By Michael Fitzgerald

Computerworld - The hottest job in IT right now might be the least “T” of them all: business analyst.

Tech purists may shudder — is it the revenge of the suits? — but 23% of the IT executive respondents toComputerworld‘s Forecast 2012 survey said they planned to hire for business analytics skills in the next 12 months, up from 13% in the previous year’s survey.

“IT business analyst” was also rated one of the country’s top 12 jobs to pursue last year by Money Magazine, which listed median pay for that position at $83,100. Computerworld‘s Salary Survey 2012 listed an average total compensation for IT technology/business system analysts at $84,376, up 1.4% from 2011.

While pure tech is hardly in decline — database administrators, programmers and Web developers also made the Money list — business analysts are being viewed by more and more IT shops, and the corporation at large, as an essential function. “It’s one of the most critical roles in the info tech space,” says Allen Hackman, senior director of information technology at Tyco International‘s Fire and Security unit.

The rise of the business analyst mirrors changes in the world of IT, says Hackman, who asserts that the popularity of software as a service, and the commoditization of technology in general, has made business analysts more important. “You don’t need IT to implement Salesforce.com,” he notes. “But how do I apply it, how do I meet my business need, how do I get people to use it? That’s the role the business analyst fulfills.”

IT departments can have good database analysts and developers, Hackman says, but fail without good business analysts on board or at least accessible. “The make-or-break part of a corporate IT department is really the business analyst. It starts with them and ends with them,” he says.

Given this, he says, CIOs and other IT managers have to shift their mindset about business analysts. “The old view of the analyst was someone junior, who would take notes and take a detailed order of the business, build a bill of materials for a project to bill out,” says Mark P. McDonald, an analyst at Gartner. Now, the business analyst has “been transformed into a senior problem-solver,” he says.

What’s changed since the days of the junior note-taker? McDonald points to three shifts:

• Organizations face more complex issues, with IT expected to help the business side weave together multiple kinds of technology to solve those business challenges.
• IT is becoming more commoditized and more outsourced, and as it does so, its main value to the organization becomes analytic rather than procedural. With the easy value from technology already achieved, IT now needs to show the business it can leverage technology for ever more strategic uses, thereby elevating the role of the business analyst.
• Unlike the rest of IT, business analysts are directly assigned to business units, even if they still report to IT. Analysts, therefore, are often viewed as the premier source of IT expertise within the organization and are typically expected to have the communications and social skills that go along with that responsibility, McDonald says.

As a result, Hackman agrees, business analysts are enjoying a certain kind of job demand, as well as security — unusual in IT today. “You can’t outsource knowledge and strategy and critical thinking,” he says.

Read the full article here.

Before The First Day

So, you know what your assignment is for your next client. Or, maybe you don’t, and you just know you’re going out to a client site for some work. It’s an important day, and it’s good to try to be as comfortable and as positive as possible. To start, it’s a good idea to have a relaxing night beforehand. Many consultants start on client sites on a Monday, to start off the week, but it’s not always the case. Try to get a good night’s rest before the first day, have a good meal, relax, and do whatever you need to do. You’ll feel better in the morning for it. It also helps to do any research you haven’t done yet, and to read up on any news that the company has been involved in recently, just to give you a bit of information on the client.

The First Minute on Site

Depending on your employment situation, you may get taken to the client site by your employer, or you may arrive by yourself. This can be pretty overwhelming to start with – it’s a new building, a new location. You’re not sure where to go. There are people walking around with phones, coffees, books, people talking, and you may feel a little lost. This is totally normal – most people would have been in that situation on their first day. Often you’ll be meeting a key client in the lobby – someone who works at the building who can greet you and bring you to the main working area. This is helpful, as you get to see the client for possibly the first time, and you get accompanied into the office. If this doesn’t happen, simply approach the reception desk and ask for your client contact, or let them know that you’re here.

The First Day on a Client Site

The first day on a client site, for me, always goes quickly. There’s so much to learn. You’ll meet a lot of people – your manager, other team members, people sitting in your area, people in other teams, and any other people who may be involved in your role. You’ll get shown around the office, and the features of the office will be pointed out to you. I always try to remember three things when I get shown around:

• The kitchen – it’s good to know where this is so you have somewhere to go away from your desk to make calls, to get a glass of water or other refreshments.

• The bathroom – Seems obvious, but it’s good to remember where it is, instead of asking again.

• Your desk – Also can seem obvious – but in many offices, all desks can look the same, so it’s good to try to remember where you’re sitting!

A great way to get to know people on your new client site is to ask them if there’s anywhere good to go for lunch. Sometimes they might ask you in advance, or sometimes they’ll ask you to come along after you ask – it’s a good way to check out the area and get to know your team members or clients. Sometimes, they might not ask you along – don’t worry, you still made the effort though, and you got some information on some good food spots!

The First Week

After the first day is done, coming back the second day won’t be so touch. You’ll (hopefully) remember where you sit; you’ll have at least one piece of work you can do without assistance or without a lot of company knowledge. You might have a few meetings set up or deadlines to meet. It will give you some structure to your day. Make sure to say good morning to your clients, the ones who sit around you or who you’ve met already. It doesn’t need to be a daily routine – but saying it on the second day shows you’re considerate and polite. As your week goes on, you should get more of a feel of the client site, how it operates, and what your job involves. You would also be meeting a lot more people. It might be a good idea to keep notes on the people that you meet. Their name, position, where they work, what they do, and how they’re involved in your project.

The Next Steps As you progress with your time on your new client site, you should find yourself getting more and more familiar with the environment, the work, the people and the office. While you may not feel totally comfortable for some time, this might be a good thing – it can get a little flat if you’re totally comfortable in a workplace. Keep an eye out for the office culture. Every office has one, though it’s not very obvious. It may be a professional workplace, or it may be more relaxed. People may be punctual, or they may have more flexibility with their appointments. People may be loud and friendly around the office, or it may be a quiet place to work. They may be social after work, or they may work late and then go home for the day. It’s just something to be aware of. It also helps to keep your ears open – as a consultant, it’s good to be able to add value to your clients, and you can do this by being aware of the issues and problems that they face. I hope that clears up some of the mysteries and questions you might have about the first experiences on a new client site!

Thanks to Ben from Complete IT Professional for this guest post.

The jobs of 200 public servants have been slashed in a dramatic effort to cut costs at the Victorian government’s troubled IT agency CenITex.

Chief executive officer Michael Vanderheide made the shock announcement to staff this afternoon in a memo — headed “Labour Rationalisation Program” — that was leaked to The Age.

The job cuts, which will affect mostly CenITex’s team of highly-paid IT contractors, are part of a bigger restructure that will see a whole division, Efficient Technology Services, wound down by mid-year.

The cuts will mean:

• A total of 280 positions, one-third of CenITex’s workforce, will be removed;

• About 80 vacant positions will not be filled;

• About 100 contractor positions and 50 fixed-term contractors will go; and

• Another 50 permanent public servants will lose their jobs, although the government will attempt to redeploy them.

The Age understands the cuts are not directly related to Premier Ted Baillieu’s broader cuts to the public service.

In the recent state budget, the government announced it would shed a further 600 state public servants, bringing total public sector job losses announced since December to 4200.

It is understood the cuts are being made because government departments are not able to pay for their IT services and the flawed financial model on which CenITex was established in 2008.

CenITex services the computing needs of 36,800 public servants and has been the subject of three inquiries this year, including an Ombudsman’s investigation and a police probe by the fraud and extortion squad.

The agency has been in limbo since the Baillieu government halted the rollout of shared IT services across government departments and asked the State Services Authority to review its operations.

The authority’s report and its recommendations have been suppressed by the government.

Last month, The Age reported that the Baillieu government, acting on the findings of the State Services Authority review, had overhauled the body’s organisational structure, a move likely to result in a new board. Board chair Warren Hodgson resigned following the announcement.

In the leaked memo, Mr Vanderheide told staff that some of the internal efficiencies budgeted from the Efficient Technology Services program “had not yet materialised” and revenues from customers (other government departments) was decreasing.

“The coming year for CenITex will be one of consolidation… I have made several difficult decisions,” he said in the memo.

“Where possible, we propose to remove unfilled positions, manage reductions through natural attrition, and look to reduce our contract and fixed term workforce. I also expect some redundancies will be necessary. In all I expect that approximately 200 people across CenITex will be affected.”

A staff member told The Age: “It came as a bit a bit of a shock to say the least. It’s interesting that they are reducing a large number of staff but there are no reduction in the management staff we’re reporting to.”

Community and Public Sector Union assistant secretary Jim Walton said CenITex management had told the union some people may be redeployed to other parts of the public service. “But there’s a freeze on jobs across the public service, you can’t fill any jobs,” he said.

An investigation by The Age earlier this year revealed that 46 per cent of the $377 million worth of contracts CenITex signed since 2008 had gone to highly paid contractors – many on $1000 a day – while the bureaucracy noticed little improvement in its outdated IT.

Assistant Treasurer Gordon Rich-Phillips said the government was committed to delivering a more efficient and effective IT service than the one it inherited from Labor.

“Most of the redundancies announced by CenITex involve contractors. We believe the changes we are making to the organisation will improve its accountability and oversight,” Mr Rich-Phillips said.

When does ‘slow’ become officially stagnant? Today sees the release of another employment report revealing what many people working in technology already knew – that the good times stopped rolling some time ago and won’t be back any time soon.

According to the latest quarterly employment report by the Fairfax-owned job site My Career, the ICT jobs market is expected to grow by less than 1 per cent in the year to November 2012. Advertisement: Story continues below Around 524,000 people are currently working in the sector, with this figure set to rise to only 529,000 by year’s end.

It’s a far cry from the ICT industry’s hey-day of 8 per cent growth in the late 90s, and the pre-GFC years when four to eight per cent expansion was the norm.

The MyCareer report follows last month’s job advertisement survey by the ANZ Bank which revealed modest growth of 2.8 per cent in the number of jobs advertised in the year to date. Resource powerhouses Queensland and Western Australia are responsible for keeping a growing number of ICT staff gainfully employed, with the latter recording a 13.3 per cent growth in IT jobs in the past year.The number of jobs in Victoria shrank by 1.6 per cent over the same period and grew by just 0.5 per cent in NSW. MyCareer report author Michael Emerson said the fortunes of the ICT industry were linked with those of the wider business sector.

European and US debt crises had seen confidence battered and IT investment relegated to the discretionary spending basket since last August, Emerson said. Up to that point the sector had been experiencing a slow recovery, since the dark days of 2008, when the GFC was in full swing. ‘The ICT sector is one that does well in good times and it’s an area that gets cut when budgets are cut,” Emerson said. ICT trainers, web designers and sales people were likely to see increasing demand for their services over the period, he added.

Read more at The Age

By ThoughtWorks.

Continuous Delivery practices are natural fit for organizations who want to manage risks in the delivery of IT services. If this contradicts what you may have been told during painful conversations with compliance teams, this session is for you. Joanne Molesky explains how Continuous Delivery can reduce IT uncertainty. She shares an approach that will help convince auditors of the benefits of frequent release.

Reblogged from GigaOM:

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Enterprise architects have been a staple of corporate IT departments for well over a decade now, starting in earnest with the advent of service-oriented architecture and corporate data modeling. The need for enterprise architecture was spurred by the need to gain control over an increasingly complex computing environment, and an increasingly large backlog of data and feature needs. But those needs are changing, and so is the job of the enterprise architect.

Read more… 901 more words

Templates available include the following categories:

• Business & People Management
• Business Continuity BCP & Disaster Recovery (DRP)
• Contracts, Agreements & Governance
• Due Diligence & Transition
• Projects & Engagements
• Sales & Marketing
• Service Strategy, Management & Operations

What Is An IT Consultant?

First of all, let’s start off by asking, “What exactly is an IT consultant?” An IT consultant is someone who works in the IT industry, external to a company they perform work for, and seen as someone who has expert and specialised knowledge of a particular area. Let’s break this down:

• Works in the IT industry – This is a given. There are many types of consultants out there, but an IT consultant is, of course, a consultant in the IT industry.
• External to a company they perform work on. Generally, IT employees get paid by company X to provide services or perform work for company X. This means, the same company that pays you is the one that gets the work from you. An IT consultant actually gets paid by one company to do work for another company – paid by company X, provide services for company Y. See the diagram below for an idea on how this works.
• Expert knowledge in a particular area. IT consultants are perceived to have expert knowledge in a particular area of the industry. This can often be only a perception – many IT employees have specialised knowledge and can easily transition over to the consulting role. This article will explain how to be an IT consultant.

Benefits Of Being A Consultant

The main benefit of being a consultant is the variety of work you can perform. Consultants are generally hired for a single project (or multiple projects at once), rather than a permanent role. This means that once the project is over, the consultant’s role is usually over and they move on to the next one.

This might seem like a bad thing for someone who has never experienced this before, but I believe it’s a great benefit. I’ve been consulting for years, and this is the part I like most about it. Yo

u get to experience working for different clients, different projects, different industries, and different people. It all builds towards your overall experience as an IT consultant.

 Cons Of Being A Consultant

There are, of course, some downsides of being a consultant. You may find yourself moving around clients a lot, depending on the work you do and the type of projects. This can result in not having a sense of belonging – you might not be able to personalise your desk, make good relationships with work colleagues, and become familiar with particular clients. This is part of the role of being a consultant. As long as you’re aware of these traits, and are content with them, then it shouldn’t be much of a problem for you.

How To Be An IT Consultant

Ok, so you know what an IT consultant is, and what the pros and cons are. Now, you’re asking, “How do I actually be an IT consultant?”.

Well, you do this in a pretty similar way to finding a job as a normal full time employee. The only difference is, is that you’ll be looking for jobs in consulting companies. These are companies that operate some internal staff (recruitment, HR, management, account representatives), but the majority of their staff are IT consultants who perform work for their clients.

Depending on the area where you live, there may be a variety of IT consulting companies. Some of the big companies, such as HP, IBM, and Accenture would have consulting areas. There may be others in your country or city that would also fit.

Start by looking for jobs on your preferred job hunting site (I’m from Australia, so I’ve used Seek in the past) for IT consulting roles. Submit your resume, get an interview, and land the job. It sounds so easy, right? Well, I’m sure you have a desire for career improvement and high motivation, as you’re on my site, but I’ll go into detail on this particular topic in a future post.

When you get a job in your company of choice, they will start by sending you out to client sites – companies that they have agreements with to supply IT services to. Depending on the agreement and the client, getting a role there could involve an interview, a resume, or just a simple introduction. From here, you perform your work for this particular client as a part of the project or team that you’re on.

That’s it! That’s all there is to it! Some of the topics mentioned above can be broken down into more detail, which I will do in a future post, but this should give you an overall guide on what’s involved and how to be an IT consultant.

From Complete IT Professional

• Acccenture
• Ajilon
• CSG
• Dialog
• Dimension Data
• DWS
• Infosys
• SMS Management & Technology

Consultants:

• Biztalk
• Business Intelligence
• Information Management
• Microsoft BI
• Microsoft Dynamics
• Microsoft SharePoint
• Oracle Financials
• PeopleSoft
• PMO
• Salesforce
• SAP CRM
• SAP Mobility

Developers:

• Accenture
• ASG
• CSG
• DWS
• Fujitsu
• IBM
• Infosys
• SMS Management & Technology

Project Managers:

• Melbourne 
• Sydney
• Canberra

Solution & Technical Architects:

• Accenture
• CSG
• DWS
• IBM
• Infosys
• Oracle Corp

New updated version of our favourite scrum ‘crash course’ video.