Network technicians: the future of IT management?

It seems like an awful lot of my blogging these days is comments on other blogs. Recently Slashdot had a discussion on The Case For Working With Your Hands. The following was my response:

One of the serious concerns of faculty in the undergraduate and graduate IT degree that I teach in is that as corporate America offshores application and Web development, help desk, and even system administration, we will be left with corporate IT departments made up solely of network technicians. As we all realize, you cannot plug in a network cable in Gary, Indiana if you are in Bangalore, India. Since networking requires hand work that cannot be offshored, the concern is that corporate IT departments will come to be dominated by CCNAs as there are fewer and fewer on-site roles for any other IT speciality. As these network specialists mount the rungs of management, we encounter the old adage that "when the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem begins to look like a nail". We see one of two situations then: IT managers from the network staff who have a very narrow range of vision and technical knowledge outside of networking, or IT managers drawn from the ranks of MBAs who do not have the necessary technical knowledge to make the best decisions (aka the "Pointy-Haired Bosses"). We strive in our program to ensure a broad technical education for all of our graduates. Our degree is "Information Technology and Management" and we face a serious problem with students who want to come into our graduate program and try to duck our technical core couses to focus entirely on management. Consequently we have just made an intermediate-level software development course, currently taught in Java and C#, a requirement for all graduate students. Other core courses include networking, databases and Web development. Forcing everyone to code is intended to weed out the "pointy-haired" bosses, and ensure that every graduate of our program leaves with an adequate understanding of core technologies. We can only hope that as corporations look for IT management expertise thay will realize that they may have to go outside their narrow network-centric staffs and draw from industries that have done less offshoring such as financial services and hospitals. Of course we hope they look to graduates of our program as well...

Posted by trygstad | Category: Academia | 10:55 AM