The emerging trends
The technological world is changing very fast, including the required mobility and technical skills to support these changes. Most global companies are now operating 24 hours a day and 7 days per week. Today knowledge has become a key strategy because of Moore’s law: “Computing power doubles every two years, technical knowledge changes every seven years”.
Software is a major contributing to the global economy, it has been applied in various ways to achieve many business goals such as faster, better and cheaper with million of jobs being created every year. The number of people supporting software development has increased from several thousands to several millions in the past twenty years and they are dispersed across all economic sectors.
Trends in US enrollment for software degrees have fluctuated over the last several years. Increases in enrollments were spurred by the growth of the PC in the early ’80s and the internet in the early ’90s but recently enrollment dropped significantly due to the media press magnification of outsourcing and create a shortage of software skill workers today. The software industry is also changing with so many new companies and new ideas. The focus of attention has moved from product to service.
Following are some of the emerging trends:
- Software as a Service” (SaaS) – Software application delivery model where a software vendor develops a web-based software application and hosts and operates the application for use by its customers over the Internet. Customers do not pay for owning the software but rather pay for using it. They use it through an API accessible over the Web and often written using web services.
- Agile Software Method – A new, more agile method with better adaptable approach to improving customer satisfaction, by rapidly identifying customer needs using close collaboration to get early feedback with frequent software releases, using small highly skilled teams of developers with flexible designs to accommodate constant change.
- Open Source – Is a set of principles and practices that promote access to the design and development of software products and knowledge. The term is commonly applied to the source code that is available to the general public with non-existent intellectual property restrictions. This allows users to create software content through incremental individual effort or through collaboration. Participants in open source environment can modify those products and redistribute them back into the community free of charge. Open source software can provide building blocks that a company can use to enter a market or catch up.
- Data Mining, Data Integration and Business Intelligence - The best job opportunity in the next 10 years probably is about searching, capturing, and aggregating data, creating metadata, manipulating, bundling and presenting data for people to make decisions. Future users need more “integration platforms” that let users merge “silos of information” into useful tools. In a global enterprise, all data (i.e.: customer transactions, finance, information systems, manufacturing, supplier transactions, forecasting, and inventory) is integrated into information and knowledge for business advantage.”
Global demand for skilled IT workers is increasing with an estimated 5 to 10 million shortage by 2020. “Demographic shift (aging population, declining birthrates) is creating a critical shortage of skilled workers and new unprecedented opportunities for many. Inadequate education, obsolete education systems and academic complacency have created a huge technological gap among people where many jobs are being eliminated or reduced. The oversupply of low-skill workers generates high unemployment in many countries, while lack of high-skill workers creates significant shortage in the technology industry. Countries around the world are taking serious steps to take advantage of this trend by improving their education program and retraining their workforce to fill the skill gap needs.
Most organizations are making extensive use of Commercial Off The Shelf – COTS and relying more on external suppliers outsourcing to:
- Reduce cost by buying rather than building
- Improve time to market
- Keep up with rapid changes in technology
- Focus on “core competencies”
- Shifting into integrating rather than manufacturing
- Maintain position in a global world (globalization)
- Support larger, more complex, and network centric software products.”
However the shift to COTS & Outsourcing does NOT imply less need for software development, but implies a major shift toward higher value skills to address emerging business needs. Following are skills mostly needed by software industry:
- Business Process Analyst
- Systems Engineer
- Requirements Engineer
- System Architect
- Enterprise Architect
- Data Mining/Business Intelligence Specialists
- Network Security Systems Specialists
- Large scale integration Specialist
- Product Development Manager
- Outsourcing Manager
- Software Project Management
- Program Management
- Software developers in specific domain areas
Most leading companies are focusing on developing and maintaining their Critical skills (Core competencies), with a strong emphasis on large scale integration. Many will outsource their less critical skills.” Industry must:
- “Identify the knowledge and skills required to perform business processes, so that they may be developed and used as basis for skilled workforce development.”
- “Track the performance of their workforce in achieving their business objectives.”
Traditional academic training has not kept up with this trend to develop higher value skills. There is an urgent need for companies to retrain their workers to focus on complex integration of large scale, network-centric, software intensive systems.” “Traditional academic training is focusing too much in theory, but not practical solutions that industry needs. Education Institutions must:
- “Coordinate training activities with current and future business needs of industry to provide talent for key positions.”
- “Continuously improve their training and upgrade the curricula to enhance the capability of the workforce to perform their tasks and responsibilities.”
Management must continuously improve the flow of information within the organization and incorporate the knowledge of staff members into decision-making processes by:
- Ensuring that workers have up-to-date skills to perform their work and avoid the cost of turnover.
- Supporting workers to increase effectiveness and productivity.
- Measuring workforce contribution to the business.
- Focusing on enhancing business performance (quality, cost, time)” “A skilled workforce requires a highly skilled management.” Workers must “Invest in life-long learning”.
Sources
- Blogs of Prof. John Vu, Carnegie Mellon University
