Earlier this week, I wrote a piece about how IT leaders are looking to fill soft skills gaps. It was based on a combination of conversations with CIOs and other IT execs and a recent study issued by the Computing Technology Industry Association (CompTIA). The soft skills in absentia included things like innovative thinking, analytical skills, teamwork and project management abilities.

The story generated more responses from readers than I anticipated, and interestingly they seemed to share a general theme: filling that soft skills gap shouldn’t be that difficult. As one reader, Tony S., colorfully put it, in response to Modell’s COO Dan Sheehan’s search for good project managers, “You make it sound like Dan Sheehan is looking for the mythical unicorn.” Tony S’s contention? These skill sets are out there, but those who possess them are being weeded out of hiring processes because they tend to be older workers. The wisdom of experience is being eschewed for next-gen talents.

An anonymous reader, who self-identified as a software engineer, made a similar argument. “What’s interesting to me, in my experience, is that it took many years AFTER being a SW engineer to develop the rest of the skills in the article. Now with all the rest of the skills well in hand, I’d be pretty stretch[ed] to write code.”

There was also Tony B., a program manager consultant with 20 years of experience, who suggested the unicorns may be hiding in plain sight. His point: the talent is often there in the IT organization but it’s rarely cultivated. He maintains that the majority of executives, despite their best intentions on filling soft skills gaps, give little more than lip service to such goals because of the corporate environment in which they work. “The constraints are that they are measured in a way — short term cost-saving delivery targets in economically constrained markets — which is in conflict with their positive intentions on soft skills.” IT executives have the ability to unlock potential but lack the support to do so. Just get it done trumps innovation, analytical skills, teamwork, etc. every time.

I’d like to know more about your experiences. Are you part of an IT organization in which you yearn to show off your soft skills, but no one’s asking? Are you an IT leader who wants to champion the potential of your team members but are shackled by short-term pressures?

Or maybe you’re like outsourcing casualty Tony G. (yes, another Tony and my most avid reader) — a 40-year IT vet with a CV full of project management success stories who feels like those four decades of experience may now be working against him. After he read the piece, he asked somewhat jokingly, but with a wisp of hope, “Do you think that Dan Sheehan guy is taking resumes?”

The award honors CIOs who lead their organizations to pursue IT innovation and business processes that deliver business value. SearchCIO.com congratulates the winners and invites readers to dive a little deeper into what makes them leaders in information technology innovation. Perretta recently recorded a podcast with our Senior News Writer Linda Tucci about building a private cloud at State Street. And we hope you’ll stay tuned for a soon-to-be-released exclusive video interview with Bruno.

In her roles at EMHS, Bruno successfully developed information systems strategic plans and governance designs at three large health care organizations. She has implemented and integrated major clinical, financial and decision-support information systems, two of which received the Nicholas R. Davies Organizational Award, the nation’s highest award for implementation of a system-wide electronic health record. She is the executive sponsor for the Bangor Beacon Community and co-chair for the Leadership and Governance Community of Practice for the national Beacon Community program.

Bruno said being a CIO is about bringing out the best in those you work with, adding that the award also honors those she collaborates with in delivering health care services in Maine.

Chris Perretta has global responsibility for State Street’s IT activities, leading a team of more than 5,000 IT professionals in 29 countries. He oversees the IT strategic planning process, application development and maintenance, system architecture, global technology infrastructure and information security for the firm. Perretta is also the co-leader of State Street’s Operations and Information Technology Transformation initiative.

Perretta said the award is a great honor that underscores his organization’s ongoing work and commitment to using technology to deliver innovative solutions to their clients.

In a statement, award program co-chair Ray Chang said judges were pleased to recognize both Bruno and Perretta “for their strategic use of technology to significantly impact and improve business performance for their respective organizations.”

Chang noted that both serve as prime examples of how technology can drive business success and the important role of CIOs in organizations worldwide.

When it comes to tech innovation, a lot of managers talk the talk, but relatively few give their workers time to walk the walk.

Poorer countries are proving that starting with less can be a springboard to tech innovation. Case in point: How India and some African nations — places with little legacy telephony infrastructure — are revolutionizing mobile banking.

You’re willing to share your favorite movies and pictures of your cat, but will you share your organ donor status on Facebook? Experts in the field of organ donation say this bold step in social media could make a world of difference for those in need.

As with any study, we take this with a grain of salt and consider the source, but it’s still a little unsettling to hear the suggestion that 90% of websites using Secure Sockets Layer encryption aren’t entirely secure.

Can you speak up? I’m wearing long sleeves. When art and technology mingle, the resulting body of work can be a little strange.

The word adaptability was the key phrase that I came away with, whether the session was on risk management, gaining a competitive advantage, CEO concerns, mobility or the “humanization of technology” — yes, an actual phrase floating around at the show, and no doubt soon to be floating around in cyberspace.

As Brian Wong, the 20-year-old Internet/Twitter/gaming/social networking/mobile brainiac behind Kiip.me, put it: “Feel or Die.” That was his closing comment for his “Making Sense of It All: Mobile and The Humanization of Technology” keynote.

Through Kiip.me, Wong is having quite an impact on the advertising industry. He is adding a human touch through an application that rewards gamers for doing what they love — playing games. Players are rewarded through gifts (provided by advertisers) that can be used in the “real world” and even re-gifted to a loved one.

In business terms, you can use an “achievement layer” to reward customers, and create interactions with customers that can seem human, even though the experience is Web- or technology-based, he explained. The point being that, well, IT needs to start acting like a human being.

Another keynote by Polly LaBarre, co-founder and editorial director of the Management Innovation eXchange, and a founding editor with Fast Company, touched on this human-touch concept as well. “The Web is the OS of life,” she said. “It’s how we live and breathe.”

Her message emphasized the need to build an organization that is resilient enough to change as fast as the world is changing. How do we make innovation an everyday thing, something that’s part of everybody’s job, every day?

One avenue is by creating a mass collaboration platform, but another important component is to “build an organization that is as human as the human beings that are inside it,” she said.

Again, it all comes back to business transformation. Today’s organizations are not built to be adaptable, to change as your workers and customers change, she said. A lot of people around me at this keynote shook their heads in agreement, and were up for suggestions on how to shake things up a bit. One example LaBarre gave was a company called Cemex. The global building materials company created a collaboration platform called Shift (as in “shift your thinking/actions to innovate”), filled with real-time collaboration capabilities for its 70,000 employees. The employees decide which teams they want to join, and have the power to build an agenda. The end result was rapid change. Within six weeks of rolling out Shift, 500 employees came up with a portfolio of ideas — that were implemented across the organization — to use more efficient and alternative fuel sources at the company.

The CIOs around me liked that idea. The next idea of a “self-managed organization” didn’t go over so well. Morning Star, a $700 million tomato ingredient producer with 400 employees, did away with job titles. No one has a boss or defined roles. A real-time social network is used to hire the people you want on your team and reward your peers for a job well done.

The CIO next to me, who works for a 160-year-old insurance company, laughed heartily at this idea. “It may work for a small company …” More laughs from him. He went on to explain all the political battles that would ensue, and lawsuits.

Still, I think many CIOs — at least the ones I spoke with — did come away knowing that adaptability was a key part of their jobs. How could it not be, when technology itself changes so rapidly? I think in many ways, it’s the business leaders who have to adapt, and not always the IT leaders. Or, as one CIO of a national educational institution put it, “How do we get the business to start thinking more like IT?”

Let us know what you think of this blog post; email Christina Torode, News Director.

• According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, employment in all computer occupations is expected to increase by 22% in the next decade. It’s recommended that such forecasts be taken with a grain of salt because they can’t account for market changes and technology disruptions. But when it comes to the possibility of more jobs, we’ll take it with whatever seasoning necessary.
• Books, magazines, seminars! Advice on tech innovation is everywhere, and it can be an awful lot to swallow. Here is some innovation food for thought in seven easily digestible bites.
• Some straightforward advice on writing a social media policy for your company that somehow manages to include Quatrain LI of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. That aspect alone makes it worth the read, wethinks.
• Finding it harder and harder to find common cause with your younger workers? Well, you both more or less have Trivial Pursuit editions named for you — see!? OK, maybe that’s not enough to get baby boomers and Millennials in your IT organization to get along, but these tips on fostering intergenerational harmony might help. Besides, as our friend Goethe reminds: “Life belongs to the living, and he who lives must be prepared for changes.”
• And finally, why used-car shoppers should lean toward orange vehicles and other odd insights — brought to you by big data.

• Innovation expert and Harvard Business Review blogger Scott Anthony lists his favorite innovation writers, as well as some rising stars. What an innovative idea.
• Six ways Stephen Gillett, Best Buy’s new president of digital and executive VP of global services, defines next generation IT.
• Someday there may be a useful medical benefit for Nokia’s vibrating tattoo, and that would be great news. Until that day — no, just no.
• We all know in-app advertisements are annoying; it turns out they’re also insidious.
• Obviously one should never put anything on the Internet that they don’t want to be seen. But even if your wall is just updates on what you had for dinner and pictures of your dog, would you ever hand over your Facebook password to a potential employer? Would you ask for it from a potential employee?

As we speak, San Diego is being overrun by 125,000 nerds, many dressed like superheroes, video game characters, zombies, stuffed animals, space aliens or manga hotties. All are ostensibly clamoring to witness the next big thing in comics, movies, TV and Web video. To be clear, these are not the cowering, bashful nerds from back in high school. These are angry, hipster nerds drunk with nerd power and full of nerdy attitude. They’re intolerant of boredom, enraged by sameness. They want all of the tools and technologies at their disposal employed to deliver new diversions in the wildest, weirdest way possible.

Which is why they all go to Comic-Con, then complain incessantly about Comic-Con. There are plenty of IT folks in attendance in San Diego this week, but not in an official capacity. Unless you’re the CIO of Marvel Comics or Hasbro, you may never have even heard of Comic-Con. But you should have. We in the enterprise technology arena could learn a few things from our geeky brothers in arms.

The Comic-Con faithful support those dedicated to their interests. But they instinctively know something fundamental about creativity and the artistic pursuits. Wherever thousands gather in its name, creativity has fled. Real creativity is born of rejection — rejection of the current, the popular, the safe, the known. It’s why some of the best stuff at Comic-Con happens in tents in a park down the street from the convention itself. There are always at least as many people boycotting Comic-Con as attending it.

So what?

I make this observation while sitting in another hotel conference room listening to another garish, noisy, colorful presentation on another current, popular technology choice. In today’s case, it happens to be cloud computing, but it could easily be mobility or virtualization or social networking or BI. How many of these sessions have we all endured? Endured them, even as we had a nagging sense that the really good stuff was probably being discussed by a small, rebellious group huddled in a tent down the road. Why do we put up with it — silently for the most part?
Where’s our awkward hipster’s sense of outrage?

If there’s one lesson from Comic-Con for IT leaders it’s this: It’s time for them to let their snarky geek flag fly. Comic-Con is all about creativity and its continuous pursuit. That’s not so different from what we’re after in our quest for technological innovation. Innovation is, after all, another flavor of creativity. Innovation and creativity are brothers from the same mother. Innovation is creativity with more moving parts and a better credit score.

And innovation, like creativity, tends to wither when we all gather in one place around what is popular and current and safe and known. As my hero, Hunter S. Thompson, once said: “When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.”

In enterprise technology, every day is Comic-Con. What we need are more angry nerds.

Perretta is CIO at State Street Corp., the Boston-based financial services giant. I spoke with him recently about his construction and launch of a private cloud (our conversation is preserved as a podcast running this week on SearchCIO.com). After explaining the hows and whys of this two-year effort, he talked about another building challenge for CIOs: designing an IT organization that can leverage technologies like cloud computing and large-scale data analytics on an “industrial scale” to deliver business value.

To that end, Perretta has scoured his organization for people who “can think in an architectural way … in what I’ll call large-scale abstractions,” he says. While these people can get “down and dirty with the detail,” they also can connect IT architecture to “a real, live business result.” At the helm of this function is a chief architect, Perretta says, someone with 30 years’ experience who “knows the business inside out” and whose job is not to manage projects, but identify and pilot ideas that make sense for State Street. Out in front of this guy is a chief scientist whose job it is to look even further into the future for interesting technologies.

The presumptive result, Perretta explains, will be an IT organization that can spot technology trends three to five years out, assess the current state of the market, pilot the technologies that make sense for State Street and — with a lot of hard work, if his implementation of a private cloud is any evidence — figure out how to make these technologies operational in a very large organization. “We have a model now that makes sense to me. It is structured, but it is not bureaucratic, he says. “But there is a pipeline of ideas that focuses the organization,” he adds, “much more than if everybody is off thinking about things to do.” An innovation pipeline, in other words.

Ritchie, who was named Volkswagen’s CIO in 2008, was referring to the proliferation of rogue IT in business, and the general lack of understanding about its inherent risks. Volkswagen’s top executives understood what it took to run their business operations, of course, but he discovered they knew much less about IT operations than he had supposed. He was taken aback by “the general lack of appreciation of the complexity of running an IT environment and … what it takes to manage it.”

Ritchie has a doctorate in business strategy, as well as a longstanding interest in the relationship between organizational structures and business success. In fact, most of his 24-year career at Volkswagen has been spent on the business side. So, he certainly wasn’t up on stage to whine about rogue IT and his business peers’ lack of insight into enterprise IT. Rather, he was describing the coordinated changes IT and the business side were making to help the company compete more effectively in the era of the connected car. It’s no secret that Volkswagen has been slower to capitalize on the digital car than some of its competitors, notably Ford; and Ritchie — with the right IT team — has an opportunity to seize the moment and take the lead in this area.

It was therefore surprising to hear this business-savvy CIO talk about the need “to educate the business” on what it takes to run enterprise IT. Especially because all the talk at this conference — and at most other IT conferences for that matter — is about how CIOs must keep up with the business or be left in the dust by tech-savvy employees (aka rogue IT cowboys) who can self-provision the technology they need to do their jobs, thank you very much, pardner.

The biggest challenge in IT innovation is doing the change management part correctly, Ritchie said. His business partners needed to understand, for example, that they can indeed get a great “above-the-water-line strategy” for connecting with the connected cars of their customers by going around IT, but that the solution will “not leverage our internal managed services, and it is not going to leverage our internal app functionality.”

Ritchie let his business partners know that rogue IT solutions might get them off to a fast start, but “we’ll be slow, as a corporation, to take advantage of it.” Instead, he argues for IT and the business working together on the plumbing.

Maybe IT is the victim of its own success. CIOs and their departments provide all manner of IT solutions to business challenges, but over time these systems become a routine part of business operations — so much so that they begin to be disconnected from their original enterprise IT roots.

This view or opinion was evident in Forrester’s latest survey of some 2,000 business leaders on how businesses interact with technology. While 87% of the leaders told Forrester they believe the future of their organizations hinges on technology innovation, more than one-third (35%) said they don’t consider IT to be a source of technology innovation. Almost two-thirds (65%) said they have budgets to buy technology within their group, without involving IT. Of the so-called Generation Y employees (those 18 to 30 years old) surveyed by Forrester, 64% said they download unauthorized applications or websites at least once a week to get their jobs done; and at least 40% do the same every day.

We live in a golden age of rogue IT. Ordinary schmoes like me can download apps to do our work. Business departments rent software over the Internet to carry out critical business functions. Amateur developers build business applications in the cloud.

But without the scalable, secure and integrated features that only IT departments can manage, these quick fixes will fall as fast as they rise — or worse, sink the enterprise.

The rise of all three means that the CIO job of tomorrow — as in, pretty much today — is more about consulting than doing. That goes for your IT staff, also. “It’s a very broad definition of consulting. It’s providing direction, it’s providing oversight, it’s providing value,” said Marc Cecere, a principal analyst at Forrester and keynote speaker at Forrester’s IT Forum in Las Vegas this week.

Cecere said that in a business environment dominated by tech-savvy business people, self-service technology and speed [think cloud computing and mobile devices], much of the building, procuring and maintaining of systems will not be done by internal IT organizations. Instead, CIOs will need people who can identify and assemble all the pieces of these systems — solutions architects, data integration architects and vendor and sourcing managers.

For many of the IT roles today, including the CIO job, businesses will be looking for the equivalent of a Russell Brice, a New Zealand mountaineer who has helped 300 people climb to the top of Mount Everest. At some point he quit climbing and provided oversight, using his computer, mobile phone, walkie-talkie, telescope and so on to guide the climbers on the mountain. Just as application developers will be guiding those tech-savvy employees to make sure the technology they are building is secure and scalable, Cecere said. Project managers will not be running one project at a time but overseeing numerous projects simultaneously. When people get off track — when there is an emergency — that is when those IT job roles will revert to hands-on.

To excel at your CIO job, you will not only need guides, but also innovators and specialists. Cecere would like to see senior IT people freed up for innovation. “We’ll see if that happens.” At a minimum, CIOs will need people who can identify where innovation is needed and where it will come from. Some roles will need to be more specialized than they have in the past — in security, in managing data, in process design, for example, given anytime/anywhere computing. CIOs will need people who can figure out how to scale, secure and add functionality to the mobile applications business people are building for themselves, he said.

“That’s an awful lot of change that you folks in particular will be going through, as we move to more empowered BT [business technology] organizations,” Cecere said, using Forrester’s latest coinage for companies where business people are more tech savvy, and IT will play a more strategic and consultative role in the provisioning of technology.

Of the three broad components of today’s IT department — app dev and delivery, infrastructure and operations and a project management office — Cecere believes the app dev and delivery functions will shrink the most, as this is the technology area business people are most interested in. They haven’t shown much interest in running or planning IT.

CIOs should not think about this transition as a transformation project. The business and IT are not going to drop what they’re doing and plot out a course. And it won’t come about in a big bang — the vendors, business and IT aren’t ready for that. Cecere’s metaphor of choice?

“You ever see 5-year-old kids playing soccer?” he asked. “Somehow, the ball gets from one end of the field to the other and once in a while in the goal, but everything in between seems like random motion. I think it’s going to be this zigzag function.”