Remember me

Register

 | Home  | Contact us

Business partners newsletter

Intellect, the trade association for the UK’s IT, telecommunications and electronics industries, launched guidelines designed to improve organisational professionalism throughout the ICT value chain.

Intellect launches organisational professionalism guidelines

The guidelines focus on seven key elements of organisational professionalism - integrity, processes, people, communication, relationships, improvement and citizenship – and have been designed to help organisations implement, demonstrate and assess professionalism.  

The guidelines come under the banner of an industry wide initiative on professionalism, ‘Prof IT’, which is supported by the British Computer Society (BCS), e-skills UK, Intellect and the National Computing Centre (NCC).  The heads of the organisations, who announced the creation of the ProfIT alliance in May 2006, share a common view that professionalism is an aspirational standard, rather than a set of minimum requirements. 

Dr Alf Roberts, the IET’s former chief executive officer, was among key stakeholders invited to participate in a two-phase consultation that Intellect held earlier in the year.  Dr Roberts made a valuable contribution to Intellect’s work, meeting with the Chair of the Intellect professionalism working group back in January 2006.  He also participated in a series of roundtable debates on professionalism in the ICT industry, where he outlined his view of the three key elements of professionalism: “a body of knowledge, applying this in an effective way, and doing so with the right attitude towards your employer, the client and the public at large.”

John Higgins, director general at Intellect, thanks the IET for its support and welcomes future opportunities to work together to embed organisational professionalism.  Commenting, John said: "The UK's ICT industries make a substantial contribution to the quality of our lives and the prosperity of the nation. They are also a major employer and exporter. However, these industries and the people they employ are often perceived as lacking professionalism and up to now there has been no benchmark for IT professionalism in organizations. This initiative will hopefully go some way to engendering trust between suppliers and customers, thus enabling the delivery of successful IT programmes which will contribute to the prosperity of the UK."

The ‘Organisational Professionalism Guidelines’ complement other Intellect activities designed to ensure successful project delivery, including the Intellect Code of Conduct, IT Supplier Code of Best Practice and Concept Viability.  Visit the Intellect website for more information about Intellect’s Professionalism programme and to download a copy of the guidelines.