InfoWorld — The worst of the recession is over, and IT management is coming to grips with the "new normal" of slender resources and pressure to make "alignment with business" more than a buzzword. The demand for technical skills is still strong, but if you want to succeed in this "new normal" environment, you have to offer more to your employer -- a lot more.

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Consider the career of Ginny Lee, who in 2008 became Intuit's third CIO in just four years. Her predecessors, says the man who hired her, CEO Brad Smith, had the requisite technical chops but lacked a clear understanding of how IT could contribute to the company's overall success. They didn't keep their jobs. "In the world of SaaS, SOA, social networking, and mobile, IT is no longer just about great technology," Smith says.

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Lee, a former investment banker with no formal training in computer science, exemplifies a tectonic shift occurring in the world of enterprise IT. Today's CIOs -- and by extension, everyone who works for them -- are living the "new normal," an age where budgets are recovering but still constrained, and where IT is responsible for generating moneymaking ideas and applications. The "new normal" means that business skills are essential if you want to climb the ladder to IT management, and you'd better understand that the days of IT being merely a support organization that just keeps the network running are over.

Yes, things are different, but the world of enterprise IT has not turned upside down. Although it's trendy to think that the days of the big CRM and ERP deployment are past, that's not the case. There's been a noticeable uptick in sales of major enterprise applications this year, fed in part by the resurgent merger and acquisition activity, says Mark White, a principal with Deloitte Consulting. Indeed, Oracle (ORCL) had one of its best quarters ever recently with a big boost from the sale of new licenses for business applications.

There is, however, strong demand for IT hands who have the skills to help deploy a new generation of cloud-enabled applications, virtualization, social networking, and mobile services. And predictive analytics is building on the legacy of traditional business intelligence and data mining to become an essential tool for older businesses and Web-centric companies alike that need to move faster -- and at lower cost -- than ever before.

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