Critical.
Authoritative.
Strategic.
Subscribe to CIO Magazine »

IT skills must include business nous: BMC CIO

BMC CIO, Mark Settle, shares his insights on the IT skills conundrum

With the constant commoditisation of skills in IT, value is generated at the interface of IT and the business and people who want to make IT their profession need work more closely to that boundary.

That is the advice from Mark Settle, CIO of BMC Software, who has first-hand experience across global markets.

“Schools are not graduating people with the right skills, and there are more obstacles to immigration for skilled staff,” Settle said. “It’s the paradox of the US industry: Every company has growth plans, but not for their IT department.”

Settle who joined BMC Software in 2008, has held CIO appointments at Fortune 300 companies Corporate Express, Arrow Electronics, Visa International, and Occidental Petroleum and has worked across several industries. He is also a former Air Force officer and NASA program scientist.

He says many organisations have a strong preference for finding IT people with three to five years’ experience, for various, valid reasons.

The days where intern programs and work-study programs for students were commonplace have gone, however, this begs the question: how are graduates getting that first three years of experience?

“Some of the larger companies, such as Shell, are doing it... but for a lot of organisations, the days of career progression are gone and it’s now about issues such as staff numbers and budgets,” Settle said.

“In a closed-loop environment like IT, how do you keep people around and expose them to new opportunities? I think people today are far more receptive to new skills and whether they can have an impact on the company.”

Enterprise must look at graduating people from IT along the lines of the business, he said.

At times, it’s little wonder people outside of IT question it as a career progression, particularly over the last 12 months when layoffs have been commonplace and the global external business market has been effectively frozen.

As a company that sells business-to-business tools to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of managing systems, BMC has largely weathered that storm.

“Smart shops figure out the key skills they want in-house and what the year-to-year variation will be,” Settle said. “If you’re not careful, the business decisions dictate the skills and sourcing.”

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

More about: Arrow Electronics, ASA, BMC, BMC, BMC Software, Corporate Express, NASA, Occidental Petroleum, Visa, Visa International

Comments

Post new comment

The content of this field is kept private and will not be shown publicly.
Users posting comments agree to the CIO comments policy.
Login or register to link comments to your user profile, or you may also post a comment without being logged in.
Related Coverage
Related Whitepapers
Latest Stories
Community Comments
Tags: bmc, career, career advice, careers, CIOs, it skills, Mark Settle
Latest Blog Posts
Whitepapers
  • Cloud printing in the enterprise: liberating the mobile print experience from cables, operating systems and physical boundaries
    In recent years mobile technology has proliferated throughout the enterprise. Today, virtually no one in the workforce is bound to a desk to work, check e-mail or communicate with co-workers and customers. At the same time, we’re seeing the rise of cloud technologies, loosely defined as online resources, often provided as a service, that manage the data and software that used to run solely on PCs. This merger of mobile and cloud technologies is on its way to becoming one of most significant enablers of business productivity and innovation seen in the past decade. Read more.
    Learn more »
  • Teleworking made simple—and secure—with desktop virtualisation technology
    Businesses of all sizes are increasingly focused on creating flexible work environments and offering telework options for employees. By administering policies and providing the technical capability for employees to work remotely, these companies can improve job satisfaction and worker attraction and retention. This paper explores the implementation of teleworking based on a foundation of desktop and server virtualisation.
    Learn more »
  • Oracle Exadata - Extreme performance, lowest cost.
    As organizations contend with escalating demands for greater quantities of information, more sophisticated data analysis, and a burgeoning user population, Oracle Exadata makes database workloads faster, easier to manage, and less expensive. Oracle Exadata is the world’s first database machine to provide extreme performance for both data warehousing and online transaction processing (OLTP) applications. Read this whitepaper.
    Learn more »
All whitepapers
rhs_login_lockGet exclusive access to Invitation only events CIO, reports & analysis.
Recent comments