Computing IT skills survey 2012

John Leonard reviews the skills that IT professionals should be adding to their armoury

Anyone who has worked in IT for any length of time will recognise the caricature of the embittered old programmer forever grumbling about the passing of the days when everyone knew "real" languages like Assembler and Cobol.

In a sector that changes as rapidly as IT, where the environment is characterised by outsourcing and cost cutting, hanging onto the past is not an option: IT professionals need to adapt to survive.

But how should they adapt, and with which areas of technology should they be familiarising themselves?

In order to obtain a considered view from the server room, we surveyed more than 400 Computing readers to discover both the skills they possess now, and those that they feel will be most valuable in the future.

The research was split into four core themes: programming, analytics, datacentre and enterprise applications.

Programming skills
First we looked at current programming skills. SQL and HTML were the technologies most widely practised, not surprising given the pivotal importance of database-powered enterprise applications with web-based UIs. A little further down come the object-oriented stalwarts Java and C/C++ as well as Microsoft's .Net framework - C# skills came in just outside the top 10 shown in figure 1.

[Click to enlarge]

Asked separately which skills they expected to increase in importance, a clear picture emerged. Mobile technologies are seen very much as the way things are going, with Android, HTML5 and iOS all making strong showings, along with Java - a language designed to be architecture-neutral and a key pillar of Android and many mobile applications. The presence of CSS, XML and Ajax in the top 10 shows the continued importance of web development techniques as companies seek to improve the online experience of users and customers by implementing Web 2.0 technologies on their sites (figure 2).

[Click to enlarge]

Computing IT skills survey 2012

John Leonard reviews the skills that IT professionals should be adding to their armoury

Analytics and data management
Questioned about their experience of the important and growing field of analytics, SQL and related database skills came out on top. As organisations increasingly become indistinguishable from the data they hold, managing that data and extracting meaningful information from it is becoming more important with each passing year.

Given this focus, skills in areas such as relational database management systems (RDBMS), business intelligence (BI), data governance, master data management, data mining, data warehousing and the newcomer, big data, will always be in demand.

The giants in the heavyweight database field, Microsoft with SQL Server and Oracle with its enterprise databases and end-to-end technology suites, are well served by a cadre of trained and accredited specialists. The open-source MySQL, which powers an enormous number of transactional websites, is also well supported (figure 3).

[Click to enlarge]

Prompted about which single analytics or data management skill will increase most in importance, the survey respondents returned a clear winner in the shape of BI. The ability of an organisation to convert its broad data assets into knowledge, getting the right information to the right people at the right time, is now seen as vital by the IT department as well as the business as a whole (figure 4).

[Click to enlarge]

The term BI encompasses some of the other rising stars on the list such as data mining and data governance. Really, BI is about marshalling the various processes and activities in such a way that they provide an overview of the business, where it has been, where it is now, and where it is going.

The current interest in mobile BI - rolling the technology out to smartphones and tablets - neatly unites two of the main growth areas revealed by the survey.

Another point of note is the rise of big data. While scarcely featuring on the list of current skills, NoSQL databases (such as Cassandra) and the Hadoop software framework both emerge on the list of technologies to watch, with the statistical language R and the more general term MapReduce also mentioned just outside the top 10.

With skills in these areas in short supply, and with big data now on the radar of more and more organisations, data scientists are suddenly in demand. In terms of technology, big data is an area in flux, with some analysts arguing that the current open source MapReduce-based frameworks like Hadoop are being overtaken by proprietary solutions for real-time parallel processing and analytics (many created by Google) such as MPI, BSP, Pregel, Dremel and Percolator.

Despite these and other innovations, there is a tacit recognition that the majority of analytics tasks will remain within the remit of traditional RDBMS. Among those looking into big data analytics, 64 per cent said advanced SQL skills would need to be developed or acquired compared with 20 per cent who mentioned Hadoop.

Virtualisation, cloud computing and datacentre infrastructure
In the data centre VMware skills featured prominently (figure 5). Consolidation of resources continues, apace, including server, storage and network virtualisation, and with VMware still commanding the lion's share of the hypervisor market this is not a surprise. Indeed, a recent Computing survey found 77 per cent running VMware, as compared with 22 per cent using Microsoft's Hyper-V platform, with Citrix's Xen coming somewhere behind that.

[Click to enlarge]

Computing IT skills survey 2012

John Leonard reviews the skills that IT professionals should be adding to their armoury

The drivers for consolidation - cost and energy savings, flexibility and high availability/disaster recovery benefits - remain very much in place, and most recent research by Computing suggests that in more and more organisations virtualisation of the production environment is becoming a reality.

Virtualisation of datacentre infrastructure is also, of course, a pre-requisite for deploying a private cloud, an area that 14 per cent of respondents believe will be the most important over the next two years. More broadly, Cloud service management was selected by 25 per cent. This could include public or private cloud services, managing service levels from a third party provider, or integrating cloud and on-premise services, for example. With almost two in every five respondents mentioning them, cloud skills are clearly going to be a valuable asset (figure 6).

Once again, VMware features strongly, while the increasing threats from malware, ballooning data volumes and the challenges presented by bring your own device (BYOD), see security, storage and unified comms all in the top 10.

[Click to enlarge]

Enterprise applications
The main trends in enterprise applications are consolidation and collaboration.

Given its overwhelming market share (well over 80 per cent according to Computing research), Microsoft's Exchange email and collaboration suite can call upon a large body of skilled operatives to maintain and configure it. Fifteen per cent have abilities in its nearest rival- Lotus Notes.

Skills in Microsoft's SharePoint collaboration and document management platform come second, followed closely by CRM and IT security policy (figure 7).

[Click to enlarge]

SharePoint skills are currently in high demand. The platform is seen as a flexible and easily customisable foundation for web applications with a wide range of potential uses within the enterprise, including intranet management, BI, file search and social media. It is perhaps this flexibility that led respondents to list SharePoint skills as those most likely to increase in importance. By contrast, demand for Exchange/Outlook qualifications looks to be virtually static.

CRM and business process management (BPM) are seen as other growth areas. Both have the goal of improving services to the customer, the former by pulling together the pools of data and functionality in the finance, sales and marketing department to reduce duplication and waste. BPM is a management approach that promises to drive cost-savings and efficiency and raise customer service and profitability by analysing and optimising, via technology, the various interacting processes that make up the business (figure 8).

[Click to enlarge]

Summary
Tying all the various strands of business technology together, we can see that collaboration and mobility are overarching themes, allowing workers to participate on shared projects from wherever they might be working.

Competitive advantage is being sought through better serving the customer, and by analysing the many streams of data flowing through the organisation in order to gain insight and inform decisions.

In the datacentre, further virtualisation can be expected, with cloud services being utilised to augment or occasionally replace on-premise infrastructure and applications.

By keeping a weather eye on these trends, and perhaps even more importantly, the way that the IT department enables the organisation to adapt to the changing environment, IT professionals can keep their skills fresh and avoid being shunted into technical backwaters - or worse.

About the survey
The survey was conducted by email to Computing's readership in May 2012. A total of 427
people completed the survey. Participants came from a range of vertical sectors, with IT and telecoms, banking and finance and public sector organisations being best represented. The sample was split equally between small ( < 500 staff) and larger organisations.

Download the survey results as a spreadsheet here (right click on the link and save link as / target as)