Brief: Acquire New Skills For Technology Management

The age of the customer raises uncertainty for CIOs and their technology management teams. Historically, tech management has used requirements from marketing, operations, and other business areas to build relatively siloed systems. The solutions were often highly complex, but tech management understood how to get them done. The age of the customer changes this by requiring organizations to focus on both the BT and the IT agendas. This drives tech management's need for stronger political, consulting, and cross-organizational skills as it takes on a more assertive stance with technology and taps the explosion of customer data for its own use. We see this particularly for relationship managers, architects, program/project managers, vendor managers, user experience designers, data experts, business process designers, and security experts. CIOs will be able to fulfill some of these needs from within traditional ranks, but the biggest challenge will be to recruit these skills from business and external sources.