Chief Digital Officer and Other Coming IT Job Opportunities

Network World’s synopsis of the IT trends outlined at the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo last week seemed to highlight job trends as well.

Gartner’s Peter Sondergaard predicted that 6 million U.S. Jobs will be created in support of Big Data by 2015. But there’s more. Gartner also predicts that 25 percent of organizations will have a chief digital officer at the executive table by 2015 as well.

According to the article:

“The chief digital officer will prove to be the most exciting strategic role in the decade ahead, and IT leaders have the opportunity to be the leaders who will define it,” said David Willis, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner. “The chief digital officer plays in the place where the enterprise meets the customer, where the revenue is generated and the mission accomplished. They’re in charge of the digital business strategy. That’s a long way from running back office IT, and it’s full of opportunity.”

While the analyst firm sees growth slowing at the dominant consumer social networks, more companies are establishing social media as a discipline. That means people focused on it.

“Social computing is moving from being just on the outside of the organization to being at the core of business operations,” said Sondergaard. “It is changing the fundamentals of management: how you establish a sense of purpose and motivate people to act. Social computing will move organizations from hierarchical structures and defined teams to communities that can cross any organizational boundary.”

And smartphones will pose more issues — and offer more opportunities — than just BYOD:

In 2016, more than 1.6 billion smart mobile devices will be purchased globally. Two-thirds of the mobile work force will own a smartphone, and 40 percent of the work force will be mobile. The challenge for IT leaders is determining what to do with this new channel [with] their customers and employees.

Walmart, for one, is laser-focused on capitalizing on the move to smartphones.

Gartner also says security investments will dramatically increase. It says the market will grow by 56 percent from current levels in five years, while cloud security will almost triple. That would seem to equally increase the already-hot demand for cybersecurity pros.

According to Network World:

Gartner analysts said a key reason for this is regulatory compliance. IT leaders need to anticipate and plan for the coming wave of government interventions and regulations. As information technology becomes pervasive in all operations, regulations from the analog world will come to the digital world.

Meanwhile, the cloud offers a whole range of services delivered in that way:

Services delivered through the cloud will foster an economy based on delivery and consumption of everything from storage to computation to video to finance deduction management.