Title: Vice president of research
Company: Nucleus Research Inc., Wellesley, Mass.
Savvy CIOs and IT consultants frequently point out the need for good communication between IT and business professionals. Some IT executives take this recommendation a step further and actively market an IT department's capabilities to senior business leaders via service catalogs and other techniques.
Perhaps that helps explain why half of the 60 IT and business executives who responded to a February online survey conducted by Nucleus Research cited IT marketing as the most important skill they need to develop within their staffs.
Computerworld's Thomas Hoffman spoke with Rebecca Wettemann about the types of skills that survey respondents say are in strongest demand and the reasons behind this.
Why are IT marketing skills in such high demand? I think really being able to promote what you're doing is becoming an important skill to develop. Plus, the need to develop people skills is becoming more and more important.
Yet 34 percent of respondents cited IT strategy and planning as the most important nontechnical skills to develop. With the increased focus on [service-oriented architecture], many IT managers are asking how they can focus their resources most effectively. It's a more structured focus because SOA is enabling people to get out of the code-building race and leverage what they've built to provide greater value to the company.
Two-thirds of the respondents said help desk skills are the most important technical skills needed in the IT team. Why is that? As end users use more applications, they may be having more of their work tied to using these applications. And as companies get more involved with security provisions, they're making sure the help desk gets more involved in supporting end users.
When asked which IT position is most difficult to hire for, the highest number of respondents -- 33 percent -- said systems integration.
How come? I think it's hard to find those people because those skills are in such high demand right now.
How do you respond to skeptics who insist that despite research that cites strong demand for technology skills such as Java and .Net, many people with those skills are unemployed or underemployed? The actual technology skills are very important, but so are the business management and project management skills that go with them.
It's a three-legged stool. Yes, you need .Net and Java skills, but have you developed the business management and project management skills to map out a project plan or work effectively with a project team?
Reading between the lines
That's what IT pros have to do with the Milken Institute's Best Performing Cities ranking of the 200 largest U.S. metropolitan areas. The think tank lists the locales based on five- and one-year growth in jobs, salaries and gross domestic product. But if you check out the chart on the MilkenInstitute.org Web site, be sure to scroll over to the column for the "2004 high-tech GDP location quotient," a measure of high-tech concentration. Do that, and No. 1 Palm Bay-Melbourne-Titusville, Fla., still looks pretty good, with a high-tech GDP LQ ranking of 13. But Nos. 2 through 5 on the Best Performing Cities list all drop below No. 100 in the high-tech GDP LQ ranking. Conversely, metro San Jose, No. 1 in high-tech concentration, is only 185 overall.
Some happy mediums can be found: Huntsville, Ala., is No. 28 overall and No. 5 in high-tech concentration, and Albuquerque ranks 43rd and seventh, respectively. But before you plan a move, keep some other factors in mind. Both Huntsville and Albuquerque are relatively small metro areas, and Huntsville's concentration of high-tech is almost entirely due to the presence of NASA.
The chart is interactive, so just click on any category to get rankings.
Milken calls its report the 2005 Best Performing Cities, but all data is from 2004.
-- Jamie Eckle
Confident, yes, but let's not get cocky
IT workers are almost giddy with confidence, according to the Hudson Employment Index. The index is calculated monthly for the U.S. as a whole, for various regions and cities, and for several industries. IT's confidence level for March 2006 towers above that of any other category, whether it be an industry or a geographic area. A look at IT workers' answers to three of the survey questions gives you an idea of why they're so self-assured.