Welcome to Orcmid's Lair, the playground for family connections, pastimes, and scholarly vocation -- the collected professional and recreational work of Dennis E. Hamilton

 

Smarter IT Skills in Time Enough

ACM News Service - The Increasing Importance of Process Skills.  This blurb is a little scary, to the extent that it points to a dangerous dumbing-down of IT experience: "New technicians today may have the requisite knowledge of technology, but may lack an understanding of how their work affects business operations; they might, for example, patch a critical system during the middle of the business day without realizing the implications of that system crashing."  I find that unreal, mostly because I don't see where operations management would allow that -- unless that is part of the inexperience equation. There's a fetching analogy, that "putting such inexperienced and harried workers behind critical systems is like putting someone who has no driving experience or knowledge of driving laws behind the wheel of a Ferrari."

George Spafford's 2004-05-26 Datamation article offers more perspective, especially on the need for maturing experience and how we may have outrun our ability to achieve that (along with our divided attention problems).  Spafford does list a 5-point approach to moving forward:

• Formal IT Governance
• Risk Management of Rapid, Destabilizing Technology Adoptions
• Hiring for Process Maturity Skills
• Establish Well-Accepted Professional Accreditation (as opposed to vendor-driven)
• Fundamental Process Disciplines in Academic Curricula

The IT Process Institute is featured as a resource for further guidance.

In short, "IT tools will come and go, but the processes learned along the way provide the real value."  There must be room for "along the way" learning.  I think this goes hat-in-hand with a bigger issue: institutional learning takes time and considerable experience over time, by individuals, teams, and the organizations in which they partake.
posted by orcmid at 5/29/2004 09:53:25 AM