Cloud driving change in the IT Department & Profession – But no FIX!

The fusing of ICT with business economic delivery models is challenging the future of the IT profession.

The IT department will change beyond all recognition faster and more fundamentally that many appreciate. The British Computer Society (BCS) Debate at the turn of the year confirmed this point; this is not just a blogger going feral, it is fact coming home to roost.

For too long the IT profession has survived without a proper structured qualification and credibility management framework. Maybe this is it, time to come into line and adopt the principles well proven across other professional institutes (Law, Accounting, Chartered Surveying, Engineering, Architects etc…) and at last earn  wit credibility the investment in branding goodwill traditional professional disciplines have foster in titles such as Engineer,  Architect and Professional!

Whether the BCS has the capacity to drive this with its fledgling Chartered Status and Institute ambitions is questionable. I think it may need a little more firepower brought to bare to drive this through, and the Public Sector is one driving force well suited to stimulate this change.

Setting the standard and expectation in a more structured and disciplined way for technology professionals would address many failings in the industry:

ü  True visibility of vendor agnostic competence. Not every business has time to vet to the nth degree their vendors, and with over 90% of the industry made up of Small Medium enterprise (SME) organisations the room for manoeuvre for Cowboy operators is huge, and the cost on business even more distressing.

ü  Consistent baseline across all IT Professionals, from which specialisations can be founded. Without a baseline, there is no common conduit of understanding and communication, no reliable and consistent ‘stub off’ point.

ü  Continuous Professional Development. If there was one profession that needs this it is ICT! Whilst many IT ‘Professionals’ do drive themselves hard at keeping up to date many more do not, and the latter are often the ones  creating the friction in businesses.

ü  Recourse to have practitioners ‘Struck Off’. A black list that any enterprise can reference to validate the competency and credibility of an ICT vendor or service provider and ID the trouble makers.

ü  Creates a value point for the industry to price itself against, ACROSS the industry, allowing for a maturing of what is a wild frontier in the price /value proposition for any customer investing in ICT. Yes it may create a higher baseline cost for visible skills, but that is buying a whole lot of comfort for procurement that currently is non-existent.

And no doubt you can thing of a few if not many more benefits and probably some shortfalls. So why not start the debate….. What do you think?