IT managers must change with the times

We live in a very different world from the time when large-scale commercial IT appeared, and with it the first editions of Computing.

Complexity and uncertainty have multiplied in IT, in businesses, in the economy and in our personal lives.

Chief executives demand more and faster value, innovation and agility from technology.

Against that background, the growth and maturing of IT and the IT profession has been likened to the growth of civil engineering - from an era of individual craftsmen at the beginning of the 18th century to an era of organised, regulated, systematic professional processes by the end of the 19th.

The comparison is not always favourable. If civil engineering had the same record of failure as IT, say the critics, no one would ever feel safe travelling in a lift or driving over bridge.

That's a good challenge, and we certainly have no room for complacency.

The difference is that IT has accomplished much greater complexity and growth, and has done it in 40 years, not 200.

The roles of IT organisations and leaders have been in transition since they were created in the late 1960s, and that evolution continues apace.

Fifteen years ago, most heads of IT were senior functional managers, chiefly concerned with how to achieve business goals, not what goals to set.

Their challenges were understanding technology, ensuring projects were delivered on time and to budget, and building connections with the rest of the organisation.

Those issues still exist today. They are compounded by the need to focus on business value and alignment, and to manage major outsourcing deals.

Operational IT is now the essential infrastructure of almost all business and government activity. Strategic IT has the potential to matter even more.

Most IT leaders readily appreciate the expanding challenges and value of the role, but business strategists often take a much more limited view. That means the quality of IT insight, and the value that businesses should obtain from it, too often, goes unused.

Many IT leaders are, however, working hard to fix this problem, and the next five years look set to bring some radical changes.

In the short term, businesses will continue the vigorous drive to cut costs. IT organisations will play a central part, driving down their own costs and helping to achieve cost savings elsewhere.

As the rising trend of outsourcing continues, internal IT roles will increasingly concentrate on core business value while managing and integrating external partners.

In the longer term, all businesses will have to confront fundamental changes being created by the forces of globalisation, enterprise virtualisation, increased focus on external relationships, economic cycles, increased regulatory control, and their underlying technology enablers.

The ability to cut cost further, and the shift to a time-based Real Time Enterprise as a source of competitiveness, will cause massive discontinuities in, and between, many businesses and industry sectors.

All this requires new kinds of external relationships with business customers and stakeholders, peer networks, vendors, service providers, and businesses operating in the same or related industries.

The bottom line? IT and business leaders must redirect the value of IT to align with these changes.

Gartner sees the emergence of a new IT leadership role, that of business network transformation, where leaders spend more time working with issues outside the IT organisation and enterprise.

There will remain a substantial role for more traditional business technology 'chief IT engineers', dealing with strategic sourcing and supply chain issues. In a few organisations, people are taking these roles already.

Perhaps we are seeing the first of a new generation of true business technologists.