The August 23^rd issue of ComputerWorld contains a series of articles related to 2020 vision, megatrends, and careers. Predicting the future is always a risky business, but nonetheless the articles provide some interesting food for thought, and useful suggestions, for actions that should be taken now.

I found the article about future careers most interesting including this statement about 2020, “Job titles include cloud architect, cloud capacity planner, cloud infrastructure administrator and integration architect.”[1] While this is of course not an exhaustive list of IT careers 10 years from now, the point is that a tidal wave of changes is in process and the kind of roles we IT professionals will have in the future will be different. There is a strong belief that cloud computing is a megatrend that is here to stay and that it will fundamentally change how we work – and that integration skills will be more important than ever.

One of my personal views of the future is that integration competency centers are here to stay.  I am not alone in this belief. The Xerox CIO, John McDermott, was interviewed for the article and talked about the role of the IT architect being filled not by a single person, but rather in a center of excellence “where we combine and collocate business process owners with technology platform owners.” The need for integration also won’t go away as Julia King summarizes; “a big chunk of technical specialists’ work will involve integrating a broader array of technologies.”

Ken Spangler, CIO of Fedex Ground, makes another interesting prediction that “Ten years from now, it will be all about how to assemble software not how to build it.” This perspective aligns nicely with a core them of Lean Integration[2] and the notion that we need to take a factory approach using mass-customization techniques to build solutions.

One of the things that I love about IT is the constant change and opportunity to learn.  It’s reassuring to see that there is a widespread view that the one thing that won’t change is change itself.

[2] John G. Schmidt and David Lyle, Lean Integration, An Integration Factory Approach to Business Agility, Addison-Wesley, 2010, visit www.integrationfactory.com for details