Decline of the Whiz-kid

In the 1980s and 1990s CIOs could not get enough young computer science graduates fresh from university to pump out dazzling lines of code, no business experience required. Today, CIOs have little time for such young prodigies. In the new world order, hard-core programming talent is available cheap as chips offshore, and business is looking to recruit from a new talent pool - the IT whiz-kid with business nous.

One reason for this change is the growing realization of the chasm that still remains in many organizations between the perceptions and priorities of technologists and the executive team (or other managers throughout the enterprise). Ivy Sea Online, a leadership resource and consulting centre, puts a major cause of the disconnect down to what it calls "organizational culture worldview" - the way that each group "sees" the primary objective of the enterprise.

"For organizational leaders, the business is the bottom line and technology is a means to an end - one facet of a successful organization," the Ivy Sea authors write. "For the technologists in the IT department, the technology is the point and, too often, the business bottom line is viewed as a hassle or limitation. In some companies, a randomly surveyed IT employee may not even know there's a recession, for example, or that market conditions are affecting the company that employs him."

Ivy Sea says to address these problems organizations need a new breed of technologists, ideally with strong technical skills combined with business knowledge, communication ability and a client-centric idealism. When such is impossible, the organization at least needs a person or two with the skilfulness and fluidity to act as "translators" between front-line technologists and the rest of the world.

Joan Mann, associate professor of Information Technology at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, and vice president of Adept Solutions Global, calls such positions hybrid positions, because the people in them must know about both IT and business. The hybrid positions are specifically there to create a better relationship between users and IT. Mann says any CIO thinking strategically about his or her IT function will attempt to hire hybrids, especially when the relationship is suffering. The CIO should have the vision of what a good relationship would bring to the IT function and the organization as a whole. The hybrid would work to make this happen.

In a Journal of Online Education paper, Mann has made several suggestions for addressing the need for hybrids via changes in curriculum and teaching methods within universities. In the IT area, these range from changing how students are acculturated into the profession to actually teaching "soft" skills and improving their awareness of how politics influences projects. She also suggests universities add a hybrid major to the IT curriculum that takes the students with strong interests in IT but who perform poorly at programming and teaches them end-user development, project management, change management and conflict management, as well as some technical material.

On the end-user side, she suggests the creation of a hybrid major and a hybrid minor, with students taking the hybrid major if they are interested in working with IT but are not technically oriented. The hybrid major would be targeted for non-IT business majors and even non-business majors to take. The majority of people in hybrid positions do come from the business side and have a higher success rate, Mann says.

Hybrids are exactly what is required, agrees ANU master of Software Engineering Clive Boughton, because students need a broader education, and because business itself will not always be able to offer exacting jobs to graduates, and may demand they frequently swap and change jobs within the organization.

"If you're reasonably broadly educated you've got more hope of doing that [swapping roles], particularly if the organization is prepared to give you a little bit of extra training or mentorship in the areas where they may wish to push you. And a lot of organizations too would probably push you into areas depending upon your general characteristics anyway, so if you are showing yourself to be a people person you're more likely to get into areas of management than you are if you're a dyed-in-the-wool programmer that wants to sit in a little room in front of a screen all day."

But Boughton says the demand presents new challenges to universities, which often must develop a multi-disciplinary organization to address it.