6. IT ROI Will Become Even More Difficult to Prove.

The increase in the number of tacit jobs in the coming years has both good and bad implications for IT. Tacit IT is not about automation - the meat and drink of IT since its inception and the route to easily measured ROI. Tacit IT is all about decision support, knowledge management, business intelligence and artificial intelligence. That's a tough row to hoe for CIOs trying to justify their existence. More and more, businesspeople want information rather than systems, new capabilities rather than automation. In a 2005 survey of IT and business executives, McKinsey found that only 29 percent of business executives believed that automating business processes was the best route to improving operating efficiencies, while 43 percent of IT executives highlighted it. Those numbers speak to a significant disconnect between what business executives want and what IT executives think they want.

But there is, in fact, room for more process automation. According to a survey by consultancy Accenture, fewer than 10 percent of customer interactions and 13 percent of supplier interactions are online. CIOs said they could triple those numbers.

Eventually, however, the shift to tacit work means that opportunities for automation could disappear. And the pressure will be on vendors to make technology think, rather than automate. As the McKinsey report states: "Machines can't recognize uncodified patterns, solve novel problems, or sense emotional responses and react appropriately; that is, they can't substitute for tacit labour as they did for transactional labour. Instead, machines will have to make tacit employees better at their jobs by complementing and extending their tacit capabilities and activities."

The good news is that structuring and supporting tacit relationships using technology is still very new and virtually unexplored. For example, McKinsey found that companies in the top quartile of growth in labour productivity between 1998 and 2004 spent $US6200 per employee on technology for tacit work and $US38,200 for transactional. There's a lot of room to shift that investment as more transactional work starts going out the door. The bad news is that decision support technology is difficult to build and the results difficult to measure.

7. The Entry-level IT Job Will Disappear.

The Post-modern IT Department will be looking for people, but CIOs won't be able to find them. For Nancy Markle, former president of SIM, the impact of the talent gap will rival that of the technology gap the United States became aware of when the Soviets launched the Sputnik program in the late 50s. "The technology-rich innovators are going to be the economic leaders of the world," says Markle. "Other countries are moving ahead because they have government-sponsored programs. We need to have government-sponsored programs that target every level from elementary school through [university]."

It's a sentiment that should - but based on historical evidence, won't - also resonate with local government officials.

In 2005, when SIM researchers asked IT leaders which skills they felt might disappear from their departments by 2008 because those skills would become obsolete, automated or outsourced, the top ranked were: programming (except for "new" programming skills like Java, .Net and Linux), operations, desktop/help, and mainframe/legacy skills - the kinds of skills that used to keep personnel busy hiring entry-level employees.

Yet when the SIM researchers asked IT leaders which background they valued most in entry-level employees, the vast majority chose computer science. And the core of most computer science programs is still programming - precisely the skill that IT leaders told SIM they don't value any more.

Not surprisingly, students are reading those tea leaves. In the US, the number of kids who are choosing to major in computer science has plummeted by nearly half since its peak of 3.7 percent of freshmen in 2000, according to the Higher Education Research Institute at the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies at UCLA. Just 1.4 percent of all incoming freshmen in 2004 said they would select the major, and the number of women interested in computer science has dropped to its lowest level since the 70s.

The local situation is no less bleak. As reported in sister publication Computerworld back in March: "Demand for undergraduate degrees in IT continued to drop this year, with preferences shifting away from traditional computer science, engineering and programming subjects to newer offerings such as game development and degrees that combine arts or business subjects.

"University Admissions Centre (UAC) figures show that the number of students electing to study IT related degrees across NSW universities fell this year. The lowest fall was 4 percent, while the biggest drop was 36.7 percent. The centre did not wish to name the universities.

Meanwhile, fewer foreign students are choosing to remain in host countries after graduation because job opportunities in their home countries have improved dramatically.

A few schools responded by offering combined business and IT curricula. But the kinds of skills CIOs are looking for in their employees - project management, communication, expectations management - are difficult to teach in the classroom.

Some schools are making internship programs a larger part of their curricula but implementation is constrained by time and money. One educator has increased the number of internships for students in his mixed IT and business program, but is limited by the time necessary to set up the internships and by the budgets of local businesses. Indeed, though many CIOs have internship programs, most are for only a few positions - not nearly enough to fill gaps that will arise. "I think the universities and colleges will not produce enough people to keep up with demand, and the same goes in Europe," says Zurich's Maier.