RESOURCES INDUSTRY TRENDS
PUBLIC SECTOR CUTS Two corporate-sponsored research studies published in March 2011 looked at the UK government’s budget cuts and their effect on public sector IT. Virtualisation software vendor VMware commissioned polling company Comres to find out what senior public sector finance officers thought of the cuts. It found that 61% believe that budget cuts have
already impacted front-line services, and that 69% believe it will be difficult to make the spending cuts within the allotted three-year timescale. It also asked those senior finance officers about their
perception of IT. Three-quarters agreed that IT is integral to achieving the mandated budget cuts, and 83% said IT is essential for delivering shared services. The survey found that 55% of finance officers had
reduced their department’s IT budgets following the cuts. Whether the remaining 45% have the resources to ‘accelerate the transition to cloud computing’, as VMware suggested they might, is another matter. Meanwhile, recruitment consultants Badenoch & Clark polled 1,000 public sector IT practitioners to find out what impact the cuts are having. Around a fifth of them said they expect there to be ‘sweeping’ job cuts in their department, while another fifth said the future is uncertain. Not much can be made of Badenoch & Clark’s finding that “seven out of ten respondents said morale was either average or poor”.
MID-MARKET IT SPENDING Most medium-sized businesses (defined as those having 100 to 1,000 employees) expect their IT budgets to increase in the coming year, according to a global study commissioned by IBM. Of the 100 UK companies included in the survey, 62 said that they expect their IT spending to grow, compared with just 11% when the same survey was conducted in 2009. The study also detected a change in mindset between 2009 and today. Two years ago the study found that 47% described their company’s primary focus as efficiency and cost control. This year that figure dropped to 19%, while 81% said that “growth, innovation and the customer” were the priority.
STAFF TRAINING An investigation by professional services giant Deloitte has found that high-performing IT organisations are significantly better at identifying the individual
49 INFORMATIONAGE APRIL2011 20% 13% 4% Very effective Source: Deloitte Fairly effective
Not very effective
13% 15% 3% 4% 0%
No process in place
Unsure 13% 9% 13%
STAFF TRAINING AND IT EFFECTIVENESS
How effective is your organisation at assessing individuals’ development needs and aligning this to formal training?
Good Fair Poor 61% 57% 63%
26%
training requirements of their staff than those that perform poorly. The report, entitled IT Strategy and Effectiveness, assessed respondent organisations according to an IT management maturity model. It found that 81% of organisations rated either ‘good’ or ‘very good’ according to Deloitte’s maturity model consider themselves effective at identifying the training requirements of IT workers. This compares with just 12% among ‘poor’ or ‘very poor’ IT departments. Other correlates with IT management maturity were
the presence of a documented IT strategy, the presence of an IT operating model and the involvement of the CIO in managing key supplier relationships.
IT JOBS After nearly two years of weak demand for IT staff, the UK IT skills shortage returned in the third quarter of 2010, according to government agency e-skills. During the quarter, the number of advertised IT positions ‘marginally’ exceeded the number of available candidates for the first time since 2008, e-skills found. “While this is good news for IT professionals seeking
employment in the sector, the drop in the number of ready candidates with the required set of skills may start to become a problem for recruiters,” said e-skills CEO Karen Price.
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