Devil's Advocate: The IT workforce - the wrong number of people?

Continuing our coverage of our annual Skills Survey snapshot of the IT skills market (http://www.silicon.com/ss2002 ), Martin Brampton says where the blame for the perennial 'skills shortage' should lie.

Last week we were concerned about the wrong sort of people (http://www.silicon.com/a51756 ). With the benefit of the latest silicon.com skills survey, we can now think about whether we have the right number of people. The question of opportunities for IT people illustrates the curious neurosis that afflicts the sector.

We wallow in skills shortages, relishing the evidence that the world really needs us. At last, it seems, the economy will be truly grateful for our esoteric contribution. This must reflect a deep-seated insecurity. Does anybody really need IT, or is it all just a tremendous game?

Long ago, when mainframes ruled unchallenged, the business mantra was efficiency. Computers would revolutionise it. No matter that many projects would never have stood up to the simplest back-of-an-envelope analysis of cost and benefits. The whirring tape drives in the glass fronted ground floor computer room were a sign of corporate prestige. But would companies really go on paying for such a fantasy?

Well, no, the efficiency story wore thin and companies could no longer prosper merely by cost cutting. Now computers would be the keys to competitive advantage. Imaginative schemes showed that clever deployment of computers brought huge gains in new revenues. At least one or two schemes did, and they were the preface to many an article or presentation.

With only a handful of substantiated examples, the claim of competitive advantage started to lose its appeal. Just as we were about to descend into neurotic despair, the greatest IT story yet began to unroll. The internet, previously growing steadily in academic circles, suddenly burst on the wider world. A cheap global network would revolutionise economies, placing IT absolutely in the centre of our financial interests.

But the internet failed to cure our neurosis because it turned out to be another step in technical development and not an economic revolution. Some of us, it seems, are even having to face the fact the world does not need us.

Perhaps if we were not so neurotic, we could behave more rationally. For a young and innovative industry, IT is extraordinarily conservative. Even when everyone is bemoaning a skills crisis, recruitment policies are desperately unimaginative. It is well known that women can be highly capable in IT roles but few are attracted into the sector. A significant problem is that recruiters fail to look critically at their routes to the labour market, missing opportunities to appeal to women candidates.

Then recruiters insist on narrow definitions of skills, ignoring extensive research that shows that people of ability quickly adapt to new technologies. With productivity ratios between developers of up to ten to one, it makes little sense to recruit largely on length of exposure to a particular technique. And, of course, the skills of older workers are notoriously undervalued by IT recruiters.

Now, it seems none of that matters, since there are too many people and too few jobs. Which points us to a different set of problems. Another aspect of the conservatism of IT in the UK is our inability to create the kind of small but dynamic technology companies that are so numerous in the US. Individuals are reluctant to take risks and buyers are unwilling to trust small companies.

Contractors imagine themselves entrepreneurs but they are typically hired for a regular five-day week, often over long periods. It is not uncommon for the contractors in an IT department to provide greater continuity than the so-called permanent staff.

Yet the Americans show us that it is possible to build competent small companies that provide genuine innovation. Some of them grow to become large companies but many others simply provide a range of valuable products and services to their larger corporate clients. With too few safe jobs out there, maybe it is time to grow out of our neuroses and have another go at creating genuinely novel IT enterprises in the UK.