TABLE OF CONTENTS It s obvious that new skills will be required in IT if it is to fulfil the three roles in the 3R model. Or is it so obvious? Because the skills required are largely not IT skills; rather, they are real business skills. These skills need to be real because although they may have a foundation in MBAs and other generic business education, they need to be specific to the company s operations and industry. So if an IT person wants to fulfil the three new roles, he or she had better understand the business they are in, and the industry in which that business operates.
I need to repeat that these are roles, and not necessarily jobs, so the more a specific IT job spans across the roles, the more skills will be required.
When we are talking about skills, we need to recognize that there are in fact four broad role categories in IT. But I have been focusing on the three IT demand roles that most businesses want to retain within their organization. The fourth IT role is of course the IT supply role one which the company may wish to outsource or insource. This supply role requires more of a generic specialist technical IT skill a contradiction if ever there was one. One of the reasons outsourcing is so attractive, both to the company and the outsource supplier, is that the supplier is able to concentrate specialist skills in...
