Educating the next generation for running IT as a business

http://www.bladewatch.com/2009/09/04/the-need-to-launch-it-training-university-v2-0/ and http://www.bladewatch.com/2009/12/15/short-essay-on-training-the-next-generation/

I have written a few posts about educating the next generation of IT and business people going forward, and I know there are so many groups and individuals working on this going forward, whether it’s education based around a specific platform, or qualification and certification against a set of processes or concepts like ITIL, like Prince 2. I still feel though that what I needed when I was thinking about IT was a grounding a rules of engagement training coupled with interactive or real life concepts to ready me for the real world – where we can’t just rebuild the server or order a new switch, there are processes and procedures to be followed. At the same time though, in an environment where we have people that think outside the box, “..have you thought about this,  since you can’t do that..” – how refreshing, how engaging.

The world is changing, university needs to evolve with it, I loved my time at university and finances permitted, I always said I’d go back to doing a degree in history or economics. I wonder had my university course been more like it would have been had I decided on a career in medicine it might have proved more valuable financially, emotionally and professionally. What we need to do is bridge the gap between academic study which is so important with the real world scenarios, real world qualifications and experiences so that our graduates and post graduates can not only hit the ground running know the help desk process, service level agreements and understand concepts like ITIL, virtualization or grid, but understand the economics, the business pressures the just in time, the on demand business – all the stuff that dad taught me all these years:

“…don’t reply to that she’s well meaning person, this is what you do and say…”

“…No, no, no, you run the diagnostics, you verify the patches and service packs, rule out the infrastructure, what else could it be? Could it be the application at fault? Oh dear, oh dear..”.

With that then, what would I have wanted from my IT degree going forward, from a university, from an online IT degree course, what would I have recommended as useful, what case studies would I have used and what concepts would I have wished I had experienced? There are so many, there are also so many limitations, reasons why we just cannot do that, but let us continue to live in “Martin-world” where everything is possible, where the barriers can be dealt with, and slowly head back on our journey to reality.

The core skills and subjects I would have asked for would have been:

• Economics and business studies – concepts of marginal cost combining how it should be and how it is in some businesses – direct and indirect costs, elasticity of demand
• Project management including Prince 2
• ITIL training maybe not the complete course, but the basics the incident, the service request, the change process what it all means and why they are different
• Human resource management – in terms of interacting with customers, managing expectations, dealing with failure, how to communicate in business
• Green IT – the possibilities, the justification both environmentally and economically – what it can mean from the desktop to the data center

What technical experience might I have wanted?

• Operating system – Windows/Linux/Unix
• Database – Oracle/MySQL/SQL
• Development – C++/HTML/XML
• Virtualization – Xen/VMware
• Grid/cloud – DataSynapse/Platform
• MiddleWare – MQ Series/IIS/Websphere/Apache
• Monitoring – Ganglia/NSM/OpenView

What experiences would I have wanted?

• Hardware – server stuff, SAN, RAID, network, what a server looks like, playing with blades, understanding how it all fits together
• Concepts – latency, performance per watt, redundancy, high availability and business continuity, operational risk and risk mitigation
• On call and help desk – incident case studies including failures – what went wrong and how could it have been prevented – how the teams fit together

Could we train our IT people like we do our teachers, our other professionals, provide them with the type of degree which balances the right range of theoretical and practical skills which makes them more prepared more effective members of the team? Could we have the degree which is focused around a role, development, infrastructure or application support, leadership or project management? Could the MA be the qualification which includes less technical, but more human resources and leadership training, could the degree rather than focus just on the how good is your development, but also include the documentation, the application release process and roll back?

Going forward how do we translate the traditional IT qualifications and ways of teaching students to be more business relevant, more centric to the challenges that we face today? What range of businesses, start-ups and innovations could we see simply by illustrating to the next generation here is where we are, what do you think we should do, what is your take on it? Only when you are standing outside the issue can you really see objectively where the issues are and what you might change.

Our next generation business and IT leaders share a common path, the boundaries between business and IT continue to change, as they do on several levels being just an IT person or just a business person is no longer good enough, I expect you to understand a credit derivative the return on investment on that project you are trying to get funded, just as I expect you to know what a server is, what a data center is and why it matters to your business. Complacency is no longer an option, in yesterdays world we could say “that’s an IT problem”, and we could let it be one, but as the business becomes ever more dependent on the IT, and becomes in some respects the IT, what affects your IT affects your business, what affects your business affects your IT. A lack of data center space might cause operational issues for the IT, but could be devastating to your business, more capacity, sure in 2011 once the second phase of your data center is completed, for now, no more disk space or servers installed please.

In summary, put it another way could the next generation Martin MacLeod, not just leave university with a BA or a BSC, but also a Prince2, an ITIL and be Cisco/HP/Dell/IBM/Sun/Oracle/Microsoft certified as part of that degree? Could I not be educationally and professionally suited and booted as much as the next man?

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