Skills shortage slows recovery

Companies now need IT professionals who have advanced business skills to roll out web-based solutions. Photo / Supplied

The sense the IT landscape was markedly different coming out of the global financial crisis than it was going in was strengthened by a new report from recruiters Hudson.

Economic Recovery and the New IT Skills Shortage is the result of roundtable discussions with information and communications industry leaders and chief information officers (CIOs) across Australia and New Zealand.

It paints a picture of CIOs having to shift their organisations but struggling to find the right people to make the necessary changes.

In some cases it's their own fault. While some organisations cancelled or delayed projects in the downturn, others went further and purged their IT departments, losing valuable skills in the process.

There are a huge number of projects lining up to be done and major questions are being asked as to whether there are enough people in the marketplace to do them.

That's not unusual, but the difference is the way the skills mix has changed.

"If there was a skills crisis in Australia and New Zealand before the downturn, it is nothing in comparison to that which the industry now faces on the upturn," the report says.

As always, seasoned IT professionals with advanced business skills are the most valuable but there is also a shift in where the action is happening.

Over the past decade or so there has been a lot of investment in back-end systems.

Now the emphasis is on what the customer sees, as senior management has got over its doubts and is treating the web as a primary delivery channel.

But the skills needed to roll out web-based solutions may be very different to those found in traditional IT teams.

It's about sites that work better and which transfer business processes online so the web becomes a primary communication and transaction space for dealing with customers.

Peter Mahler, the acting CIO of financial services firm AXA, says his firm's aim is to get 80 per cent of customer interactions onto the web, both for cost savings and for better service.

"As CIOs we wanted to do this stuff five years ago, but we were infants and the technology wasn't ready. But now that's where a lot of skills are going to be needed."

While New Zealand's Ultra-Fast Broadband Investment Initiative and the National Broadband Network across the Tasman may be a decade away from being completed, some organisations are starting to strategise around them.

In many cases that means focusing on short-term gains through activities such as data centre virtualisation, cutting the number of physical servers needed on site, refreshing core applications to ensure they are flexible and responsive to changing market conditions and improving services delivery.

Organisations that act early will be better able to cope with user expectations of applications that are available anywhere at any time.

The alignment of the needs of organisations with the activities of their IT departments has long been on most must-do lists, and it is finally happening.

Finding IT people who really understand the business has always been hard, although it is something our universities have tried to produce in recent years.

"While technical and vendor-specific skills seem plentiful, strategic and conceptually oriented skills such as enterprise architecture, business analysis, project management, business relationships and vendor management, and data management are in short supply," the report says.

"CIOs ... want employees who can ask the right questions of a project business sponsor to deliver projects fully and efficiently."

Annabelle Klap, Hudson New Zealand's director of ICT recruiting, says rather than the monolithic outsourcing projects of the past, cloud computing offers organisations the option of palming off specific applications or business processes.

"Cloud is all about driving out cost and efficiency for new generation IT and companies are moving to that," Klap says.

That changes the balance of where people need to hire.

"In the past, contractors were brought in to run projects. When it comes to cloud, I would be saying to a lot of employers, 'You need to invest in permanent staff, or upskill your existing staff.'

"Instead of hiring people for their technical skill sets, now IT is trying to align itself around the business and staff now have to wear multiple hats, business, commercial, technical."

As the market picks up, a skill shortage is already emerging for good business analysts.

Klap says companies need to seriously think about internal recruitment for such roles.

She says the place of the CIO in organisations also needs to change.

"Over the years a lot of CIOs have not sat at the executive level but reported to the chief financial officers.

"Some of us believe to realise the full potential of IT, the CIO needs to be on the executive committee."