Hot Jobs are Bad for Business
Number one Hot IT Job for 2009, according to Baseline, is Business Intelligence Experts. That is bad news for business managers. It means there is a shortage of the skills needed by businesses. These people help “in a lot of decisions having to do with how the customer base is changing, market differentiation, pricing and services”.
To BI Experts, this is received as good news - salaries will go up because of demand; jobs will become more interesting with less mundane report writing and more strategic analysis work; and career paths will open up as you gain more exposure to things outside IT.
Business executives, though, may not have the reaction you expect. They believe they are paid the big money because they make the tough decisions, and when others try to move into that space, they react. This is not necessarily political in nature - it is just good business sense. They are always looking for better ways to do things, and if the BI guru suddenly becomes a cog in the gears of success, alternatives should be considered.
Fortunately (or unfortunately for the BI experts), there are a number of new BI solutions appearing on the market that are geared to providing BI-like answers without the need for ‘expertise’. They require less technology infrastructure at a lower cost using a cheaper skillset. I am proud to be associated with one. The pendulum is swinging back from a technology-centric, expert-driven ’business intelligence solution’ to embedding easy to use business analytics into applications. They do not require experts to run them.
So I caution the BI workers out there — your position might be hotter than you think.
