In a section – “what does marketing do?” he answers “we close the sale”.

Love to see a sales director’s response to that…

“we’ve become brokers and project managers arranging services our client is requesting”

This sounded rather familiar – so I dug out “the Bible” (Wikinomics) and found something similar:

“companies are focused a new challenge as well: managing an increasingly seamless and supple fusion of design and development expertise from multiple suppliers, partners, and customers in global design and process collaborations.”

OK – so the editorial from Junior Doctor is slightly more pithy, there is definitely a parallel here. Large organisations such as Boeing and BMW are no longer engineering firms, rather they project manage a collaborative process across multiple companies that brings their product to life. They have decided to focus on being the best at what their customers value (in BMW’s case the driving experience, which is more about the software components of the car rather than efficient engine engineering). The same applies to Doctors. Patients will not value their diagnoses and remedies for ailments for which Google can provide the answers and eBay the drugs. Therefore Doctors end up project managing this area of care rather than adding value.

Leaving the question of the reliability and danger of self diagnosing aside, this is not necessarily a bad thing. If Doctors are not tied up dealing with ’simple’ ailments presumably they will have more time to fix the ‘complex’ ones – just as how BMW is able to focus more on their drivers’ experience if they outsource the more traditional engineering R&D.

I have a feeling that this may be a case of Gates and UK Boardroom using the same words but meaning different things by them. Some IT skills have become so common that they are not really seen as IT skills. When being asked the question, did the UK boardrooms surveyed consider the ability to use email and a word processor as an IT skill? Would the board consider employing individuals who could not these basic tools – and worse refused to because it was IT and they didn’t understand it? Only recently I was debating with a group of friends what “being in IT” means. Does it mean you are in the IT department? Does it mean you are a programmer? Does it mean you can code HTML and write a website? Or update a blog? Or use a computer in your job?

Skills listed as important ahead of IT were those such as teamworking, analysis, planning and flexibility. The IT can be core to succeeding in all of these – try analysing and planning without a spreadsheet or project management tool, try teamworking without staying in touch via email and try being flexible without the technology to work from home.

In the end, IT skills will never be valuable in their own right, however they will be essential to achieve all the skills that deliver true value to a business, and therefore to an employee.