IT managers responsible for staffing their departments can no longer rely only on specific certifications and specialized experience when looking to create an IT team that can address business demands and anticipate future needs.

Creating such a workforce requires IT managers inventory the skills their current staff possesses and identify potential synergies in various roles and responsibilities. Research firm Gartner described the process of assembling such a staff as "building the next-generation IT workforce: focus on synergies" at their Symposium/ITxpo conference last fall. Separately, Foote Partners' CEO and chief research officer David Foote referred to individuals filling such roles as hybrid IT workers. 

"Hybrid jobs require IT professionals to sit down at a business meeting and be able to predict and deliver the technology the business will need to meet its goals and go about implementing it," said Foote late last year during a Network World interview. "The premise of IT/business hybrid roles started at the CIO level. In 2008, you will see it as far down as the $60,000-per-year operations people."

Part of the reason the hybrid is emerging in IT is because the walls between traditionally "siloed" IT disciplines are coming down. Technologies such as virtualization and best practice frameworks such as ITIL require IT staff to work across the intangible boundaries of the past to deliver optimized IT services. Gartner identified seven synergy skills that can help CIOs build the workforce capable of delivering integrated IT services.

"Developing synergy skills across IT will accelerate the organization's transition from being technology-driven to being business-driven," a Gartner presentation from the show reads. "The old scenario of IT as a large centralized control group, with every technical resource reporting to it, and only a few satellite groups working directly with the business is being transformed."

The 7 synergy skills (and definitions) laid out by Gartner at Symposium are:

1. Business enablement: Create and implement solutions that meet business needs.
2. Business process management: Design and implement business processes and systems that efficiently create value for a chain of customers.
3. Change advocacy: Plan and gain buy-in for new ways of doing things and new solutions that create competitive differentiation.
4. Innovation: Improve organizational performance through the application of original thinking to existing and emerging methods, processes, products and services.
5. Project delivery: Scope projects with business value and lead cross-business and contractor teams to achieve project objectives.
6. Service orientation: Agree and monitor service solutions that meet criteria of business needs, cost and risk.
7. Teamwork: Collaborate supportively with colleagues to achieve a common mission.

Denise Dubie is senior editor with Network World.