New Skills for the New IT - Gartner Executive Summary

While continuing to deliver reliable IT services, CIOs have an opportunity to use new technologies and practices to redirect or liberate resources that increase innovation and value for the enterprise. The focus of IT skills is changing -- from service delivery to designing and implementing technology-enabled, information-rich and transformed business processes.

Because the highly skilled talent required to transform IT is always in scarce supply, IT's traditional approach to finding new talent, with its heavy reliance on external sourcing, will ultimately impede a CIO in positioning IT to create competitive advantage for the enterprise. Doing nothing is not an option, since this will lead IT to the lesser role of commodity service provider.

CIOs have an opportunity to re-imagine IT by looking at current resources and developing a skills plan that addresses ongoing digitization of the enterprise, the rise of lighter-weight technologies and social computing, and the need for technology-driven innovation. As shown in the figure opposite, the typical IT organization devotes about 70% of its resources to operating IT -- managing infrastructure and supporting applications. That leaves 30% of resources for upgrading and expanding infrastructure to meet business requirements and for building new or enhanced applications that further automate business processes and improve information. Innovative solutions that allow IT to create new business services make up only a small part of that 30%.

Over time, the percentage of resources devoted to operating IT will decline significantly because of automation and new cloud-enabled delivery models. For example, based on the Gartner 2011 CIO Agenda Survey, 42% of CIOs expect to deliver more than half of their transactions via the cloud by 2015, a figure that will rise to 73% by 2020. This will substantially reduce the internal skills and resources required to run IT, though IT will need reskilling to support the new service delivery models.

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CIOs must cultivate new IT skills

To ensure that IT increasingly contributes to enterprise growth and innovation, CIOs must incorporate a new talent strategy into their IT strategic plan that blends business and IT skills. They will need a workforce-planning process to identify the range of skills involved in operating IT services, building new services and leading business-IT innovation. CIOs should use the following approaches to cultivate the new IT skills:

Buy from the market in the short term.

Contribute to the market in the intermediate term by building internal capabilities through continuing education and reskilling.

Influence the market in the long term by working with educators/academic communities and suppliers.

CIOs need to bear in mind that they, too, must become innovation leaders to foster business support for technology-enabled business innovation.

Source: Gartner (View full report)