Which direction are IT heading?

The natural career path in IT is something like:

specialist -> team leader of specialists -> technology manager / project leader -> CIO/CTO.

It's to build technical awareness and social skills especially management. Working with people who follow such a career path is simpler and with less conflicts. Such people in fact connect and are at the same time mentors for those at lower career levels. Predictable actions with development plans for employees.

But unfortunately, this is slowly becoming more and more rare. I like to analyze various things in the field of management and I am surprised by the trends that can be observed. In my opinion, these trends are negative in a way. And above all, the very definitions and job titles are slowly being degraded.

In management theory, the word manager is used for being responsible for between 5-7 people. Today, you can be a manager of yourself - meaning 1 person.

Project management as the only thing you finished was a theoretical project management course. How can you manage a technical project without knowing the technology in which that project is embedded? Through stories and tales at working group meetings? [Doesn't work does it?]

The problem with strict technical staff - instead of increasing the hiring of exactly such specialists (programmers, networkers, etc) - today the problem is solved by increasing hiring for coordinators or new project managers (see example above). [Doesn't work does it?]

Since more coordinators don't work how about a matrix structure and assigning specialists to multiple projects? [Doesn't work does it?]

Then how about taking on even more projects and somehow overloading the specialists even more? Maybe it will have an effect? [Doesn't work does it?]

The hardest thing about IT is understanding what impact it has on the business and what impact the business has on IT. This is not an easy topic and really requires cross-cutting knowledge.

To do the project (short version) you need:

• design the architecture and link it to the revenue model (!)
• consider technology options - that is, which technology meets the substantive requirements
• delegate tasks and coordinate them for common points (mile stones) for the selected technology
• execute tests and analyze application's security

Technology knowledge is required at each of these stages.

It seems that the current career trend in IT is as follows:

(empty) -> (empty) -> technology manager / project leader -> CIO/CTO.

And looking at the job descriptions, the CTO/CIO is really Project Leader. Some companies have already figured out what the problem is and are increasing their hiring of technical staff. But.

They are not solving project management problems like number of coordinators of coordinators.

A pretend leader without technical knowledge can't get respect since he lacks domain knowledge. It is not possible for him to have prestige and full confidence in the decision.

So how do the specialists themselves look at this subject. They also confirm that increasingly the requirements are to specialize in several technologies. This is unrealistic because a day has only 24 hours.

In a sense, automation can be a way out. It is best to automate standardized technology with good documentation. Meanwhile, in companies we know how it looks like.

I will honestly say that I do not know how it will end up with 5-10 years.

It seems that companies in terms of organization cannot continue to operate in an efficient manner. It is rather reasonable to expect that the time to solve problems will permanently increase.

This is not about on-premise or cloud technology - this is about a permanent lack of resources in the form of knowledge.

Even if someone creates a new ticket, even if the technology because it quickly processes, assigns and even tries to solve the problem - many new events will be closely related to changes in the organization and technology. Someone will have to make decisions. Decisions that will affect ... whether this business will still exist. This is not a pessimistic comment, this is the natural task of the market - to self-regulate within the limits of law and technology.

The old motto is:

Chaos -> Management -> Chaos.

probably slowly it is time to change it to:

Chaos -> Information Technology + Management -> Chaos.

The latter is interesting because many companies have not yet matured to the stage of having an Enterprise Architecture. [You're guessing right for this position, too, you need to know something about technology]

#management #itmanagement