Why non-IT skills will be vital to IT success in 2020
Patrick Hubbard is Head Geek at SolarWinds. An accomplished technologist with over 20 years of experience, Hubbard’s career includes software development, operations, product management and marketing, technology strategy, and advocacy. An unapologetic market-hype deconstructionist, Hubbard is passionate about arming technology professionals with the tools and skills to deliver services that delight, not just satisfy, users. Hubbard’s current focus is helping enterprises adopt cloud-native and DevOps techniques that deliver the business transformation CIOs increasingly demand.
Today, the value of our IT departments has expanded far beyond operations and technical support. This means the role of the IT pro is evolving to include wrangling the overlapping growing demands for technology across all departments within businesses. Traditional IT siloes have been broken down, radically changing how budgets are allocated and the types of skills IT pros now cite as essential to carry out their work. And in recent months this has been exemplified by a pandemic that has forced business to transform with unprecedented speed to simultaneously support both customers and employees at home.
Enterprises no longer see becoming digital as an option, or a plan—it’s now a competitive necessity. And with a digital transformation programme, comes a greater emphasis on cloud and hybrid IT architecture. At the same time employees expect business applications to be accessible from any device, anywhere, at any time, in almost all elements of the enterprise. As IT becomes even more ingrained in the fabric of the enterprise, spurred on by the development of digital workspaces, the IT pro can become a key player and influencer in plotting the strategy and direction for the business.
In today’s technology-rich environments, IT pros are expected to be experts in the field of new and emerging technologies and to speak the language of business. Today, being limited to implementing requirements in a silo can mean critical business needs aren’t met by the technology they manage.
In this seventh annual study of the trends impacting the IT industry—SolarWinds® IT Trends Report 2020: The Universal Language of IT—IT pros cited the need to upskill in nontechnical skills where cross-functional and business-level communication is necessary. Driving this is a need to push past the hype cycle, moving away from chasing emerging technologies to readdressing the focus on core strategies.
Organisations are reassessing priorities in the shadow of an oncoming recession, and if IT pros are to ensure the enterprise’s IT requirements are not neglected, they must learn to communicate at a business level and routinely ask management to define the core competencies of the business as they relate to technology. The IT pro should be aware if the organisation is prioritising digital transformation, and if it is, what the key performance metrics are for evaluating its true impact.
It’s the job of the IT pro to act as a credible voice of authority in this situation, providing clarity and guidance around the functional details of the technologies themselves.
