The global skills and competency framework for the digital world

#78 Review Skills from an IT Supplier's Perspective change request pending

When viewed from an IT supplier or vendor perspective, and the skills required for that organisation, SFIA throws up some interesting white areas. Among others these include marketing, HR, finance, pre-sales & sales & education. Consulting or professional services while being pretty well covered may need a review from this perspective. BAU IT Operations and IT Service Delivery I suspect are pretty well covered.

SFIA generally appears to be reasonably robust and complete when viewed from the lens of an internal provider of IT Services to the business.

When viewed from the lens of an external IT service provider (SAP, Oracle, IBM, AWS etc) where IT is the business, then these functions are not included and I propose they need to be. These are specialist skills related to running the business of IT. They include:

The HR function: this has been covered elsewhere in detail, but includes skills framework, skills inventory, skills strategy, skills evaluation, attracting candidates, hiring, retention, performance appraisals, career paths, growth, compensation, stock options, rostering, remote working policies, HR policies, maternity, paternity, harassment, equal opportunity, affirmative action, accruals for leave etc

Finance: SOX, revenue recognition, transfer pricing, sales, service & support business models, recurring annuity, costing, pricing, preparing bids, approving bids, contract renewals, budgeting, forecasting, preparing, assisting, rolling up, owning the p&l and balance sheet 

Marketing: new product development, product management, service management, customer defination, market needs analysis, analyst analysis, market opportunity defination, customer segmentation, pricing, positioning, marketing collateral, marketing programs, outbound & inbound marketing,channels, user groups, events, lead generation

Pre-Sales: developing customer demos, understanding and ability to enunciate product roadmap & strategy, understanding customer requirements, assisting in bids

Sales: self-explanatory, though we may need to review skills from a new business development perspective and installed base account management perspective (identify customer needs, identify new opportunities, prepare proposals, respond to bids, close business, renew business, act as a trusted advisor, set or understand product roadmap, understand and influence customer IT strategy) 

Education: as a standalone line of IT business, developing curriculum, developing the certification program, exams, training service providers, developing training material, owning the education p&l. 

Current status of this request: pending

What we decided

This is a very broad set of suggestions.

Some of the topics are covered in SFIA, some are not.

Further work needs to be done to decompose this into specific change requests and/or requests for changes of scope for the SFIA framework as a whole.

What we changed

Some have been addressed in SFIA 8. To include others need specific change requests, proven industry demand  and potential users/subject matter experts to create skill descriptions.