New Career Opportunities New Career OpportunitiesSeveral new IS positions in the emerging organizational models are attracting the attention of business leaders; we recommend them to those who wish to improve IS career longevity. Matching internal candidates to the new criteria can be difficult, but few IS shops can afford the ongoing expense and questionable loyalties of outside contractors or the extravagance of hiring large numbers of individuals at competitive salaries that command premiums of 15 to 70 percent or more. Though a few of those key positions are being filled by former IS customers transferring from the business units (3 to 5 percent by 1997), the majority are filled by temporary transfers, a staffing trend that is blurting the distinction between business-unit power users and business-knowledgeable IS hybrids. Those in IS who volunteer for assignments that physically place them in the business units or who are continually building professional or personal relationships with their business counterparts through joint projects are able to make the transfer more easily and should be encouraged and rewarded. Career development (and even survival) in the new IS world will reward those who undertake critical self-appraisal and aggressively take responsibility for defining their role in the less hierarchical, more pragmatic and business-driven IS models. The image of IS in the company will also benefit significantly.
Although many "hybrid" positions-typically requiring business specialist/technology generalist qualifications-are easily filled with internal candidates, mistakes are common. For example, with IS/business account management positions in which the individual is located in a line of business and is responsible for managing the relationship between IS and the business unit, a premium is placed on trust, collaboration and interpersonal skills. Meta Group's research with respect to internal applicants indicates a much higher incidence of success with business-unit candidates (87 percent) than with IS candidates (35 percent), with CIOs often citing personal "chemistry" as the most critical determinant of job success. Our research indicates that too often behavioral aspects are given insufficient emphasis by IS management in hiring decisions. Generally speaking, the cultural change necessary in the transition to the new model requires people gifted with an arsenal of behavior-modification techniques as well as considerable emotional and intellectual persuasive power.
Migrating current positions into the new environment does not necessarily require changing the name of the job, although we strongly encourage titles that are business friendly and not technical sounding. Common career paths indicated in our research include database administrators; becoming data warehouse designers an architects; systems programmers shifting to data warehouse engineers, programmers and administrators; and systems analysts assuming decision-support system and executive information system responsibilities.
Though internal hiring through retraining and redeployment requires sufficient investment in training for both technical skills and "softer" management and behavioral-based competencies, our research indicates that training budgets have declined in recent years. Failure to provide proper training leads to high opportunity costs associated with people seeking education from their peers and superiors; those costs tend to evade the scrutiny of managers who focus on direct expenditures. Ironically, some companies are solving that problem by actually encouraging selected new-breed IS hires to actively engage in peer-level coaching and training, particularly in relationship building, marketing and interpersonal skills. That training becomes part of their job descriptions and is factored into their incentive or merit increase plans, makes shadow costs visible and helps justify the higher expense of new-breed hires.