The effective management of human resources is an important challenge for MIS executives. Part of the challenge is obtaining and retaining MIS personnel with the skills and knowledge required to support the organization effectively. The purpose of this paper is to provide managers and educators with information on the current and future demand for MIS professionals and with information about the relative importance of specific MIS skills. To address these issues a survey of MIS managers was undertaken in the summer of 1990. The results include projections of demand for ten MIS job types. Also reported are the perceptions of importance of fifty-four skills for systems developers and twenty-six technical specialist skills. A model is proposed for explaining perceptions of skill need. Implications of the results are discussed for businesses, educational institutions, and researchers.
The rapid growth of end-user computing is a double-edged sword: it offers new opportunities for improving the effectiveness of organizations, but it also creates new risks for a firm's information resources. This paper describes an organized approach for effectively managing end-user computing. It is based on the definition of "service support levels" which link support services to responsibilities. These levels form the basis of a cooperative effort between the MIS department and the end user.