Sky's the limit for digital

'In a corporate environment, no one wants a back room boy.' Richard Manthel, managing director of Robert Walters. Photo / Supplied

In March the European Commission released its Europe 2020 strategy for sustainable growth and jobs.

It replaced the previous 10-year strategy which had largely failed to turn the EU into "the world's most dynamic knowledge-based economy by 2010".

New targets include raising investment in research and development to be 3 per cent of GDP, and making sure at least 40 per cent of youngsters have a degree or diploma.

Whether the EU and its currency still exist in 10 years may be playing out in the streets of Athens about now, but those sort of strategies will affect the New Zealand labour market ... particularly since we export so much talent and import so much of the skills we need.

The Open World Forum 2020 FLOSS roadmap (for Free Libre and Open Source Software) predicts the rise of cloud computing means by the end of the decade 40 per cent of IT jobs will be open source-related.

Stepping back and looking at wider environmental forces, there are changes coming which will affect the workplace and the jobs we do.

Whatever your religious position on manmade climate change (and technologists can do the maths, so they're more likely to accept it's happening), energy consumption is going to be a problem.

The US military is warning surplus oil production capacity could disappear within two years and there could be serious shortages by 2015.

That's a long time before the oil starts flowing from the Great South Basin into Invercargill.

Green computing, now low on the CIO's priority list, could become the necessity.

The centralised workplace may finally be over, as Aucklanders caught a premonition of during the great power crisis of 1998, and the work of IT staff may be not making sure every PC in the building is working, but every employee can access the corporate applications wherever they are.

The United States tends to eschew the green rhetoric in its forward planning. A recent assessment by the federal government put network systems and data communications analysts at second place in its list of fastest growing job sectors over the next decade, between the biomedical engineers and the home health aides needed to look after an aging population.

That's understandable. The amount of data which needs to be managed, stored and made some use of is growing exponentially, taking up physical resources like huge disk farms and gigawatts of power.

"It used to be information, but now it is turning back into data," says Don Sheridan, the director of innovative learning technologies at Auckland University's school of business, contemplating the impact of technologies like terabyte ethernet.

Most of tomorrow's technologists will come through not just the computer science departments but engineering and business schools like Sheridan's. Those institutions need to constantly reinvent themselves, while identifying what core skills and values they need to pass on.

Whatever technology people end up working with, the one constant in IT is change. Many of the technologies you will be used to in a decade haven't been invented, and the job you will do probably doesn't exist yet.

That's why people working in the sector need to be flexible and to keep refreshing their skill base.

For the business school, the business of technology is business, so foundation level papers try to instill understanding of business principles.

"Knowing a specific thing is not as important as having a general view of business processes," Sheridan says.

Being able to communicate with non-technologists is vital. The days of the computer geek with limited social and interpersonal skills is over (though there are sure to be a few lurking behind the cabinets).

The act of writing programs is now less about lines of code and more about taking elements which have already been written and putting them together.

Being able to navigate those object libraries can become the skill.

Don't expect the way we communicate to stay the same. Sheridan points to the rise of Pecha Kucha, a game of presenting ideas through 20 slides in 20 seconds, as an example of the sort of skill people may need to pick up. He says the data versus information problem is sparking new interest in taxonomy, the science of classification.

"How do you present information to people without confusing them? Choice is not a small issue," he says.

The business school now offers three distinct paths into technology.

There is the managerial path, for accounting students who want a background in information systems.

There is the traditional programmer/developer path, producing people who are adept at using current software to design and build applications and systems.

Sheridan says Auckland is the only business school in Australasia to also have a telecommunications group, where fundamentals include Cisco certification.

"They are not engineers but business focused. The students build networks in the lab and see how they function," Sheridan says.

Across the road at AUT University, Tony Clear from the school of computing and mathematics sees IT as a fashion industry where what's old can become new again.

"Cloud computing is essentially the old computer bureau revisited," he says. "IT is essentially a service industry. It may provide products but service is the goal. The drivers of technology, communications, collaboration and service provision are all interrelated."

Some of the changes coming are about how we work and who with. Academics are increasingly familiar with working in global collaborations, using technology to sweep away country and institutional barriers to do research or development projects.

"As an academic you end up working part face to face, part globally."

New Zealand's remoteness means that's probably the way many of us will work," Clear says. "The challenge will be find the useful spot for ourselves in the value chain."

He expects that spot is likely to be the ability to develop new products and services which have a software dimension. That means our schools will still need to produce people who can solve technical problems quickly.

"Developing innovative products requires software and software development remains hard. Even with high level programming languages you need a structured way of thinking and the ability to relate the context to the technology."

Clear expects outsourcing to wane, as the deficiencies of sending chunks of work to India or the Philippines becomes apparent.

"If all you are doing with software provision is running global arbitrage on the labour costs, you end up with a situation where no one can afford to live but everyone gets paid. It's a crude model of resource use."

Clear is concerned the utilitarian model of study is too narrow, and some more liberal arts education would be of value.

"One of the issues with globalisation is around intercultural collaboration. The scope for gaffes is huge," he says. "If you don't understand your own culture because you've never read a book, how can you hope to understand another culture?

"The challenge is to know enough to know what we don't know."

The recruitment firms tend to work on much shorter time scales, but they're seeing shifts in the way technology is deployed.

Richard Manthel, the New Zealand manager for recruitment firm Robert Walters, says the need to translate business ideas into technology is behind growing demand for good business analysts and project managers.

He's also seeing the changes devices like iPhones are creating, with business applications moving from the centre to the edge of the organisations - with different skills needed to develop and support them.

"There will be companies inventing technology who will need creative people with IT skills to cut code," Manthel says. "Then there will be people like business analysts and project managers to decipher those technologies into the business."

He says companies which embrace technology can attract talented workers.

"IT people want to be in companies that are leading-edge, working on good projects.

"When Air New Zealand developed its own online booking system, it was exciting for guys who worked there."

Martin Barry, from AbsoluteIT, is seeing business, communication and interpersonal skills becoming more important in who gets hired.

"In a corporate environment, no one wants a back room boy," he says.

Having some technology or cross-functional skills is also becoming more important for people moving into senior management roles.