New Workforce - The Weblog of New Equities

DB2 - the home version

For novice SQL/DB2 enthuasiasts, IBM is offering a free tutorial in the form of The DB2 Business Game:

If you're a beginner with IBM® DB2® and SQL, you may wonder how the technical skills you're learning are used in the "real world." Here is a chance for you to put your DB2 SQL skills into play in this interactive game! Jump into a "run your own business" scenario, where your company's future depends on a key report needed to secure funds for a critical upgrade. Use your relational database skills to build this report.

This is part of an ongoing series of SQL and DB2 tutorials currently offered by IBM.

New Equities hosting presentation on SOA

For those of you in the Charlotte metro, New Equities is once again hosting the Charlotte Java User Group's (CharJUG) monthly meeting. The presentation topic will be:

Enterprise Content Discovery with SOA

The presenter will be Gavin Sutcliffe, whose most recent activity has been to migrate Department of Defense and U.S. intelligence community information systems from proprietary systems to service oriented architectures. He will cover the following topics:

• Schema and WSDL overview
• UML Sequence diagram walkthrough
• Architectural overview
• Query federation and aggregation engine
• Search service
• Service consumer, or client
• Use case walkthrough
• Query entry and Query federation
• Results generation, aggregation, transmission and presentation
• Scalability and Security issues
• Quality of service and reliability

Date and Time:

Tuesday, Sept. 19, 6:30 to 8:30 PM

Location:

New Equities Offices
200 South College Street
Suite 1630
Charlotte , NC  28202
704.373.6373
(Map)

Space will be limited, so RSVP now at the CharJUG Meetup site.

Follow the IT money in 2006

The Top 10 IT projects of 2006, according to Baseline Magazine, include CRM, Collaboration, Supply Chain Management, and Business Analytics, among others. Plan accordingly.

The revolution will be modeled

Hope you were paying attention in Math class. From BusinessWeek via ZDNet:

In a world teeming with data, we ourselves become the math nerds' most prized specimens. Researchers at Aetna Health Care, Amazon.com (AMZN), and many other companies are piecing together mathematical models of customers and employees. Some models predict what music we'll buy, others figure out which worker is best equipped for a particular job. For now, these models are crude, the digital equivalent of stick figures. But over the coming decade, each of us will give birth to far more fleshed out simulations of ourselves. We'll be modeled as workers, shoppers, voters, and patients. Some of the simulations will have our names and credit cards attached, perhaps a few genetic details. In others, our identities will be shielded. Many of these models will be eerily accurate and others laughably off mark. But companies and governments will use them all the same to predict how to sell us things, steer us clear of diseases, and ramp up our productivity. And yes, they'll try to use them to keep us from hijacking airplanes or detonating bombs.

This mathematical modeling of humanity promises to be one of the great undertakings of the 21st century. It will grow in scope to include much of the physical world as mathematicians get their hands on new flows of data, from atmospheric sensors to the feeds from millions of security cameras. It's a parallel world that's taking shape, a laboratory for innovation and discovery composed of numbers, vectors, and algorithms. "We turn the world of content into math, and we turn you into math," says Howard Kaushansky, CEO of Boulder (Colo.)-based Umbria Inc., a company that uses math to analyze marketing trends online.

We've been seeing a lot of press on the the importance of right-brain thinking for technology professionals. From this it's clear that there's still plenty of future for the extreme left-brain types.

The top three IT gigs

An article in CIO Magazine asserts that "the internal IT staff is back". But it also emphasizes that the game has changed:

In sum, the IT workforce is more important to business than ever before. For CIOs, it can become a full-time job to define the new business-facing IT roles, find the right candidates and use their skills in the right way. Three roles in particular have emerged as critical: the project manager, the relationship manager and the business analyst. Experienced candidates in these areas are inordinately hard to find. And some roles, like that of the relationship manager, are hard to define. And there are other difficulties: determining how to compensate these new specialists in a shifting job market, training and deploying them, and—once you've figured all that out—keeping your top talent on board. But CIOs must confront and conquer these challenges if they are to meet the increasing IT demands of today's business environment.

We've previously noted this trend here, here and here. IT professionals who previously could focus exclusively on honing their technical skills are now being asked to morph into more business-facing roles. For some, it's an opportunity to broaden their career path; for others it leads to the conclusion that their path forward is increasingly constrained and marginalized.

But the notion that IT professionals should have to have some understanding of how business operates shouldn't be revolutionary. As one commenter points out, "IT 'is the business' " and that has never stopped being true. In the first decades of the industry, it seemed enough to have people who could figure out how to implement a myriad of new technologies. In the current environment, companies are looking for people who understand how those technologies support the business. On the whole, not an unreasonable expectation. But it definitely ups the ante for IT professionals.

The $100 laptop

MIT legend Nicholas Negroponte is at it again:

Nicholas Negroponte, chairman and founder of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Labs, has been outlining designs for a sub-$100 PC.

The laptop will be tough and foldable in different ways, with a hand crank for when there is no power supply.

Professor Negroponte came up with the idea for a cheap computer for all after visiting a Cambodian village.

His non-profit One Laptop Per Child group plans to have up to 15 million machines in production within a year.

Negroponte's design would make computing accessible to children all over the world, as well as in the US:

Children in Brazil, China, Egypt, Thailand, and South Africa will be among the first to get the under-$100 (£57) computer, said Professor Negroponte at the Emerging Technologies conference at MIT.

The following year, Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney plans to start buying them for all 500,000 middle and high school pupils in the state.

Professor Negroponte predicts there could be 100 million to 150 million shipped every year by 2007.

Who are the new computer whizzes?

The answer may surprise you. Or not.

New wrinkles in Microsoft's certification program

Microsoft is updating its certification program to better align it with the way people work in the field. From InfoWorld:

The changes introduce three new tiers of focus for achieving a Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist certification in Visual Studio 2005 or SQL Server 2005, he said.

For Visual Studio, engineers can achieve certification in either Web, Windows or distributed development to show where their area of specialty is, Valvano said. Similarly, SQL Server Certified Technology Specialists can achieve professional credentials as a database administrator, database developer or business intelligence developer.

Currently, Microsoft has none of these individual certifications for Visual Studio, which more broadly define a certified developer as either an "application developer" or a "solutions developer," or SQL Server, which presently has certifications only for database administrators, Valvano said.

The new credentials "allow us to go much more granularly [into certifications] and align that with how the product is used," he said.

The examinations Microsoft certified professionals are required to take cost US$125 each, the same as they did previously, Valvano said. However, the tests themselves are more rigorously focused because they require engineers to have more specific skills than the previous broader certification tests, he said.

"We're able to have a much better testing methodology that tests against the skill sets people have to use [in the field]," he said. "The tests are much more robust and more in line with what engineers do on the job."

Are you affected to any great degree by this move? If so, will it make it easier to establish your credentials or is it just another hoop to jump through?

UPDATE: More here and here.

Keeping talent in circulation

Businesses are beginning to wake up to the need to have a strategy for managing talent:

Competent businesses are adept at hiring and firing workers. Great businesses however are skilled at developing and deploying talent in ways that continuously grow their experience, stretch their abilities and enable their achievements. Creating work environments that promote people agility across jobs and organizational boundaries is the next imperative for companies seeking competitive advantage through their talent.

It is surprising how few companies develop and move their talent around the organization. They know how to recruit stars, fire failures and replace leavers – but few seem to know how to provide one of the most important factors in retaining talent – opportunities to achieve, move and grow – within the company. Ever hire a star only to see them leave in frustration 9-18 months later because they felt stuck? Or experience shock when an outstanding performer leaves your company after 5 years because they were ‘too valuable’ in their current job to be allowed to move to a different position or department? So instead, they moved to a different company.

There are many organizational and cultural reasons why companies constrain talent. Performance obsessed managers are often reluctant to give up the people resources they feel are needed to achieve ever more challengingly goals and performance objectives. This short sighted behavior is reinforced by management and incentive systems that reward business results but not development of people.

We're glad to see this realization taking hold. Corporations have a tendency to view their employees as the sum total of the skill set for which they were hired. But human beings have a surprising range of talents, and the current notion of "career" actually embodies what would have once been considered several different careers. Consultants and free agents are particularly inclined to seek out development and change. By its nature, the consulting profession has its own built-in mechanisms that enable people to move into new settings, migrate into new roles, and try out new skills.

From the New Equities perspective, working with a community of consultants and placing them on projects, it's just as important to know where people want to go as it is to know where they've been. Companies who think in these terms are already ahead of the game. Consider the example of Cisco, presented later in the same article:

Companies like Cisco that compete in dynamic industries, where technologies, products and markets are in a continuous state of change must learn how to develop and redeploy their talent in an agile manner. The company recast its Pathfinder software application originally developed to support external recruiting and used it to create an internal job matching system. Pathfinder’s corresponding online database, I-Profiler, allows employees to voluntarily enter their resumes for consideration. The profiles capture employees’ work and educational experience, skills, and technical qualifications and detail their career aspirations for development discussions with their managers. Line managers have access to each of their employees’ profiles to assess existing skills on their teams.

Cisco is looking first to its own internal workforce, encouraging people to self-profile so they have a ready-made talent pool. Their process captures not just past experience but also the employee's career path, encouraging discussions with managers. Ultimately, as new opportunities surface, Cisco will be in a position to make the best use of the talent it has in-house.

New Equities is taking virtually the identical approach in building our own community of IT consultants. Our aim is to proactively network with consultants and profile them well ahead of any specific project requirements. Having a complete professional profile means understanding not just work history but career aspirations, not just skill sets but future potential, not just references but connections. Each person who becomes a member of our community brings new knowledge and new connections that can benefit the community as a whole.  The New Equities network comes into play in uncovering new opportunities, finding the right people, and keeping talented people working.

The coming IT job boom

Jim Ware of The Future of Work calls our attention to a recent article in the Herald-Sun (Raleigh-Durham, NC) in which IBM expresses concerns about the coming shortage of skilled IT professionals:

With a critical shortage of Information Technology workers projected in the coming years, it's crucial that university computer science departments do all they can to attract top students to the field, a local IBM official said Tuesday.

At IBM University Day in Research Triangle Park on Tuesday, leading IBM officials and university professors from across the region gathered to discuss new ways of marketing computer careers to up-and-coming students.

In addition to hearing about the work being done at individual university departments, the event provided a chance for small groups of IBM developers and faculty to meet and discuss future research projects and allowed graduate students a chance to touch base with a potential future employer.

Gina Poole, vice president of IBM's Academic Initiative, told about 120 university educators that an additional 2.2 million people will be needed in information technology-related professions by 2010.

"A lot of today's students will be filling those needs," Poole said. "The demand is building up, but the supply isn't building up fast enough."

The prediction of a shortage of IT labor seems to be in utter contradiction to the recent experience of IT professionals in the post-Internet bubble/post-Sept. 11 job market. But IBM is not the only organization making this forecast. As far back as Sept. of 2003, Business 2.0 drew very similar conclusions (full article requires subscription):

The cause of the labor squeeze is as simple as it is inexorable: During this decade and the next, the baby boom generation will retire. The largest generation in American history now constitutes about 60 percent of what both employers and economists call the prime-age workforce -- that is, workers between the ages of 25 and 54. The cohorts that follow are just too small to take the boomers' place. The shortage will be most acute among two key groups: managers, who tend to be older and closer to retirement, and skilled workers in high-demand, high-tech jobs.

To see the demographic time bomb in microcosm, just count the gray heads around your own office. At Sprint, for example, half of the 6,000 field and network technicians are over 50. At Cigna Systems, about a quarter of the 3,400 IT workers will pass 55 this decade. And at Cary, N.C., software maker SAS, more than a quarter of the staff will be eligible to retire by this decade's end. The company's VP for human resources, Jeff Chambers, says this group is filled with veteran designers and engineers, many of them architects of the company's most successful products. "It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see what's going on," he says. "Existing staff are going to start getting out soon, and the feeder pool just isn't coming up. If you're responsible for the workforce, you'd better ask yourself what you are going to do."

The same article also makes the point that most of that work will not move offshore, as offshore capacity represents only a fraction of the total expected demand. Moreover, post-9/11 immigration policies have curtailed the number of H-1B visas available.

Does this foretell a return to the salad days of the pre-bubble '90s when highly skilled IT professionals commanded high rates and generous perks? Perhaps. Predictions of a boom are compelling because they are based on demographic certainties as opposed to expected business cycles or investment patterns. Even so, the reality may play out in unexpected ways that will confound the experts.

If those predictions hold, this development will be welcome news to IT professionals still smarting from the last downturn. Businesses and staffing organizations will need to drastically rethink their assumptions about the nature and makeup of the contingent workforce.