Want to know what the IT staffing/jobs outlook is for 2010? Well, the good news, according to a new Robert Half Technology report — there’s “more than enough work to go around.” In answer to the question, “How would you describe the staffing level of your IT department in relation to current workloads?,” CIOs responded:
- Very understaffed 10%
- Somewhat understaffed 33%
- At the appropriate staff level 53%
- Somewhat overstaffed 3%
- Don’t know/no answer 1%
The report further found that 7% of CIOs plan to add IT staff in the first quarter of 2010, while 4% expect workforce reductions. (The net 3% increase is the strongest forecast since the first quarter of 2009.)
This CIO Update article cautions that executives are “taking a slow and steady approach to hiring,” however. So what types of IT professionals are they looking to hire? Generalists and specialists it seems.
On one hand, companies are looking for jack-of-all-trades candidates, so these folks can work in many capacities and help with the overall IT workload.
Demand for certain specialties is strong for applications and database developers, network admins and help desk and support staff.
The Society for Information Management recently polled CIOs about their IT spending priorities and plans for dollar allocation in the coming year. An overview of the results is presented in this slide show on CIO Insight. It’s hard to visualize from the slides so I created these two pie charts to represent their findings about 2009 versus 2010 budgets. It looks like the news is better in the coming year— roughly half of the CIOs surveyed said their 2010 budgets would remain the same.
50% of CIOs said their budgets would be lower in 2009.
45% of CIOs said their budgets would be the same in 2010.
Yes, it’s been a bad year for IT budgets – the worst ever, in fact – but we should return to the lavish spending levels of 2008 … in 2012.
That’s the prediction of Peter Sondergaard, senior VP of research with Gartner, who says: “Global enterprise spending on IT is going to decline 6.8 percent this year. And the IT industry – measured in dollar terms – will actually not recover until 2012, to the 2008 revenue levels.”
In dollars and cents, that’s $2.3 trillion spent this year, compared to $2.5 trillion last year, which will be the level we reach again three years from now.
“Spending has actually declined in all markets,” he says, citing hardware, software, telecommunications and IT services. “Compared with previous negative economic cycles, the impact has been felt all across every single vertical industry.”
Recovery will be driven by IT spending primarily in health care, utilities and government. Sondergaard notes that IT budget planning for 2010 is being done “on the background, therefore, of the worst year ever, in the IT industry.”
“2010 is about balancing cost, risk, and growth,” he says, but expects that about half of all enterprise IT budgets will reflect zero growth or even less funding than for this year.
“By 2012 the accelerated spending on IT will begin to drive a culturally different approach to technology that will start to impact product features, service structures and the overall IT industry,” Sondergaard predicts. “Silicon Valley is no longer in the driver’s seat.”
To see Sondergaard’s brief speech on this, click here.
Wondering where your IT budget is going? Recent tabulations of data center costs show the rising costs of operating one could even threaten corporate profitability in some companies.
A recent report from global management consultants McKinsey & Company says data center capacity currently is growing 10 percent annually as businesses process and store more data. And the resulting cost of this growth is higher yet.
“With this spike in capacity comes a corresponding escalation in data center IT costs,” states the McKinsey report. “Today’s data centers account for approximately 25 percent of the total corporate IT budget, when you take into account facilities, servers, storage and the labor to manage them. This share will grow as the number of servers, the amount of power consumed, and the unit cost of power all increase.”
For example, overall IT spending is climbing at a rate of six percent a year, but data center facility costs alone are jumping 20 percent annually.
“The portion of the IT budget consumed by infrastructure and facilities is significantly reshaping the economics of many businesses,” the report states. “In information-intensive businesses like investment banks, telecoms and business information, data center costs are diverting capital from new product development, making some products and segments uneconomical and materially affecting margins. Without radical changes in operations, many companies with large data centers face reduced profitability.”
You can guess EasyStreet’s take on this: Considering the well-known inefficiencies in most corporate data centers, these rising costs sound like a good argument for outsourcing as a more manageable IT cost structure for more companies.
IT industry-analyst firm IDC sees a massive growth in the number of devices CIOs must oversee, but far less corresponding growth in services to support the devices, according to a recent white paper on the topic.
As far as device growth, IDC sees a 66 percent growth in the number of devices for which CIOs are responsible, climbing from 1.3 billion in 2007 to 2.2 billion in 2012. Support services, meanwhile, will grow 37 percent, to $728 billion, over the same period.
“While the number of devices that CIOs will be responsible for will increase dramatically over the next five years, most enterprises do not expect to see a dramatic increase in their external spending on support services,” states IDC. “However, focusing on only the external costs neglects the additional costs associated with supporting these devices. In addition to the external support costs, enterprises need to consider the internal staff required to support and manage these devices.”
Outsourcing IT was one of the potential solutions IDC says CIOs often consider.
“To address the concerns of managing and supporting an IT environment, many enterprises have chosen to outsource all or some of their IT operations to a dedicated services provider,” the report noted.
You can click here to download the white paper. (You’ll have to register for the download.)
