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The description, while thorough, is no longer accurate for today’s modern enterprises, government organizations, and small businesses. A fundamental shift has occurred in the relevant skills and abilities IT managers need to succeed in the new mobile world order. The era of LAN-locked left-brain analytical thinking is giving way to a new form of holistic, right-brain Mobility Intelligence marked by new IT perspectives and priorities.

The reason for the shift is simple. The workplace has become mobile. Over the next five years, most Network Administrators will spend a majority of their time supporting and securing workers and their mobile devices outside the traditional corporate network. As the traditional server walls come down, the line between personal and professional information will blur. The IT person whose skills, experience, and education match the job description above will be unprepared to face the challenges of a workforce that never sets foot in the office. The workforce of the future will choose to work and access the Internet with their local laptop or iPad.

The mobile workforce of the future understands local user administration rights and how to change settings, configurations or applications, and firewalls. Furthermore ,companies such as Microsoft and Apple are improving their O/S usability, making it even easier for the novice to self-determine settings and policies. Many companies are now allowing employees to bring their own computers and devices to the job. While cost savings and “consumerization of IT” appear to be the motivation for this trend, the “bring your own device” (BYOD) practice will only make reporting and risk-mitigation requirements for IT that much more challenging. While virtualization has taken root for some companies, it is only “situationally effective” for protecting corporate data. It will take several more years for virtualization to become a potential panacea for maximizing productivity while minimizing mobile data risk.

Perhaps the most important aspect of the new Network Administrator job—facilitation and change management skills—currently shows up as the second-to-last bullet point in the ad, almost an afterthought. These and other skills are fast emerging as must-haves for a new class of IT “uber managers” with strong IT vision and deep Mobility Intelligence.

Intelligence Evolved
Since the 1990s, Business Intelligence (BI) has been a fundamental IT investment for companies of medium, large, and global size. For every company with at least $50M to$100M in revenue, discussion of the IT environment include ssome kind of investment in BI from huge firms such as Oracle, SAP, and IBM, or from a second-tier BI provider trying to take market share from the “BI OPEC members.”However, BI roots go back further than the 1990s.

In a 1958 article, IBM researcher Hans Peter Luhn described the term “Business Intelligence” as “the ability to apprehend the interrelationships of presented facts in such a way as to guide action towards a desired goal.” Executives wanted full access to data within their business at any given moment. Huge efforts were made to collect basic information like sales revenue by product, vendor costs, customer contact, and employee sick time. Even more resources were dedicated to analyzing the data, identifying possible cost-cutting mechanisms, recognizing buying patterns, and streamlining processes. Consultants built their businesses on this work. For many companies, this form of BI is still a challenge.

The enterprise-wide focus on BI over the past 10 years has created a set of IT management expectations that include exact calculations, numerical comparisons, and literal interpretations. An IT to-do list was simple: find the data, look at it, and determine exactly what it means. Their success code was clear: be straightforward, analytical, and factual. Today, the new mobile workforce is changing the foundation of BI as it relates to managing employees or serving customers. Business data no longer exists within the clear confines of the LAN. Business data spends time on laptops, USB drives, and Smartphones, making it difficult to track, collect, and analyze. Simple data collection now requires a new set of software agents, skills, and basic understanding. Accurate BI requires a clear view into the employee use cases and into the soupy mix of personal and professional information. It requires a  perspective on employee work patterns and data use patterns—how employees interact with customers, how they use third-party data on sales calls and vendor meetings, and in turn, how employees use external data for proprietary business purposes. Agility is now a core IT design parameter, much as it has been for decades in the sales and product business engines. Analyzing data now requires the softer skills of estimation, assumption, and context. These skills are not sufficiently taught in MIS programs or required of Network Administrators. They are the aspects of holistic, right-brain Mobility Intelligence.

Mobility Mindset and Skill Set
The “new normal” of mobility marks a complete shift in mindset for most IT professionals. It requires a new Mobility Intelligence—a different way of looking at, understanding, and managing data. Look again at the Network Administrator job description. One of the requirements is, “Demonstrated working knowledge of current communications devices, protocols, server and desktop technologies.” In the current picture, communications devices, protocols, servers, and desktop technologies are constantly changing. As mentioned above, the workforce has gained a seat at the technology table by bringing their own preferred devices or certainly their own time of day and styles of productivity to the corporate environment. In today’s marketplace, the description should really read, “Demonstrated working knowledge of changing mobile communications devices, Internet, cloud, and desktop technologies, and an understanding of how they are used by employees.”

A degree in computer science, MIS, or business will no longer suffice. Successful IT managers also need to be well grounded in psychology, organizational dynamics, and even design. The constant challenge of supporting a sales force with a compulsive need to access e-mail from everywhere has not changed in 15 years. However, the compulsive and creative approach to being productive remotely now includes accounting departments and legal departments, not just road warriors. Let’s also include administrative assistants on Saturday morning or Sunday night. It is now standard for customer service reps to obsess over Twitter flow, and for brand managers to have an unhealthy relationship with Facebook. IT and senior management must play offense and defense, often at the same time, to effectively handle changing decisionscapes: the CFO’s constant anxiety over compliance; the CEO’s bi-polar relationship with IT risk mitigation and unlocking sales behaviors to increase revenue; as well as the ebb and flow of the PR team’s Internet access issues.

Mobility Intelligence covers many issues broad and deep. But the collective set of new skills, traits, and proficiencies can be categorized into three primary buckets:

Behavioral Pattern Analysis — Understanding of how context and autonomy impact the IT needs of workers;
Right Brain Engagement — Integration of approximation, comparison, and  interpretation      thought processes; and
Street Smarts — Knowledge of business functions, organizational dynamics. Knowledge of growth goals that translate to actions and decisions from every employee Monday through Sunday, 24/7. Street Smarts
require experience and instinct.

Behavioral Pattern Analysis
Consider the top five things people do with their work
computer:
1. E-mail
2. Internet Applications and Websites
3. VPN Access to non-Internet Accessible Applications
4. Job-specific Applications (Oracle manager/SQL,
    Coding Engines, Java, Client Management)
5. Publishing (Word, PDF, Excel, PowerPoint)

E-mail is a great example of why behavioral pattern analysis is so important. Imagine a salesperson who spends all day on the road visiting clients, customers, partners, and prospects. E-mail gets answered remotely from the BlackBerry. If there is downtime at the airport or train station, it may be addressed on the laptop using an unsecured Wi-Fi network. But the most important and sensitive e-mails are saved for the end of the day, before breakfast, or after dinner.

 What does that say about the salesperson’s IT needs? For one thing, the server needs to be up and operational at all times of the day. Users need to be able to get access to files and e-mail all the time. There can be no outages or downtime.

 It also reveals the numerous possible points of data leakage from the user’s behavior. Using an unsecured Wi-Fi connection can give hackers access to company files, which can be a problem for the single machine or for the whole network, depending on viruses downloaded and data accessed. The laptop itself could also be lost or stolen. E-mails are at risk when they are stored locally, on the network, or in the cloud. These e-mails contain sensitive company or client information. It may be impossible to destroy or recover them.

Pattern analysis is particularly critical with handhelds. A BlackBerry or other handheld device brings with it a slew of potential security and service problems that are usually addressed on a reactive basis. Mobility Intelligence converts problem solving into a proactive practice. Perhaps the salesperson regularly misplaces a Smartphone, breaks it, or otherwise does damage to the Smartphone on a regular basis. IT people and processes should be created to keep that employee working at all times from anywhere despite what may be considered systematic sabotage to the Smartphone. Using intelligence and right-brain thinking, IT departments need to predict the demise of hardware and software across the organization and have procedures in place to deal with them. The companies that will be best at this are the ones that employ people who understand how users interact with their technology assets.

Understanding user behavior patterns will help direct the strictness or leniency of policies across the board in a way that balances productivity with security.

Right Brain Engagement
The second aspect of Mobility Intelligence is Right Brain Engagement. Roger Sperry, Nobel Prize winner in 1981, once conducted an experiment to understand how the different sides of the brain—right and left—impacted how humans think and act. He isolated one person at a time and asked questions about a pencil. When the left part of the brain was functioning alone, the person could name the pencil but could not describe how it was used. When the right part of the brain was on its own, the person could explain and demonstrate the use of the pencil but could not name it. The truth is that when it comes to a pencil, it is important to be able to both ask for it by name and use it. The same could
be said about pretty much any device.

According to research, the differences between the right and left brain can be described according to the lists in Table 1 to the left.

In the past, just having left-brain analytical skills was enough to get most IT professionals through the day. Setting up the computers, helping when a program did not work, and replacing hardware were all logical and ordered tasks. Today, IT is part of every business function. It requires big-picture thinking. IT people need to know how each program, each device, each firewall makes the business more productive.  The future is more important than the past. Imagination drives innovation.

If asked, most IT professionals could talk in great detail about a pencil. They could describe and use it. The issue is whether they could talk about the role of a pencil in their company. Could they also describe what impact the same pencil would have if used outside the company? In today’s economy, that is what is expected of a business function as important as IT. And that is what IT experts will be expected to bring to the table.

Street Smarts
The third component of Mobility Intelligence is Street Smarts, commonly defined as the intelligence gained outside of traditional educational venues. It includes social awareness of who you can trust and how; environmental awareness of the inherent risks and opportunities in your personal or professional surroundings; and informational awareness of the credibility and authenticity of claims and data.  There is a constant argument among business leaders, educators, sociologists, and others about the value of book smarts versus Street Smarts. The truth is that both are important.  Career advancement in IT historically required book smarts. IT managers needed to have advanced degrees in Management Information Systems or Computer Science, as the job description in this article outlines. The pedigree combination of the EE Masters and MBA degrees was born out of this reality, but technical education, while important, is no longer the benchmark.

What a business does, what its customers want, what drives its innovation and where it plans to go in the future are critical to the IT function. IT professionals must understand each of these elements if they are going to be able to serve and support the organization in growth. Ultimately, none of this can happen without IT. IT has become that essential. If a company has no access to Twitter, it cannot service its customers there. If employees cannot collaborate online, in real time over a video conference, collaboration and innovation die. If the systems are not in place to track products seamlessly across continents and in stores to manage supply and keep items in stock, sales suffer. 

There are a number of ways to test an IT person’s Street Smarts in an interview. Ask the following:
• The stock price of the company
• The business leader they respect most and why
• The most interesting marketing campaign they have seen
   and what worked about it
• The apps they have (or will never have) on their phone
• Their thoughts on whether Smartphones will replace
    laptops
• The headline for the most recent news article they read
• How they describe their job to their grandparent

The answers might be surprising. The most advanced IT managers will be excited to talk about big-picture, contextual issues that impact their business. They will thrive in a mobile environment. They will take on the challenges of supporting and securing a global business. Most importantly, they will contribute to the future of the company outside the bounds of IT. Their Street Smarts will take over when their book smarts become outdated.

Making Intelligence Mobile
Mobility Intelligence requires a different way of seeing and managing data, people, and priorities in the new mobile world. It calls on a whole new set of holistic skills and abilities not typically associated with the traditional IT function. Some IT change agents are beginning to get on board. The rest have
some catching up to do. Better education and soft-skill training will help. But ultimately, it is a wholesale shift to a new mobile mindset that will separate those who merely survive and those who thrive in a mobile environment.