NCC Members have free access to this Guideline on the Principia website.

A modern business must be capable of responding to the ever-increasing pace of change in the business environment if it is to survive and prosper. New products, new markets and new delivery channels must be sought to maintain competitiveness. Mergers, acquisitions and even radical new business models are all challenges that a business may face. There is also, of course, the need to control costs.

A key factor in addressing all of these issues is the successful application of e-business systems.

The growth of the new e-business imperative for all businesses has resulted in the demand for new sets of skills to ensure that emerging opportunities are exploited to their full potential. The result is that we are increasingly seeing the requirement for new sets of e-skills at three different levels within an organisation:

• Technical staff with the skills to develop, implement and maintain successful e-business systems
• Support staff with a mix of technical and client-facing skills to provide effective levels of support to the users of the e-business systems
• End users with the appropriate skill levels to utilise the e-business systems on a day to day basis and fully exploit the information, knowledge and communications functionality that they are capable of delivering

And we are only beginning to scratch the surface in terms of the wide spread adoption of e-business technologies. For example a recent IDC survey has forecast that an average of 36 billion person-to-person e-mails will be sent daily by 2005. The number of e-mail boxes in use around the world is expected to grow by a compound rate of 138% until 2005, bringing the total to 1.2 billion, up from 505 million last year.

Another part of the e-skills jigsaw is the use of the internet to recruit staff with appropriate expertise and knowledge. At the same time we are seeing the increasing application of web-based technologies to facilitate e-learning programmes aimed at ensuring that those employees already in place are equipped with the correct mix and levels of e-skills. Recent research by Ovum indicates that e-learning will account for 20% of the UK training market by 2004.

If you are in any doubt why it is necessary to understand the new e-skills, think about this: all the money that you invest in a new internet-based trading and communications system will be wasted unless it is properly optimised and integrated. Traditional barriers between departments have been blurred by the introduction of the internet, and unless both IT managers and non-IT managers understand the changes and support them, the investment will not deliver the efficiency or savings that it could.

It is only by understanding the new changes to all jobs throughout the enterprise, from top to bottom, and the new skills and attitudes towards skills required today, that optimisation of internet systems investments can be achieved and competitive edge thereby maintained.

This guideline will look at how the growth of e-business is fuelling the demand for e-skills and consider how specific skills requirements can be addressed through recruitment, training or the use of contractors. It will also review the role of an e-skills audit in identifying where skill deficiencies may be. In particular it will focus upon the role of the NTO in developing the Skills Framework for the Information Age (SFIA) and its potential application in the area of the skills audit.

Caveat:
Defining job titles and specifications is highly subjective and variable. Individual enterprises arrange their staff differently, and there is no definitive model or definition of each job and the skills required which can apply to every business. This is a broad guide only, and intelligent interpretation and application to each enterprise will be required.