I'm catching up on my trade journal reading, and I've gotten all the way up to the July 17th ComputerWorld. In that, I ran across this article which predicts which skills will be hot, and which will be cold, in 2010. Some of the predictions make a lot of sense - for instance, they predict that you'll need a storage administrator. Heck, with how cheap storage is getting, I might need one in my house :)

Others make less sense - here's one that's been predicted for years now on Application Development:

By 2010, applications will become commodities delivered by external service providers. Internal development won't be dead, though -- it will just be done differently in 2010, Foote says. The challenge will be selecting packages and tailoring them to what you need. "Code-writing disappears in this world, unless it's code-writing in customer-facing applications that offer strategic advantage," he adds.

That glosses over the obvious fallout from so many large ERP installations: tailoring third party applications is never as simple as management would like to think. Admittedly, there's a caveat above: "applications that offer strategic advantage". The question that ought to arise is this: "Will installing this third party package require us to change our processes?" Unless your company is small and nimble, a "yes" answer to that question should make you pause. Process changes become political footballs in companies, and that benefits no one. In many cases, it will be far, far cheaper to custom build something that follows your existing process simply to avoid the political issues.

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