BIZVOICE: IT future looks golden

Every two years, the U.S. Department of Labor issues projections about employment prospects in a variety of occupations. These are used by students to plan their careers, by schools to develop academic programs, and by employers to lay out their recruiting strategies. The latest estimates, issued in November last year, paint a rosy picture for careers related to information technology. In spite of offshore outsourcing and the general doldrums facing the U.S. economy, the experts predict significant demand for graduates in IT —- five of the nine fastest-growing jobs that require a bachelor’s degree are in IT, with more than twice as many new jobs as in all sciences and engineering combined. The IT-ification of business and industry is still going strong, and new employees are constantly needed to continue this process. Companies are hiring and actively recruiting. Often they resort to offshore outsourcing because they can’t find qualified staff to fill their positions. It is truly a good time to be in the field of information technology.

On Wall Street, the picture for IT looks promising as well. The dot-com bust is clearly over, and companies such as Microsoft and Google have larger market capitalizations than General Motors. Web 2.0 companies such as Facebook and Twitter are drawing more and more attention, and the average investor feels more comfortable investing in tech stocks, albeit with more skepticism than they did in the late 1990s.

At universities across the country, the end result of these positive developments is renewed energy in computer science. Enrollments, which had dropped by about 50 percent since 2000, are beginning to stabilize. New courses emphasizing today’s reality —- multimedia, robotics, virtual worlds —- are increasingly being used to add zip to introductory computing classes. Incoming freshmen once again say they want to major in computer science.

As impressive as this turnaround is, a closer look reveals that this characterization misses a much larger picture. The jobs the DOL characterizes as IT are computer experts —- programmers, network analysts, database managers, software engineers. They are the jobs people envision when they think of working for Google or Facebook —- designing and creating information systems that help run our economy and enrich our lives. Computer science programs do a good job producing students with these skills. But focusing exclusively on these jobs in these industries is looking at the tip of the iceberg. Because the real impact of information technology is not in companies that build our IT infrastructure, but in the companies that use this infrastructure —- the Boeings and General Motors and Citicorps of our world. And even there, the real impact is not in the company’s IT units, but in the rest of the company. It’s about the information, not the information technology.

Business schools have been preaching this message for the past decade and turning out a generation of business leaders well versed in the importance of information technology. But times are different now, and the pace of integration is accelerating. It’s not enough to have an information strategy that is implemented by a highly qualified and specialized back room.

The competitive companies are those that embed information in the fabric of their organization —- in their business strategy, their products, and their services. In the way they are organized and the way their employees work together. New companies are embedding computational thinking and information strategies across their entire organizations.

Preparing students to contribute to this world requires a new form of technical education. Students need a holistic approach that blends information and information technology with the environment in which it will be used. One that focuses not only on building information systems, but building systems that magnify the power of the individuals working together in their organization. New academic programs with this objective are popping up at leading universities across the country, with names such as Informatics and Information Science. These programs inject computational thinking into every discipline and professional domain, and human and organizational thinking into technology design. These programs produce graduates who are equally adept at understanding people and organizations, as well as technology. Graduates whose jobs won’t be outsourced, because their work is embedded in the entire business strategy of their organization.

When you look at the Department of Labor projections, it’s hard to point to the jobs that are IT-ified, that blend computational thinking and information strategies into the way that a job is done. And yet the success of this integrated approach is unmistakable and growing. As a member of one of our advisory boards put it, students who blend technology skills with a deep understanding of people and an application domain are “golden.”

The future belongs to these students, who embrace both the human and technical dimensions. It is these kids who will build the next generation of information systems that expand our horizons, augment our creativity, and let us tap into the collective talents of people.

> Peter Bloniarz is the founding dean of the College of Computing and Information at the University at Albany, State University of New York. Bloniarz is also one of the founders and the former research director of the university’s Center for Technology in Government. He joined the university’s computer science department after receiving his doctorate from M.I.T.