Architecture: an emerging core competence for IT professionals

ABSTRACT

With the emergence of globalization, IT organizations have begun to shift from service organizations to solutions organizations. IT professionals must now mitigate complexity by understanding both the enterprise and IT solutions. An IT professional has to balance the business needs of the enterprise with the possibilities that technology offers.

At the same time, technology itself has enabled hard IT skills jobs to become commodities that can be outsourced around the world and performed at a fraction of the cost. This shift has changed the core competencies needed by IT professionals in the developed countries. IT professionals must now have the competencies of leadership/followership, communication and collaboration, problem solving and critical thinking, creativity and innovation, global business expertise, systems thinking, and self management, in addition to the technology expertise and project management skills we expected in the past. Arising from all these competencies, architecture has emerged as an overarching core competence for IT professionals.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of how IT competencies have changed in the last decade and to introduce architecture as a critical component of an IT education curriculum. We will discuss the implications this might have for the SIGITE model curriculum framework.

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  D. Software
  D.3 PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES
      D.3.3 Language Constructs and Features

General Terms:
Design, Management

Keywords:
IT education, IT skills, architect, architecture, globalization