IT is on the way to becoming a profession with the same
ethical and professional standards as medicine and the law, MPs and
IT practitioners heard last week.
Charles Hughes, former president of the British Computer Society
and leader of the BCS Professionalism Programme, told the
Parliamentary IT
Committee that IT was about a third of the way there, when
benchmarked against other professions.
The BCS,
suppliers group Intellect, the National Computing Centre and sector skills
council E-Skills UK, are collaborating to put the building blocks
in place to professionalise IT, he said.
Their work aims to establish a commitment from IT professionals
to develop their skills and to apply them. The group also wants IT
professionals to become more accountable for their decision
making.
Intellect has developed guidelines for organisations on how to
professionalise their operations, and they are already attracting
interest in other areas outside of IT, said Hughes.
The joint project aims to usher in a sea change in the way IT
professionals and organisations view their work, said Hughes.
"We used to think we did a good job if the project we took on
worked. If it did not offer business benefits that was someone
else's problem," he said.
And Hughes said that politicians could help the industry by
being less quick to blame technology for IT failures, when the root
cause is often poor management or poor planning.
"I believe, more or less, that all the issues to do with
IT-enabled projects are not to do with technology. The majority of
problems are concerned with people not doing IT in the right
way.
Most of the problems are down to people, management and
communications, and not at all to do with basic technology," Hughes
said.
Validating the IT professionalism model
www.bcs.org/upload/pdf/modelreport.pdf