The Evolution of IT Jobs

Sally Bradt provided me with a link to this article, IT Roles Facing Extinction.  While the title sounds pretty dramatic and negative, I find the article to be more hopeful.  Yes, some roles might be facing extinction, but there are more coming along to replace them.

Some emerging and expanding roles, according to author Kerry Doyle, include project management, public speaking, and mathematical expertise.  Moreover, the author sees IT as evolving to become more outward looking and focused on helping the larger enterprise leverage technology to improve.  Many of these skills are related to what we learned earlier this month in our leadership training from MOR and Associates.

Areas that the author describes as changing are these:

1. Programming
2. Data Center
3. Data Technology
4. Security

I encourage you to read the article in full and think about the impact on your own career.  I predict that we will continue to need a strong IT staff in the coming years, but many jobs will change.  Be prepared to change with them.  And in order to avoid becoming too concerned about this change, look back over your career and think about how much your job has changed since you started.

Managing Yourself by Managing Your Time

One of my goals for our ITSS leadership work is to manage my time better.  I think I have always been fairly good at this.  I have a regular habit of spending my first hour of the morning planning and reviewing my calendar.  When I attend leadership training two years ago, I learned to schedule time in my calendar to work on big projects that require concentration and careful thought.  I also schedule time weekly to work on leadership, either by reading key articles, reviewing past training materials, or just thinking about what's important.

Despite all this, I will admit to being an email junkie.  Although I've tried, and will continue trying, to reduce my attention to email, this is a real challenge to me.  Even my first hour of the morning includes some email.

Here are a few resources I've found on this topic:

• The War on Interruptions, by Chip and Dan Heath
• Too Much Information, by Schumpeter
• Never Check Email in the Morning, and Other Unexpected Strategies for Making Your Work Life Work, by Julie Morgenstern

Now I have to admit that I haven't yet read the book by Julie Morgenstern, although I did enjoy the video on this page.  However, I have contemplated the title of the book and what it might mean for me.  And I have come to the conclusion that, at least for now, I'm simply not going to quit reading email in the morning. 

Here is my rationale, or maybe my rationalization, for this decision:

• A big part of my job is communication, and I often use email to do this.
• I organize many of my tasks with labels in email, so to work on a project, I want to review these emails.
• I want to be responsive to those who make requests, or provide information, via email.

So given that I'm not giving up on email in the morning, what will I try?

• Reduce time in the inbox.  Given that I do label things, if I want to work on a project, move to the emails with that label and try to stay there.  Don't quit flipping back to the inbox and get distracted by new messages.
• Put big jobs on my to-do list and file emails away.  Even if there is still work to be done, I can remind myself of this with my to-do entry and avoid getting distracted by seeing the email in my inbox.
• Work on extending the time between trips to the inbox.  Here is where the big distractions lie, along with the tendency to try to multi-process.  I've read that humans aren't really very good at multi-processing, and I've come to believe that for myself.  I'm working on doing one thing at a time.

I hope some of these ideas might resonate with those of you reading this blog.  If so, I invite you to comment.

I Have Terrible News

I received a very interesting review today of this article:
I Have Terrible News:  Value of Communication in Honesty
by Jack Zenger

The review I read came from Jim Bruce of MOR and Associates.  But here is my take on this article.

I like to think of myself as a compassionate leader, so I tend to avoid hurting the feelings of others.  This means I sometimes have difficulty delivering an important message, when I know the recipient is going to feel terrible about it.

In this article, Jack Zenger points out the value of being brave enough to deliver the difficult message.  I am going to work hard on this.  It will be important to balance compassion and honesty.

Certainly there are many messages that don't need to be delivered at all.  What would be the point in deliberately setting out to hurt someone's feelings if there were to be no benefit in the end?  But if you see that someone's behavior is hurting their ability to do the job well, is it really doing them a favor to stay silent?

At our MOR training last week, we learned that "feedback is a gift."  We learned to say "thank you" when someone offers feedback, even if it difficult to hear.  Let's all practice this.

Leadership Training

On July 19-20, 2012, Information Technology Systems and Services (ITSS) at the University of Minnesota Duluth (UMD) hosted a leadership training session from MOR and Associates.  Greg Anderson and Lori Green worked with us for two days on these topics:

• Creating Your Presence
• UMD Challenges
• Organizational Strategies and Leading Change
• The Three Lenses:  Strategic, Political, and Cultural
• Understanding Work Place Culture
• Leading From Where Ever You Are
• Stakeholder Analysis and Scenario Planning
• Taking Charge of Your Development

Before we can make progress on our own leadership skills, we must first make time to work on them.  This means managing our time, and our calendars, much more strictly and thoughtfully, so that we can focus on what's important and make time to reflect, learn, and grow.