IT on course to become a profession, says BCS

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