A manager first, and a techie second

Forget that you could once bash out flawless code for 24 hours at a stretch, or rebuild an AS/400 from scratch using the blueprints you've committed to memory. The way to the top for ambitious IT managers is through business skills, not technical ones, claims The Changing Role of the IS Professional, the latest guidelines for IT management from the National Computing Centre (NCC).

The successful IT leader is "a manager first and a technologist second", says the report, which is based on a survey of 100 members of the NCC's Skills Panel.

Managing change
The changing role of IT in business has altered the skill sets of IT professionals. IT managers might once have been systems-focused, and subordinate to business or finance managers. Today, the emphasis is increasingly on change management and strategy development. While technical skills have inevitably moved with the pace of developments in technology itself, higher up the organisation the change has been more profound, says the survey.

The NCC attempts to plot a path to leadership for IT managers. "Companies are increasingly selecting the top information systems executive on the basis of general management skills," IBM's Tom Brier told the report's compilers.

"The survey confirms that IS professionals are increasingly concerned with change management and relationship building," said NCC chief executive John Perkins. "The higher up the ladder, the more important it is to display business skills."

"We've been saying this for ages," said Michael Bennett, director of IT recruitment specialist Best International. "The issue is that IS professionals don't always acquire the necessary personal and business skills as they move up the organisation. Recently, dotcoms and start-ups have been searching for non-IS managers for senior IS roles. Technical skills for them are less important than industry knowledge and change management experience."

But technology isn't irrelevant. The NCC quotes one respondent to a similar survey carried out in Singapore, who insisted that maintaining a level of technical competence was vital "otherwise any executive could do my job".

Richard Lloyd, director at IntelliMark, the IT division of recruitment company Robert Walters, believes that UK companies still want people who understand IT fundamentals. "Candidates need to have good communication skills and entrepreneurial flair," he claimed. "They need to fit into the boardroom, but a strong IT background is essential, otherwise the individual will be just a glorified manager, not an IS leader."

The NCC confirms that leadership roles are going to non-IS business managers - and not just in the UK. A Norwegian survey compared the views of established IS leaders - those with more than two years' experience - with recent appointees. The newer managers believed that the most important part of their job was change management, while the long-term leaders saw themselves as the chief strategists. Today's IS leaders "tend to be less concerned with running the IS function, and more concerned with its organisation and overall direction", the NCC pointed out.

Technology still the core
Keith Phillips, chief technology officer for internet auction house QXL, offered a perspective from inside an ecommerce business. "My role is 60 per cent business, 40 per cent technical. I interface regularly with the board: they expect me to understand the business and articulate technology in a language they understand. You're in big trouble if you don't understand the business issues involved, but you have to remember that technology is the core of the business."

The NCC's Perkins agreed. "The development of ecommerce will further accelerate change," he said. "Ecommerce enterprises have to understand that their information systems are the business."

Changing perceptions of the IT industry mean that staff are increasingly being recruited from a broad range of academic disciplines, not just computer science, with the recognition that they will probably have to deal with human beings more than they deal with machines.