Management skills important in IT

13:04 28th August 2008

General management skills are now as important as technical ability in the IT industry, a group of chief information officers have claimed.

The recruitment company Harvey Nash gathered a group of CIOs together to discuss the IT industry and discovered that attendees agreed that aspiring IT leaders need support to develop the required skills.

Jonathan Merry, business technology director of Pfizer, noted that it is no longer sufficient to learn function skills in the IT industry; instead he identified politically savvy and commercial astuteness as skills high on the agenda.

"Knowing how to influence and negotiate with demanding business owners around the deployment of resources in favour of new and emerging markets was deemed to be a critical ability," he said.

Earlier this week, a similar survey of high-level IT professionals disclosed that CIOs are divided over the prospects of technology budgets for 2009.

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