David Rice
Title: Vice president and CIO
Company: Siemens Medical Solutions Inc., Malvern, Pa.
Rice is this month's guest Premier 100 IT Leader, answering readers' questions about management vs. leadership and software development skills. If you have a question you'd like to pose to one of our Premier 100 IT Leaders, send it to askaleader@computerworld.com and watch for this column each month.
A leader is usually a good manager. Are good managers necessarily good leaders? Good managers need leadership abilities, and good leaders need management abilities. Oftentimes, leadership and management skills are discussed as though they are mutually exclusive. Instead, they are complementary. Circumstances often dictate which skill is most needed at any given point in time.
I believe that both leadership and management skills can be learned and developed and that both are necessary in order to be optimally successful--especially over the long term.
With software development migrating overseas, do you think a developer with 20-plus years of experience would be wise to retrain in network support and administration? Although you identify yourself as an experienced hand, it's not clear what type of software you've developed during your career, and this is an important consideration. For example, end-user application developers will find the sort of transition you're describing more difficult to make than those who are experienced with systems-level software development. In general, the deeper in the ISO stack you are in terms of software development experience, the easier you will find making the transition you describe.
You might want to consider further developing "surround skills" to complement your software development expertise--for example, strengthening your project management skills and credentials by completing a PMP certification through the Project Management Institute. Or you might want to consider further honing your analysis skills and applying them in particular to effective requirements definition and requirements management skills. Strong project management and/or analysis skills geared toward requirements definition are worth their weight in gold--in spite of the current trend toward offshoring.
Technology trends come and go, but there will always be a need for highly skilled software professionals. Do what you enjoy doing the most, and do it to the very best of your ability. When all is said and done, that's what will give you the most personal and professional satisfaction--and, more often than not, will result in your remaining productively engaged.
Mining a Rich Vein of Software Talent
One of the largest examples of "farmshoring" to date is getting under way in rural southwestern Virginia. But that being coal country, maybe this is actually a case of "mineshoring."
Farmshoring, the practice of sending software-related jobs to rural areas of the U.S., has been heralded as an antidote to offshoring, in which those same jobs are sent to far-away, low-wage places like India and China. Workers in Wichita make more than those in Bangalore, but there are fewer hurdles to overcome in the way of culture, language and time zones.
According to a story by Ellen McCarthy in The Washington Post early last month, the reasons for sending coding work to rural Virginia are many. Chief among them may be the fact that government contractors are often constrained from giving jobs to overseas workers. But a couple of those contractors, CGI-AMS Inc. and Northrop Grumman Corp., complain that the job market in northern Virginia is just too tight. So both companies in the next few months will begin building multimillion-dollar technology centers in Lebanon, Va., and will recruit hundreds of software engineers at salaries well above the region's average, according to the Post's story.
Why Lebanon? McCarthy explains: "Local officials drafted a study to show that 4,566 computer science degrees were awarded in the past five years by colleges within 100 miles of Lebanon, including Virginia Tech, Radford University and James Madison University. Area community colleges promised to tailor their courses to fit CGI-AMS's needs, and the county said it would build a new $5 million, 53,000-square-foot facility where the company could do relatively basic software development and troubleshooting."
-- 65 percent: Percentage of U.S.-based IT workers who say they usually first hear about important business matters through rumor.
Source: ISR survey of 6,037 U.S. IT workers, December 2005
Is Your Training on Track?
More employees seem to be getting value from their company-paid training than not, with 60 percent reporting that the last training program they attended was a good or great use of their time. We just wonder why the group that most often said that the last training they attended was a total waste of time was also most likely to be considering future training or education.
Said last training they attended was a total waste of time Said last training they attended was a great use of time Have a thought-out career plan Are considering future training or education
All workers 12 percent 26 percent 49 percent 50 percent
Workers earning less than $20,000/year 21 percent 22 percent 42 percent 59 percent
Workers earning more than $100,000/year 5 percent 31 percent 66 percent 49 percent