The relative importance of selected skills needed by systems analysts as perceived by practicing systems analysts

The purpose of this study was to identify the relative importance of selected skills that a systems analyst may need when performing systems development tasks and the relative importance of the systems development tasks as perceived by practicing systems analysts. The impact of selected dimensions of the system development environment was also investigated by evaluating the importance of skills within different system development contexts. A survey was sent to a national sample of organizations and 134 systems analysts from 77 different organizations participated in the study. The participating systems analysts were asked to rate the relative importance of 35 selected systems analyst tasks. The systems analysts rated the tasks on a 5-point scale from "very important" to "very unimportant." The respondents were instructed to rate the importance of the tasks by considering how each task aided them in successfully developing and maintaining computerized information systems at their organization. After rating the 35 tasks, the systems analysts were asked to rank the relative importance of four skill categories for each task. The four skill categories assessed were interpersonal skills, technical skills, analytical skills, and communication skills. The systems analysts ranked the four skill categories for each of the 35 activities from 1 to 4. For each task, every skill category received a unique ranking. The skill category rankings were weighted by the individual task ratings to determine an overall weighted skill category ranking. The overall weighted skill category rankings were grouped and analyzed based on four dimensions of the systems analysts' typical system development environment. The size of the system developed, the interpersonal environment in which the system was developed, the reason for undertaking a system project, and the individual who typically initiates system projects were assessed to determine their impact on the relative importance of each of the four skill categories. The results showed that regardless of the dimensions of the system development environment, analytical skills were consistently ranked the most important skill by the systems analysts. Although the computed average weighted ranking for technical skills was higher than communication skills, the rankings for these two skill categories were statistically equivalent. Interpersonal skills were consistently ranked last.