New IT roles produce a slew of new job titles

Learn how three CIOs are creating new jobs — and new job titles — for IT professionals to reflect the ongoing evolution of IT’s role in the enterprise.

Chris Coye, Disney/ABC Television Group, The Walt Disney Co.: Business Technology Partners, Data Engineers

As the business landscape has evolved, we are playing catch-up to hire the skill sets needed in IT. One of the biggest trends is the consumerization of IT. Employees don’t want to use 25-year-old systems to do the same things they do at home using Google or Facebook. In response, we are creating roles for business technology partners–people who can deliver systems that are more like the experience that employees get outside of the office. These roles, which in the past may have been systems managers, have business acumen first and foremost. They have the ability to communicate directly with clients, and are able to understand clients’ businesses, translate their needs and hand off their requirements to a group that can build and deliver systems.

In the data analytics field, we are hiring for data engineering roles instead of business intelligence positions. We refocused our team and titles on data engineering about two years ago to reflect IT’s position as a technology function that provides a platform for the business to use. So we are hiring data engineer team members to define and build the platform.

Cynthia Conde, Sanofi: UX Designers, Integration Specialists

We are evolving our IT professional landscape to include roles that are more strategic and business-focused, such as solution architects, project managers and service owners who can deliver IT from an end-to-end business service perspective rather than by traditional technology towers. We have a broad range of systems and services that span external providers and on-premises solutions. We need people who can look after the whole solution in the context of a business service, and not just at the individual parts.

With big data, cloud, mobile and social, we need to meet the needs of a digital world. Our internal users, external customers and consumers have greater expectations of how they interact with technology. This is a call to action for us to embrace new roles, such as user experience designers who bring a “design eye” to the development process and focus on simplifying the user experience and enhancing productivity.

Other new roles are data scientists, who understand how data is used in the business process and help glean business value from data, and integration specialists, who understand internal systems, third-party cloud solutions and other partners to ensure seamless high-performing services. This is a complex challenge requiring professionals who understand the entire ecosystem, have a service bent and know how to link systems to provide the right solutions and services.

Jim Cole, Formerly at First National of Nebraska: CX Managers, Emerging Technologists

We’ve redesigned our organization to focus on the customer and the employee. Any customer-facing system–whether on the Web, voice or mobile–is now the responsibility of the application manager of customer experience. This new role was created to provide continuity among systems that a customer sees and touches. We used to be mired in the whole concept of channel delivery–we aligned applications for the Internet, phone or mobile. Now we have a single manager with a retail banking and customer service background who oversees all applications to bring things together in a common customer experience.

We have a similar approach for employee systems. Previously, we did not focus on making it seamless for employees to access systems from multiple lines of business. To help customers with business across multiple systems–credit card, mortgage or a savings account–an employee had to log on to a separate system for each product. So we created a manager of the customer experience position and hired a technologist, since so many of our employee systems interact with core banking applications. We also have two “emerging technologists” whose job is to find out what technology developments will affect banking and the business in the next five years.

(Since this interview, Cole has become EVP and CIO at Arvest Bank.)