Project ITC: Tomorrow's Essential IT Competencies
How to determine, develop and deploy them
Project ITC explores the changing business demand for IT competencies, what competencies are most essential to IT's performance, and how to source and develop them.
What are the most important competencies - skills, knowledge, experience, behaviors - in an IT organization today, and tomorrow? That's a very tricky question because so many forces are in play:
- The expanding roles of IT organizations - including in non-traditional areas such as business process management, innovation, and integration - demand more business-IT hybrids than ever before.
- The unrelenting march of technology requires up-to-date expertise in emerging technologies, their business applications, and enterprise architecture.
- The growing emphasis on managing the business demand for IT services places a high premium on relationship, business value and organizational change management skills.
- The growing importance of information assets - including intellectual property, corporate knowledge, and proprietary methods of business analysis - demands a new perspective on information systems.
As backdrop, workforce demographics are changing, technical education isn't keeping pace with demand, and many IT organizations are facing potentially debilitating retirement waves. However, the options for sourcing IT talent continue to expand with the globalization of the IT services market. Put all these pieces together, and the question of IT competencies is more complex and more business critical than ever.
Re.sults Project ITC will enable participants to address questions such as the following:
- What competencies are most important to the work and performance of our IT organization? How are the necessary competencies changing?
- What competencies are most essential to maintain in-house?
- What are the most important IT leadership competencies today and tomorrow?
- Who should make the determinations around IT competencies, and how? How can the "voice of the customer" help drive those determinations?
- How should we best source, develop, and deploy the most critical competencies?
- Demand for communications and relationship skills is on the rise - how can we best develop them quickly and effectively?
- Demand for "connections" skills (portfolio, vendor, and services management) is on the rise - how can we best develop them quickly and effectively?
- What competencies are on the wane, either through obsolescence or because they are easily sourced outside the company?
- What should our IT competency model and talent strategy contain?
Project ITC features the participation of some of The Concours Group's most experienced practitioners and researchers, including Vaughan Merlyn, an authority on business and IT organization and strategy; Dr. Keri Pearlson co-leader of the Concours IT Leadership Development Program and an expert in managing information systems; Tim Donahue, an expert in talent and human resources strategies; Bob Morison, co-author of Workforce Crisis; and Dr. Margaret Schweer, an authority on talent development and human resources for IT, who will direct the project.
Project ITC is included in memberships in the Talent Management Concours and in all Concours programs for CIOs.