These were the topics that filled a recent daylong discussion at UCLA's Managing the Information Resource program. Along with the results of ongoing surveys conducted at the IT Leadership Academy and polls of the hundreds of alpha practitioners who attended Computerworld's Premier 100 IT Leaders Conference two weeks ago, that discussion reveals a growing concern that HR, while critical to the effective functioning of IT, is in many ways out of touch with the current realities of how IT work actually gets done.

Here are some examples:

IT practitioners say job descriptions cease being relevant after someone has been doing the work for six months or so. The job the employee actually does after that initial period typically morphs into something very different, but job descriptions are rarely updated. The problem is that many widely deployed HR practices were created for Industrial Age work environments. It's time for an HR upgrade to the Age of Big Information.

The work of contingent or temporary employees, who may constitute as much as 80 percent of the head count in many IT shops, is typically counted and measured very differently than that of full-time workers, giving a distorted view. Thus, although HR may boast that it has reduced or held the line on IT head count, more people may actually be working on IT projects than ever before.

A stunning 89 percent of the IT executives queried at the Premier 100 conference said that their organizations aren't spending enough on grooming the next generation of IT leaders; 51 percent said their organizations are spending "way too little" in this area.