© 1996 by British Computer Society
Whatever happened to hybrid managers?
The short history of the hybrids
Anne Brackley is a Chartered Occupational Psychologist. As a Senior Consultant in the Human Resources Division of OASiS plc she was involved in the BCS-sponsored research into the characteristics of hybrid managers. She then went to Sheffield Hallam University as Programme Coordinator for the development of the distance learning MSc in IT and Management (‘the Hybrid Manager Programme’). She was a co-opted member of the BCS' Hybrid Manager Task Group. She is now with the University of Sheffield's Department of Automatic Control and Systems Engineering
As this last decade of the twentieth century was about to begin, it was predicted that hybrid managers would take us triumphantly into the new millennium, as the dynamic individuals who would realise - in both senses of the word - the full potential of IT. In 1990 Colin Palmer [1], Chairman of the British Computer Society Task Group on hybrid managers, wrote: ‘The (hybrid manager) term was coined by Michael Earl, Director of OXIIM at Templeton College, Oxford, as a result of a number of pieces of research that he and his colleagues had been undertaking. They noticed that in all the significant cases of successful implementation of information technology for competitive advantage or for achieving major change in organisations, there seemed to be a person at the heart of the development who displayed certain experience and characteristics. These were: an understanding of the business and what was required within the business, combined with a technical competence that enabled them to understand what was required in technical terms, including the scope of what was being planned. In addition to this, they displayed two types of organisational skills. They knew how to get about the business, and this implied that they knew the business and the people around it well, and they knew how to get things done, possessing a set of excellent social skills - to listen, understand, negotiate and persuade’