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January 3, 2007

Deminshing Demand

The diminishing demand for the technology professional (Labor) has an inverse relation to the Increasing Demand for IT Talent! Think about this for a moment. Labor is a commodity in which individuals can be replaced easily. Commodity skills can be easily automated or moved overseas. Worse yet, our education system has down played the need for technical skills and replacing them with softer skills required by management. Our corporations can not be excluded from the blame game since they are outsourcing these skills to lower costs. For those that argue against this action, there is little to be said since our history supports this type of activity. We automated the farm, the factory, and now, the cubicle. The power of technical transformation is that labor gets transformed. Talent, on the other hand, is in constant demand. Irregardless of your skills, if you are in the top 99 percentile then you will be able to find work. In the world of Enterprise 1.0, I competed with the top of my profession. Every profession and skill category has its gurus or subject matter experts. In the Web 1.0 world, these people freely published their knowledge in the form of books, articles, and online references. They started consulting organizations and established themselves are the experts. We could read and purchase their skills in order to deliver the business value demanded. As an individual, I could easily rank and rate my effort and accomplishments as compared with theirs, but that was the old world.

In Enterprise 2.0, I now compete with the cumulative knowledge of everyone in the world. In other words, the technology professional has become a commodity and it doesn’t really matter how talented you are. Even if you are the worlds best, the competition will take what you have done and expand beyond your original ideas. Think about this for a moment, the new web provides the medium where everyone in the world can contribute, destroy, and define your area of expertise. How will you compete? How will you build your brand? How will you develop your trademarks in this new world of web 2.0?

Posted by Todd at January 3, 2007 11:46 AM