one business, and one business alone: the customer service business--taking down the problem and letting the customer know it's going to be okay."

[Image from Dilbert.com]