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By Lauren Bielski
As with other downturns, this recession-especially brutal-has forced corporate leaders to be particularly discriminating, with CIOs looking at new ways to cope given stringent budgets.
And this view extends to IT workers. Because during any given time, a staffer might be crucial for a project or a vision, while another doesn't fit and becomes expendable (even if there are regrets.) On the whole, techies have fared better than those in many other industries. Yet haven't been entirely spared, given an ongoing fixation on cost control.
Looking at findings from a selection of recent research illustrates that many enterprises are still making adjustments, trying to spend just the right amount on workers and other resources to get this year's projects completed.
Greater numbers of IT workers have found themselves unemployed late in the recession, according to Veritude, the Boston-based staffing services firm.
In a recent press release, Veritude cited WANTED Technologies hiring demand indicators, noting that many IT occupations were less appealing to hiring firms, with database administrators in 33% less demand, when the data was released in April, than when previously surveyed. Hiring demand during the second quarter had decreased by 11% for IT workers maintaining IT infrastructure (such as network and computer systems administrators). It was also down for software engineers.
During April showers and May flowers, the seasons changed but the mood of caution didn't so much. Research issued in June by Robert Half indicated that 6% of the group polled said they planned personnel reductions in the same period, citing company wide layoffs, reduced IT budgets, and IT projects being put on hold as the reason.
Spending? Only With Justification
In contrast to the recession of 2001, when it was more common to see bloated IT organizations, many now run lean in terms of staff-and have done so since the early part of the decade, according to Irvine, Calif.-based Computer Economics.
Forrester's Andrew Bartels issued a report on IT employment in March that reflected this svelt form. At the time, Forrester indicated that U.S. market for total jobs in IT occupations was down by 1.2% in 2009, with IT department staff declining more modestly by 0.7%, while indicating that IT jobs in product development and support at IT vendors would fall by 2.8%.
Still, opportunities such cloud computing are also more of a presence now, representing a new opportunity to reduce perceived, or real, unneeded extras.
Chris Silva, Forrester's analyst in mobile infrastructure notes that many of his clients are concerned about gaining efficiency and rationalizing their environments. (Silva's expertise extends to general IT infrastructure.) In a recent survey of a small group of Forrester clients, 54% indicated that they would maintain the IT staff they had, Silva told CIOZone. And yet, those organizations would be trying to rightsize, that is, be more efficient with what they had.
Silva offered an example of Sprint combining with Nextel, first announced at the end of 2005.
"In the time since, these organizations have done the hard work of combining operating environments and reducing redundancies," he explains. In terms of workforce, many Windows server administrators were taken off that relatively low-skill work and applied elsewhere. "They're more valuable," Silva relates. Presumably, they were also doing more challenging work. Much of this "asset shift" overlapped with the recession.
Silva recently completed a report on Making IO Investments to Save the Business and another piece, Assessing the Network Skills Gap, which came about when clients were interested in newer methods like WAN optimization, but didn't have the skillset to make the most of these sorts of caching and condensing technologies.
"What these IT organizations are trying to do is avoid simply buying greater bandwidth to accommodate new applications," says Silva. (He points out that earlier in the year, clients indicated an interest in spending on networks, despite the recession.)
Silva believed that being smart, rather than ruthless and draconian with cuts was what most IT organizations wanted.
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