Pure computer programmers and one-dimensional technology specialists like network engineerare are going the way of the typing pool. In demand are deeply technical professionals with multiple certifications in virtualization, networking and security technologies working primarily as component engineers and IT architects. These job titles include cloud architect, cloud capacity planner, cloud infrastructure administrator and integration architect.
CIOs and IT employment experts, including Janco Associates, Inc. predict that this bifurcation of IT roles will vastly accelerate, with most professionals falling into one of two major categories: technical specialists and business specialists.
The people who work in these roles design and maintain the underlying framework or architecture. On top of this architecture sits a shifting inventory of cloud services, plug-and-play Web-based applications and easy-to-use proprietary software components that together represent the key source of a company's competitive advantage.
Technical Specialists
Technical specialists are the people who work in a They kinow about data standards, information standards, virtualization, networks, mobile technology and IT architecture, among other things.
Organization will have far fewer people than today's IT department, but these workers will have an extremely rich set of technical skills, and they will understand precisely how their business makes and loses money and how all transactions flow through the enterprise.
This is where the enterprise's overall business process and technology architecture will be maintained. The infrastructure will be made up of multiple services furnished by a variety of outside suppliers, coupled with software components that were designed both externally and in-house and that are extremely intuitive and easy for various business functions to assemble and use competitively.
All indications are that by 2020, a big chunk of technical specialists' work will involve integrating a broader array of technologies and services into the overall enterprise infrastructure, CIOs say. That's why a broader set of networking, software, virtualization and other skills will be required.
Business Specialists
The work of business specialists is matching the right IT tool to the business need at hand. These are super-IT-savvy business experts who understand how the business works, how transactions flow, what makes and loses money for the company, and where and how technology can help or hinder the business.
This is where the upwardly mobile career action is, as well as the greatest coolness factor.
IT's future revolves along three interrelated dimensions all of which converge in the IT career track. They are:
- Innovation, which he defines as the ability to convert ideas into money;
- Business analytics, which involves operations research, data mining, data integration, reporting and statistics; and
- Risk management, which requires a keen knowledge of business processes.
By 2020 technology will be easier to use and it will be more prevalent in other parts of the business and not just the purview of IT. It is about having employees who are versatile and who know various technologies and business processes. It makes us more flexible and reduces risks. Rotation creates versatility.
The CIO role becomes much more about how to use technology to help the business rather than how we provide the technology.
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Disaster Planning Best Practices
Without a good Disaster Plan Business Continuity is at risk
 Planning for a disaster is a difficult task at best. A major provider of disaster recovery services, lists hardware problems as the number one cause of disaster, followed by power outages, hurricanes and floods. CIOs often ask "What scenarios should we prepare for" and "How likely is it that it will happen to us" When one thinks of disasters, big events such as Hurricane Katrina or 9/11 are the first come to mind. But if we look at the ultimate consequence of a disaster - downtime - we can see that any event, large or small, can have the same effect on IT infrastructure.
Disaster recovery and business continuity best practices are well documented in the Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Planning Template. The top 7 best practices are:
- Focus on operations
- Train everyone on how to execute the DRP and BCP
- Have a clear definition for declaring when a disaster or business interruption occurs that will set the DRP and BCP process into motion -
- Integrate DRP and BCP with change management
- Focus on addressing issues BEFORE they impact the enterprise
- Validate that all technology is properly installed and configured right from the start
- Monitor the processes and people to know what critical
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