IT Manager Wanted in the Wine Industry. No Wine Experience Required!
Quick note on the image above: For the past few weeks we’ve been dropping a visualization into the image box at the top of Enolytics 101, and we’re happy to see how they’re resonating with you. In that spirit, although today’s content discusses a different topic, let me say a word about this week’s image. It illustrates activity for four different wine clubs in the first five months of this year, where the darker green columns are new sign-ups, the lighter green columns are cancellations, and the orange columns represent net growth which, as you can see, drop into negative metrics. The same information visualized for all of 2019 shows all three columns above the baseline.
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Help wanted in wine + technology.
It’s a job posting that I noticed this week, thanks to Amy Gardner’s recruiting company, WineTalent.
You can find the full posting here, but let me summarize a few points.
The role is for an Information Technology Manager who will be responsible for supporting the company’s hardware and software, and its third-party vendors. “There are very few IT Manager roles in the wine industry,” Gardner said. “Only mid-sized or larger wineries have dedicated IT employees, and even then much of IT is handled by consultants or third-party vendors.”
The company that’s hiring is a long-established Napa winery that’s active in both distribution and DTC.
The list of requirements for applicants doesn’t mention a single thing about familiarity or experience in the wine industry. Not WSET or the Wine Scholar Guild or the Society of Wine Educators or etc. “This client knows the technology knowledge is more important than understanding how wine is made,” Gardner said, “but they will be involved in all of the technology that is used in the vineyard and the winery.”
Number three, as you might expect, is what caught my eye in particular.
An implication of this point, for me, is that the door is open to more knowledge and expertise from the technology field. Would it be useful if this new IT Manager was familiar with the three-tier system and AVA classifications and how to write a tasting note? Undoubtedly. But that information can be learned and shared by the 40-ish new co-workers that the IT Manager will have.
My point is that the wine industry already knows how to DO wine. Most of us in the industry do NOT know how to do technology and its iterations, including working with data and analyzing the data that our businesses already own.
Technology and data people are far outnumbered in the industry, yet it’s also the area where the needle of differentiation can be moved so effectively. That’s precisely why this job posting, and recruiting for this skill set, has caught my eye.
Does it also ring true for you? Drop me a note and let me know.
And, if you are interested in the intersection of wine and technology, consider joining the wine + data community we are building over at wine-data.org. Check out the Activity link for recent news, including Amy Gardner’s original posting of this IT Manager job and Mike Smith’s update about the TTB COLA registry as a data source.
Thank you, as always, for reading –
Cathy