The IT Agenda: Adaptability is Critical

From Tech to Dreck

I am distressed by the number of IT professionals who are interested solely in technology, dismissing all else as irrelevant to their jobs. I'm also dismayed to see vendors encouraging this attitude. Cisco bills its Networker's Conference as "100% Pure Technical Content." For those who find this appealing, here's another phrase: "underemployed."

IT workers once had the luxury of being "pure tech." We all remember those days. But as information technology has matured, such singularity has become less of an option. Data networks are now so important to business and society that the people responsible for maintaining them must be well-educated and capable of making complex decisions aimed at increasing productivity and decreasing costs. Network grease monkeys and broom pushers aren't the be-all and end-all anymore.

Think about it: Why would a company that has invested thousands, even millions of dollars in its IT infrastructure (with millions in revenue transactions flowing through that infrastructure every year) want to pay grease monkeys and broom pushers to run it all?

Professionals in other fields pay attention to far more than just the technical aspects of their jobs. Medical professionals make life-and-death judgment calls based on much more than the mechanics of keeping someone breathing. They also follow a code of ethics intended to protect individuals and the public health overall--and when they don't, they pay the price, in lawsuits and license revocations. And the accounting industry has taken a brutal beating of late because, somewhere along the line, some of its members forgot to act, well, professionally.You can't have it both ways. Either you're applying your technical knowledge to broader, human-focused (in many cases, business) decisions, or you're spending your workdays snapping together appliance parts and configuring servers. Both kinds of skills are necessary, and both kinds of jobs will continue to exist. But with cautious predictions of IT job growth by pundits and the government (see the U.S. Department of Commerce's report, "Digital Economy 2003," at www.esa.doc.gov/ DigitalEconomy2003.cfm, which, though pessimistic about offshoring, does predict something of a recovery in fields such as bioinformatics), most of that growth will come in the "professional" sector, while the all-tech jobs will become commodities, just like IT itself.

There's already been a shake-up in the IT job market. We all know of highly competent technologists who've been laid off and spent months pounding the pavement. In some cases, experienced IT workers have been replaced by younger (read: less expensive) people who got their technology training in high school. (Two high schools in my small city alone offer Cisco training.)

Anyone who believes the price of technical labor will stay constant and the demand for "pure tech" will ever again reach 1999 levels simply isn't paying attention to which way the wind blows.

Jonathan Feldman has worked with and managed technology in industries ranging from health care and financial services to government and law enforcement. He is director of professional services for Entre Solutions, an infrastructure consulting company based in Savannah, Ga. Write to him at [email protected].