It Is the Mindset, Not the Skill Set...

In the last post, I
had mentioned my research whitepaper titled "Preparing
for Innovation: Understanding How IT Organizational Change Can Help Drive
Success with Unified Communications". If you lead or manage a technology team and haven't
read this paper yet, I'd encourage you to read it.

One of the issues that I tackled in this research was "who
administers Unified Communications"? I wonder whether some of you have pondered
this topic within your team or in your organization.

This research reminded me of this insight
that what makes you successful in an organization are not just your technical
skills but also your soft-skills. Beyond just technical knowledge,
leads/managers in technical organizations do look for "soft skills" such as
good interpersonal communications, charisma, and the ability to talk about
technology in terms that others can understand easily.

Here is a piece from the paper to give you a
taste of what this paper entails:

Who
Administers Unified Communications?

Since some products in the Unified
Communications suite are relatively new, expecting to find someone with
hands-on experience of UC is not a realistic expectation. Instead, the ideal
candidate for this position, as expressed by many IT managers in the research,
combines a particular attitude with some basic experience which is likely to
already exist in the organization. As one CIO said of this position, "It's the mindset, not the skill set."
What is needed here is someone who has a technical aptitude and who enjoys
learning. UC is an evolving space, and both interest and learning skills will
be necessary to keep pace.

Beyond that, the general consensus is that a
candidate for UC Administrator in a Microsoft implementation needs a basic but
solid grounding in Microsoft® Windows® Serverand Exchange Server
technology, which makes for a natural transition into this role for a systems
engineer with that experience. In fact, the position tends to be seen as a
natural extension of the Exchange Administrator role, which underscores again
the importance of the server team to Microsoft UC deployment. As far as
telephony goes, the UC Administrator need only know enough to be able to
communicate well with the PBX/telephony team and find out what they need, or
hire an outsourced telephony vendor to help with the voice deployments.

My goal is to get you thinking about not just
aboutyour technical skills but also what else makes you
successful in your organization.  After all, organizations are social
systems! The truth is that as complexity of the technologies grows, the
organizations will evolve as well. And when your organization changes, what
will be your place in it?