I was interviewed by a journalist for CIO Magazine recently for an article on the IT skills gap that is being cited by a large number of CIOs and industry commentators as being one of the most significant challenges facing organisations as they try to embrace the digital world.

The article had been prompted by a news story the magazine had published on its website in February that claimed the offshoring trend in the mid-90s is to blame for the current skills gap. The journalist wanted to know about my own experiences in this area, whether I had experienced the skills gap, whether I agreed with the view that offshoring was to blame and what I thought could or should be done to address the problem.

As I’m sure just about anyone who has done any kind of IT recruitment in recent years will confirm, there does appear to be a lack of appropriately skilled (and experienced) resources available in the UK. You’ll note that I have added experience into this, as this is also an important requirement where there often appears to be a gap in many areas.

And yes, I would agree that offshoring has contributed to the skills gap, but it is not the only reason and it did not cause the gaps I have seen in areas such as architecture and service management. There was no mass offshoring in these areas in the mid-90s.

It’s fairly well-documented that we are not attracting enough young people (or women for that matter) into the industry. And I still meet a lot of people who fell into IT later in their careers, presumably after they saw what it has to offer and, in my view, once they became aware of the broader range of roles that exist in a modern IT organisation. And therein lies one of the challenges; how many young people know about the roles that exist within a modern IT department? They all know about developers, some will also know about roles in areas such as desktop, servers, networks and service desk; the traditional, more-technically focused roles. But how many know about enterprise architects, solution architects, analysts, etc? Roles where business knowledge and communication skills are just as important as technical skills and where you are involved in defining solutions that directly add value to the business?

And through such roles, and the exposure to the wider business they give, it is possible for someone starting their career in IT to move into other areas instead of it happening the other way round. This is something the industry needs to promote; the idea that a job in IT can be the start of a broader career.

So, awareness of the broad range of roles that exist in the modern IT department is one challenge we need to overcome. And this starts at schools and colleges, where we clearly need to be doing more to explain and “sell” IT as a career that is not just for highly technical people.

But in my view there is an even bigger challenge facing the industry; most young people want to engage with, and use, technology. It is an inherent part of their lives and always has been. These digital natives have grown up with the internet, mobile and social networking. And unlike previous generations they do not need a deep technical understanding of how it all works and neither do they need to know how to write code. Even setting up a device and installing new apps and peripherals is a relatively straightforward and painless task that requires minimal technical knowledge.

And neither do most of them want to know how it works; it’s a utility, a service they consume every day, without questioning the how. They just want to engage with technology at work in the same way as they do at home. They’d rather use social networking and collaboration tools rather than design, build, implement or support them.

But when you look at what can be achieved with technology these days and how easy it can be to get started, who can blame them? It’s an exciting time to be, say, in marketing where you can have apps and tools just a few clicks away via the cloud.
And there’s the real challenge to the IT industry; how can we make the technical side of technology as rewarding or exciting as the user-side?

In recent weeks the headlines about the growing influence and IT spending of the CMO and the impact that this is having on the CIO role have been replaced with stories about the rise of Chief Digital Officer (CDO) and how this is relegating the CIO role to that of a support function.

The CDO role, which often reports directly to the CEO, is tasked with using technology to drive transformation across the organisation. The CDO’s remit can also be customer-facing; developing new or enhanced offerings or using technology to complement the core product/service, build loyalty or to support marketing campaigns.

You can read the rest of this post on The CIO Leader, my site for business-focused technology leaders.

I took part in my first online roundtable for MeetTheBossTV last week. For anyone that hasn’t heard that phrase before, it’s a bit like a desktop video conference with 5-6 other people. The event, which was titled “The Cloud and the Business”, was moderated by Adam Burns who asked a series questions about how we were using cloud, what future plans we have, the challenges involved, etc. The other participants came from across Europe and work in industries such as pharmaceuticals, mining and professional services.

Although the entire event was recorded, the details of the discussion are confidential so I won’t be giving you a detailed account of what was said. However, it was very reassuring to hear that, no matter what the industry, we are all facing similar challenges with cloud services; vendor due-diligence, security, privacy and user expectations were mentioned by all participants. In fact the actual technology side of using cloud services was probably the least challenging! Integration was identified as being key to a successful cloud implementation – there was general agreement that an effective integration layer makes using cloud services on a ‘plug-and-play’ basis a real possibility.

Overall it was an enjoyable and interesting event, the technology worked, video and sound quality was generally good and some very knowledgeable contributors. But it was also a bit surreal sitting there at your desk being watched (and recorded) whilst talking to an international cast of strangers about cloud computing!

And a mildly amusing story to finish with: our moderator, Adam, had to do a sound check before the roundtable started for real by getting us all to talk about something. As it was Valentine’s Day, he decided to ask each of us to name the last romantic film we had watched. Did I mention that it was an all-male group? Well, you can imagine the response that question got…