The WA IT Leader’s Summit this week was an excellent event. It was well organised, well attended and had good speakers. Often you don’t get all that so well done to all involved.
There was plenty of discussion on the mythical emerging skills shortage. I think it’s actually a combination of a ‘Talent’ shortage and the IT industry obsession with creating jobs that do not yet exist and making up new job names that Career Councillors have never heard of – Social Media Coordinator???, Data Insight Engineer ??? –If I was a tech-luddite Career Officer possibly I’d suggest Law or Medicine might be a safer bet. What if a student asked what you do in these jobs. There was plenty of the usual hype around mobility, social network participation etc.
The PowerPoints were good but you know really to see the future I still just keep watching my kids and contemplating how the heck corporate can possibly try and keep up and also this idea of formal training vs. environmental assimilation (i.e. babies and iPads). My teenage daughter’s smartphone savviness is already being surpassed by my ten year old’s all-online skype enabled video-conferencing gaming sessions, cloud-based Minecraft server hosting, and Youtube gaming tutorials. He did not get ‘trained’ in any of that.
Unfortunately (after all it was a CIO Forum not an Architecture forum) no discussion (except by me with all the mobility experts during breaks) on my favourite topic the viability and sustainability of the Smartphone mobile app download ‘model’ that is the hype of the moment for consumers but in a Corporate context. This current model as it continues to move fine-grained functionality away from the Portal Tier to the user/device Tier with the associated management challenges being shifted from the service provider to the service consumer….Seriously I cannot manage all my apps already and all I have is a few social media sites and downloaded Theremin and Vintage synth apps to play with on the bus. I don’t really have anything useful – wait till the good stuff comes like micro-transaction management. Forget corporate n-tier applications and the Presentation Tier design because right now its heavy CPU based fat (but too fine-grained) apps in your hands – navigation, UI management, multi-channel and multi-tasking are now device owner responsibilities….
A prediction… I might be wrong but with the fragmentation of the components and ‘bits and pieces’ of social media it needs to be managed at both ends the – provider and the consumer. I see an emerging class of User Management Frameworks with products and solutions like Hootsuite setting the scene in the next year or so. This new product category is not only worth watching but might be one of those get in early and buy some shares gigs. For a bit of a dip into the emerging ‘device tier/poor old user to sort out’ management challenges here is an article on why you should not use Hootsuite – now that must challenge my prediction:
My Working Life 
Leave a comment