IBM is currently doing a big advertising campaign called Smarter Planet. I recently put together a lecture for a group of university students which tried to weave together a number of themes which I am currently interested in:

• Today’s world is full of wicked problems.
• Solving these wicked problems, and building a smarter planet needs new skills.
• The IT workforce of the 21st needs to be a versatile and adaptive breed of systems thinkers.

Here’s my manifesto:

In the 21st century IT professionals must adopt more of a systems thinking approach if they are to solve the wicked problems the world faces. If we are truly going to build a smarter planet then we need a new breed of versatilists who are able to solve these problems.

There are a number of themes here I plan to return to in future posts.