Information Technology Can IT become a profession?
IT Employment Advisors: An Internet Journal for Information Technology Professionals and Managers
Most of us who are employed in the field of Information Technology, and our clients, consider us professionals. Though we had in some cases achieved compensation comparable to medicine, law, and accounting we have not achieved the respect and status of those fields. Professions emerge with the increase in the knowledge required to solve a class of problems. This emergence is reinforced as society and the marketplace ask for assurances that a professional's knowledge and practices be reliable and current. Law, medicine and accounting were not born as professions with degree requirements, certifications, and professional societies. Abraham Lincoln never attended law school or took a Bar exam. Professions evolve and the depth of qualifications vary. The practitioners of IT have faced the challenge of responding to the ever diverse and growing knowledge base and to the demands of the marketplace. The panorama of operating systems, programming languages, applications, and organizational settings has made IT the emerging profession of the post industrial society. However, something is not quite right.
IT faces challenges that the traditional professions of medicine, law, and accounting did not face.
First among the challenges is the control of the knowledge base. In other applied fields such as medicine, law, and accounting the knowledge base is largely generated by the profession and is publicly shared. In the IT field a great portion of knowledge is proprietary and controlled by corporations rather than publicly shared through peer organizations.
The second challenge is the nature of the IT client. In medicine the client is the patient, medicine has a one to one relationship and accountability to the client. Law and accounting have some dimensions of this one to one relationship but are closer to the IT model in that complex organizations are also part of the relationship equation. Still, law and accounting largely maintain the one to one model and the development of those professions has helped to formalize the exchange with the client.
The third challenge is the personality of the IT worker and their understanding of what is needed to achieve a professional status beyond the position of hourly wage or salaried worker.
The fourth challenge, is the globalization of the IT profession and the exportable character of IT work. Unlike medicine, law, and accounting IT work has become exportable. This fourth factor may be the most important element causing the crippling of the IT profession.
So what went wrong, and can it be fixed? Part of what went wrong can be found in the foundations of the opportunity that IT represented to the work force. As an emerging field, few barriers to entry concerning education, certification, time in field, or journeyman requirements were created. Corporations and consumers were fueling demand for hardware and software applications. These demands needed to be met quickly. In those early days the engineering fields had some discretion over the IT function. Without much of a fight, control was taken away from engineering and given to anyone who could deliver the application in a desired time. The profession and culture of engineering were not suited for the huge demands that the marketplace was generating. Not everyone could be a programmer, but they did not need to be engineers.
Corporations and entrepreneurs, who quickly moved to the corporate model, became the money engines behind the IT boom. Intellectual property law supported their ownership of software and hardware applications. Recruitment of talent into the new field was wide open. People with a background in Computer Science still had an edge, but demand was so great that companies were willing to give non degree and non technical degree workers a shot at the work. Because new languages were emerging at what seemed like a quarterly pace, companies were willing to foot two or three months of learning curve time, a policy that is now rare.
Though new languages, applications, and systems created more jobs and opportunity, they also created confusion regarding standards and skills. The idea that the company name was what provided the definition of the standard robbed the work force of a foundation element of a profession. That is, the meeting of leaders in the field to set standards independent of special interests and to advise management as to best practices and standards. The binding of standards to a company name to specific solutions and applications stunted the advisory skills and function of the IT worker. It also helped corporations such as Microsoft in making their standard the reality through their marketing practices. The power of corporations such as Microsoft, Intel, Oracle, and Cisco to drive the decision making of clients is a problem for the development of the IT profession and a problem for the clients of those companies. Neither of these problems has yet been solved.
To review, the first two problems confronting the development of IT as a profession has been undermined by large software companies driving professional choices of IT workers regarding the programming tools required of their work. Also, these same companies have been driving the decision making of their clients, robbing the IT worker of their capacity as an advisor to management. These factors turn the opportunity to organize as a profession to meet and set standards into a pipe dream. What little development has occurred is still largely driven as company specific certifications, many of which are well below the standards of the CPA exam. Some efforts are making progress in such areas as project management certification, security, and system auditing. However, across the workforce very little progress toward becoming a profession has taken place.
If the power of corporations was not enough to forestall the development of the IT profession, we have the problem of the IT personality type. Although the boom in IT created many jobs for workers, who might not have been classified as "technical people" the process still tends to recruit the more introverted personality type. The industry in the early days of the technical boom also offered good salaries for interesting work. Many of these people knew they would not otherwise find this kind of work for this kind of pay in other fields. The weight of the marketplace was stacked against IT staff organizing a broad-based membership in a professional society. The seizure of the standards debate by the marketing experts of the large manufacturers censored what could have been the main basis of professional power within the workforce. Vocal extroverts often found themselves ostracized by their own corporate management.
With the end of the Bush recession, and the onset of the technology boom of the 1990's, the number of IT workers rocketed, salaries soared and the challenge of developing the next big thing produced heady times in the field. This was capped off with the Y2K spike in demand and salaries. However, Y2K was not a good thing for IT in the end. The design and programming flaw, its over hyped threat, and its consumption of funds brought the wrong kind of attention to the field at the wrong time. The shutdown of Y2K staffs, the Dotcom bust, the lingering doubts of management regarding the legitimacy of Y2K, and the IT field that created it, and the onset of the current recession, has weakened the march toward becoming a profession.
The ongoing recession has dealt yet another blow to the workforce by corporate management's search for lower priced IT workers in other countries. This might be the death blow challenge facing development of the IT profession. The decision by too many American corporations to export tasks that would otherwise require them to pay high salaries to U.S.-based workers breaks the social and economic contract that fuels the engine of the American economy.
The growth in IT jobs and salaries was one of the greatest factors to U.S. economic growth in the 1990's. The U.S. economy is consumer driven. Creation of the IT workforce with good salaries fueled a significant part of the economy in that decade. The IT workforce was the first to experience the current recession. IT workers were feeling the collapse in growth three to six months ahead of nearly everyone else. IT layoffs have been painful and long. Salaries for new IT jobs have been cut significantly from three years ago. This is creating a gap between new and reentry IT workers and their managers that does not foster the development of the profession. Topping off this misery are the decisions by the upper levels of corporate management to export jobs.
The state of the profession cannot be separated from the state of the workforce. At this juncture in IT and the economy the state of the profession is not good. What is especially disabling are the ways in which corporate clients, software giants, foreign labor markets, and short term budgeting affect both the economy of the country and development of the profession. Fixing the profession will be a significant challenge in this environment.
*Tim Bagwell is editor and publisher of An Internet Journal for Information Technology Professionals and Managers ITEmploymentAdvisors.com. March 2003 Issue Vol. 1. No. 3.
