Basic Internet Communications Technology Skills and Systems of Engagement

The Internet communications technology (ICT) worker of tomorrow will need skills that address the problems of today‘s enterprises. This article outlines changing attitudes in project management, their relationship to decision making, and the role of the ICT worker. Large enterprises have traditionally relied on plan-driven project management that presents a clear view of how to engineer and design a product for market. In this view, engineering is “building the thing right” and design is “building the right thing.” Plan-driven models succeed or fail on a top-down ability to define what right means in either context. In today‘s market, speed is everything, to the point that many see plan-driven project management failing to keep up with the pace. Other approaches, such as the agile approach, are gaining momentum but focus mostly on reducing time to market while relying on user feedback to define what right means. Who then is best suited to know what right means? Executives at the head of corporate hierarchies, or the people who interact with technology as users? The ICT skills needed to address this question will require a balance between speed and judgment. Participatory governance studies can inform ways to increase speed through devolved decision making, and design ethnography can provide ways that devolved decision makers can cultivate good judgment about their users. We outline this theory in practice with three case studies: delivering educational programs for app development, attempting to broaden civic engagement with natural language processing algorithms, and facilitating Indigenous clean energy projects with design thinking practices.