Need any more of a wake up call that virtualization and cloud
computing are automating some of yesterday's lower-level IT jobs?
When
InformationWeek's Paul McDougall sat down with
Krishnan Chatterjee, head of global strategy and marketing at HCL
Technologies, last week, he mentioned those technologies automating
the roles that his company used to fill.
That's one reason that HCL, Chaterjee says, is trying to do the
pricier kind of strategic consulting these days--the kind that's
IBM's specialty, the kind that HP and Dell would like to dominate,
too.
"You can look at the early signs that the Indian IT model is over,"
Chanerjee told McDougall.
"Many of these engagements--such as building a digital supply chain
to support an e-commerce initiative--require onsite specialists
with skills in project management and architectural design,"
McDougall notes. The kicker: HCL says that going forward, more of
these jobs will go to people living in the United States.
But consider the overall numbers: "To meet demand for onshore
services, HCL is building out its presence in the U.S. Company
officials said about 8,000 of the their 83,000 employees are now in
the United States, and that number will grow," McDougall writes.
"Ultimately, it wants more than 12 percent of its employees to be
based in the U.S. or Europe by 2015. About 40 percent of HCL's
current U.S.-based workers are Americans or green card holders; the
rest are on H-1B and other temporary visas. Officials say they also
want a larger percentage of their U.S.-based workers to be citizens
or permanent residents."
How much of this is public relations? How many jobs will actually
play out for non H-1B applicants? Those are wait and see questions.
But those old babysit-a-server-or-database jobs? There's no career
path there, HCL is saying.
As for tomorrow's IT jobs, some of them are a far cry from caring
for servers or tweaking databases. For instance, let's talk Ford.
Yes, Ford. As my colleague Chris Murphy explains in an intriguing
column, Ford just became a software company.
"Sometime early next year, Ford will mail USB sticks to about
250,000 owners of vehicles with its advanced touchscreen control
panel. The stick will contain a major upgrade to the software for
that screen. With it, Ford is breaking from a history as old as the
auto industry, one in which the technology in a car essentially
stayed unchanged from assembly line to junk yard," Murphy
writes.
Who does Ford need to design and keep revising its own software
platform? Traditional software developers, plus human-machine
interface engineers "who study how people interact with
technology," Murphy writes. "Ford has been cultivating these people
from within since the early 2000s. HMI engineers come from a range
of backgrounds, from software development to mechanical engineers.
They're people who can live in worlds of art and science at once,"
Murphy notes.
Not exactly your image of a Ford assembly line? Mine either. But
if I was a freshly-minted technology or engineering grad, I'd like
the sound of those jobs. That type of artist gets an interesting
canvas--and doesn't sound easily replaceable.
Source:
InformationWeek USA