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Blog: Can IT Exist Without Technology?

I'm starting to get a little nervous about the future of our profession.

Anybody who has worked with me knows that I am an incurable optimist but I am wondering how we are going to lead with technology given the fact that most IT leaders know very little about it. Try this: next time you are in a group of IT leaders, find out how many have a CS background. The result will scare you. I was part of the initial wave promoting the importance of acquiring business knowledge but the pendulum has swung so far in the other direction, it hit us on the head and knocked us senseless. Many IT "leaders" are a little bit of everything and a whole lot of nothing - we aren't really business people and we aren't really technologists. Everyone knows that the secret of IT leadership requires the ability to dig in to the details and call "BS" on the alphabet soup the vendors, and sometimes our own people, try to pitch to us. Leadership isn't the absence of weakness, but the presence of clear strengths. t's time to make technology a core competence of our IT leaders. Anybody out there want to sign up for a CIO boot camp that gets hands on with Java, .net, SOA, SaaS, BPM, virtualization, and the like?

Join the CIO Australia group on LinkedIn. The group is open to CIOs, IT Directors, COOs, CTOs and senior IT managers.

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