Last night I was privileged to speak to a gathering of the UK IT security elite, at a dinner event organised by BT. Gathered in the exclusive Westbury Hotel in Mayfair were the great and the good of information security and risk management from the private sector, government and academia.

Putting aside the debates and discussion on the challenges these individuals face – among the toughest and higest-profile tasks in technology management – there was one particularly notable facet of the evening. This wasn’t just a get-together of like-minded professionals of the type you find at any conference or seminar – this was a bunch of mates, albeit with a common professional cause, but meeting on a regular basis to see old friends, have a laugh, and even raise money for charity (congratulations to the organiser, BT’s Ray Stanton, for collecting £1600 for Childline on the night).

In my job, I get to spend a lot of time at events such as this where IT leaders network, meet their peers, make contacts and share experiences – but rarely have I come across a group whose connections go beyond merely the collection of business cards.

Security is the great taboo of IT. Understandably, most organisations are wary of discussing their security and risk management strategies for fear of attracting unwanted attention from potential threats. There is no greater challenge to a hacker than an IT security manager proclaiming his network is hack-proof.

But put these normally reticent individuals together and they recognise their common cause. There are few areas in IT where sharing information and experiences is more likely to produce wider benefits, and the openness that these experts show to each other in private is a lesson for every discipline in IT.

The only area I have come across with similar knowledge sharing is among the most senior IT leaders in the country, who come together through user groups such as CIO Connect, The Corporate IT Forum and the BCS to learn from each other.

But there is a lesson in such sharing that would benefit many more working in IT – it is a sign of a mature profession. Compare with accountants or lawyers, for whom professional knowledge sharing is a key part of their job.

The message to everyone in business technology is clear – you should be talking to each other.

The turmoil engulfing the financial services sector is causing a lot of head scratching and navel gazing across the IT industry.

Vendors are worried about the effect on sales in their most profitable market. IT professionals are worried about their jobs in the light of Lehman Brothers’ collapse and dire warnings of 100,000 job losses in the City of London.

Certainly few people will be worrying about skills shortages in the City – there’s likely to be plenty of spare IT staff looking for work.

But one area of the IT industry is almost certainly smiling – it’s time, once again, for India to benefit.

Computing blogger Mark Kobayashi-Hillary has speculated a lot about the effect on offshore outsourcing, and I’d tend to agree with his view that many finance firms are going to look overseas to help cope with the crisis.

The pressure will be on struggling banks to cut direct costs (which means people), reduce capital spending (which means big IT purchases), and generally to cut operational budgets.

Most big financial services firms have experience of offshoring work by now and understand the pitfalls and opportunities it presents. In tough times such as these when difficult decisions have to be made quickly, there are two easy, quick wins.

One is to say to an IT services company – can you run some of our proven processes in exactly the way they operate now, but cheaper. Effectively, keep the lights on, but do so for less cost. So, IT support, systems management, network management and other aspects of technical infrastructure support can easily be transferred to lower cost centres in India.

The other action is to look at transformational IT projects and ask two questions: Do they need to be staffed with in-house resources, and can hardware infrastructure be externally hosted? If the same benefits can be delivered from these important initiatives by offshoring more of the development work to India, or by outsourcing the hardware operation, then it becomes an easy move to make in the current climate.

I met with Pradipta Bagchi, the head of global communications for India’s number one IT company Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) earlier today for a catch-up. Bagchi certainly sees opportunities for TCS and others from the financial upheaval. Most of the big Indian vendors have established relationships with firms in the sector and are ready to take advantage of any opportunities that arise.

Bagchi said that TCS already has experience of the complex integration and separation tasks involved in mergers and acquisitions among finance firms – another area of expertise that is likely to be in demand. TCS is one of the major suppliers to ABN Amro, in a deal signed before the Dutch bank was bought by a consortium of Royal Bank of Scotland, Fortis and Banco Santander.

Imagine how valuable that knowledge will be if, say, Lloyds TSB and HBOS merge, or when banks pick apart the remains of Lehman Brothers and take over parts of their operations and want to merge them with their own.

A global crisis in the most globalised sector of all will inevitably lead to opportunities for the most global of IT suppliers – and they are increasingly found in India.

Computing reported recently that the number of children taking exams in IT or computing-related subjects has dropped yet again.

We regularly write about the challenge of reducing the skills gap – finding the 140,000 new recruits to the IT profession that will be needed every year for the next five years.

And it’s good to know that these are topics that animate our readers and encourage them to join the debate through commenting on news stories or writing letters to the editor.

I often receive such letters from recent graduates detailing the difficulties they are having finding jobs in IT – typically bemoaning the fact that everyone says there is a skills shortage and worries that not enough young people study IT, yet when they go fo a job employers always say they want someone with real-life experience.

It’s a genuine problem, and I sympathise with their frustrations.

But I have to also be honest and add one important point. Frankly, if the spelling and grammar used in their job applications is the same as in the letters I receive, I’m not surprised nobody will employ them.

It’s all very well being a great programmer or knowing your way around the inside of a server, but correct use of the English language is a pretty basic pre-requisite.

I once talked to an academic from one of the UK’s leading universities who said that during their career they had seen a noticeable drop in the basic ability of students entering further education. Another university has for decades tested its mathematics students on arrival, and can chart the drop in knowledge levels over the years.

I often mention these points when anyone claims that the growing number of A-level passes proves that the UK education system is working. Personally, I have few doubts that the quality of exams has degraded, and my experience of editing our letters page only serves to reinforce that.

The problem of recruiting young people into IT goes much further than simply encouraging more of them to study computer-related subjects.

Perhaps it is old habits dying hard, but there is still a part of my brain that approaches August thinking: “Ah, good. It will be a little quieter for a month, I can catch up on all those things I never had time to do before.”

What happened? Talk to anyone across the industry and the answer is the same ­ it’s busy, busy, busy. If you have time for a holiday, you’re not working hard enough.

For those who manage to get away from it all, research by Credant Technologies last month suggested that 83 per cent of City IT workers expect to take their mobile phone or BlackBerry with them on holiday. Some 65 per cent plan to contact the office from the beach.

And according to the Chartered Management Institute, one in three IT executives will not use their full holiday entitlement this year. Some 17 per cent of IT managers say they use their annual leave to develop skills to make them recession-proof, 51 per cent do not want to let down colleagues and 33 per cent are too focused on “meeting project deadlines”.

Is it just the credit crunch concentrating people’s minds on the precariousness of their jobs, or is it the result of years of gradual downsizing and outsourcing reducing IT departments to the absolute minimum number needed to still provide a service?

It is difficult to come up with a definitive answer, but these sorts of trends will be high on most people’s list.

Just look at the news so far in August. There’s Cern, the nuclear research lab in Geneva, switching on the world’s biggest particle accelerator and so putting into practice the largest IT grid in existence to capture all the data. There are rumours of Fujitsu and Siemens parting ways in their joint-venture partnership. The NHS has appointed two new IT chiefs, not to mention the Beijing Olympics and all the technology needed to support the 2008 Games. No doubt Oracle will buy somebody soon, just to keep us all further on our toes. It never stops in IT these days.

So is there any great revelatory conclusion we can draw from the lack of a summer in IT? Only that technology is so fundamental now to every aspect of work and life that the industry can simply never switch off, and that is a situation that will only get worse ­ or better, depending on your point of view ­ in future.

Enjoy the summer ­ wherever you may be spending it.

As IT professionals, you may not be aware of the hard work being done on your behalf by market researchers.

Here at Computing, we daily receive press releases containing the latest research into IT workers preferences / habits / spending plans / attitudes / opinion / any other often lame way to try to get coverage in the paper. So we are uniquely positioned to draw all these often-spurious trends together to gain a picture of our readers.

Well, you’d have thought so, anyway.

If you were to rely on the pollsters opinions of the IT profession you could end up with the most dysfunctional and disturbing perceptions imaginable.

Here is the latest example, which comes courtesy of the government-backed training organisation Learndirect.

According to its “hidden skills” survey, 51 per cent of IT professionals have “untapped potential” that their employers fail to take advantage of.

Quite probably true. But let’s see what the pollsters say.

Apparently, IT workers choice of superhero boss would be Bruce Wayne, alter-ego of traumatised crime-fighter Batman. Least favourite supervillain boss would be bat-nemesis The Joker.

Are you already wondering why they bothered?

My favourite part of the research identifies the hidden skills gained through activities out of work.

It seems 29 per cent of you have writing skills – proved by the fact that you do crosswords or have written letters to a local paper.

Next, 24 per cent of you have numeracy skills – which the pollsters know because you are good at Sudoku.

And 22 per cent of you have presentation skills – gleaned from giving a best man’s speech.

I don’t know about you, but I’m wondering what abilities the 71 per cent without writing skills have, or the 76 per cent without numeracy skills. Now that would be interesting research.

And apparently you are a modest bunch too. When asked who you would turn to if you wanted to discuss you hidden skills, 17 per cent said you wouldn’t tell anyone.

If any of you – and I mean even one of you – happen to recognise yourself or your colleagues from this clearly valuable and insightful research, please let me know by commenting on this blog post. Unless of course you are part of the illiterate 71 per cent who might struggle to string a few words together (perhaps you should try a crossword instead?)

Just to round off the in-depth research, it seems 37 per cent of you wish you had the power of mind reading to use at work, followed by 24 per cent who would choose invisibility as your superpower.

Personally, I’d choose an inbuilt personal spam filter for pointless and demeaning surveys.

Why is the IT industry still so incapable of realising that the negative perceptions that surround it are largely caused by its unceasing use of jargon and rubbish buzzwords?

I realise this is hardly a new topic. There has been plenty of navel-gazing in the past on this recurring theme, but I’m inspired to write about it again thanks to Atos Origin.

The IT services provider has produced a pretty good study of the key trends affecting business and IT over the next few years. It’s called Look Out 2008+, and you can find out more about it here: http://lookout.atosconsulting.com/introduction/welcome-look-out-2008 - it’s well researched and worth a read.

But the stand-out for me was on one of the opening pages of the printed version, where the headline proudly states:

“Why is Look Out different? …because it removes the hype and gives a pragmatic view of the art of the possible.”

No hype – but “the art of the possible” ?

In other words – “We won’t use buzzwords, and to prove it, here’s a naff buzzphrase.”

This sort of jargoneering has always annoyed me no end, as it does so many people in the IT community who find themselves labelled as geeks because whenever those outside the industry read anything about what we do, it is full of all this meaningless drivel.

Sometimes it’s fine, and sometimes IT jargon becomes part of everyday language – the internet, the web, broadband, for example – but mostly it harms the image of the industry.

Is it any wonder the tech sector is struggling to attract new people to help tackle skills shortages if the first thing potential candidates read about working in IT is full of jargon and buzzwords? How is that a way to make this seem like an exciting place to work?

I wish I knew the answer – the IT industry can hardly say it has not been told remorselessly that this is a problem, yet still it cannot do anything to change.

Cutting the hype? The art of the impossible, perhaps.

I had an unusual professional experience this week – one that most people who work in IT would recognise in the same circumstances – that of being the only male in a conference room full of about 250 women.

Most technology conferences I attend are hugely male-dominated – a typical but sad reflection of the fact that just 16 per cent of the one million IT professionals in the UK are women, a figure that has been reached after the numbers dropped every year since the turn of the century.

Women in IT is one of those old technology industry perennials that is regularly discussed and investigated – yet for all the effort and initiatives to turn the situation round, still women leave the industry in droves.

My 250-to-one moment came at the Women’s Leadership Summit, a cross-industry event dedicated to showcasing the best in female business leaders from every sector of the UK. I chaired a panel debate looking at the IT industry and discussing the opportunities it presents for all potential workers – but with a particular focus on women.

I was accompanied on stage by six senior female leaders from six of the most influential consumer and business technology companies in the world – BlackBerry-maker RIM, Google, Microsoft, Dell, Cisco and Canon. Their skills and experience encompassed the full range of roles, from management to sales to engineering.

RIM’s European managing director, Charmaine Eggberry, talked about how the rapid growth of the company means it expands its workforce by 20 per cent every three months. RIM could hardly have more female-friendly employment policies – yet Eggberry still struggles to attract women even to apply for jobs. “But I have no problems recruiting men,” she said.

The concensus of opinion was that the biggest barrier to attracting women into IT is the image of the industry – a chicken-and-egg situation whereby the profession is seen as geeky, dull and male-dominated, and as a result it cannot attract a diverse workforce so remains seen as geeky, dull and male-dominated. Yet the senior speakers at this event were anything but – every one an excellent role model for the sort of career that IT can provide to anybody, regardless of gender or age.

I could debate endlessly the subject of women in IT and the reasons we have to reverse the trend, but what I took from the summit was more than simply this ongoing issue.

There was a noticeably different feel to this event, a different atmosphere to the usual male-dominated IT conferences – more open, more collaborative, more relaxed, more positive, and I would even say more inspirational and aspirational.

I walked out of the event smiling – which I suppose could be attributed to being the only bloke in a room full of successful and in some cases fairly wealthy women – but I can’t honestly say I felt the same way walking out of the keynote speech at the SAP conference last month. We simply cannot ignore the positive effect that a more balanced workforce would have on IT.

You would be amazed at the misogyny displayed in some of the letters Computing receives when we write about women in IT – a minority of course, but one the profession could do without.

Computing reporter Janie Davies has been researching the subject for an article in next week’s issue of Computing – I won’t steal her thunder but some of the tales of sexism she has been told are gobsmackingly bad; an embarrassment to every other man in IT.

Technology is becoming increasingly ubiquitous in our everyday lives, and the UK IT profession simply has to reflect the diversity of the people that use its products and services – or it will wither. We need 140,000 new entrants into the industry every year for the next five years – and that means significantly more than 16 per cent of those need to be female or the jobs will not be filled and the work will go overseas.

There is no shortage of initiatives to promote women in IT and to encourage women into IT. But there remains a shortage of women who want to work in IT. There is no overnight solution, but a solution must be found.

The IT profession is expanding at such a rapid rate that 140,000 new staff will be needed every year for the next five years by UK employers.

But at the same time as such ambitious recruitment needs have emerged, research by the National Computing Centre suggests that the skills shortage today is at its highest level for 10 years. Demand for IT staff is outstripping supply by nearly seven per cent.

Put those two statistics together and you get a potential shortfall of almost 10,000 IT professionals per year.

For any organisation employing technology expertise – and there can be few that do not – recruiting, retaining and training IT professionals is going to be a critical factor in achieving its objectives.

There will be huge competition for talented individuals as IT plays an ever-more fundamental role in making companies more profitable and helping government deliver better public services.

In the short term, IT contractors will be the first to benefit – hourly rates for freelance work in the technology-intensive financial services sector has already shot up by 11 per cent in the last six months, hitting a two-year high, according to the Association of Technology Staffing Companies.

Longer term, for skilled IT professionals seeking full-time roles, the opportunity to join a forward-thinking employer that can prove it cares about its staff will be a big incentive.

The companies featured in the Top IT Employers 2008 book, published this week by CRF in association with Computing, are clearly ahead of the game.

But attracting the best talents into business technology continues to be a challenge. 

The number of university students opting for mathematics or computing-related courses is dropping year by year. The same is true at GCSE and A-level.

The Office of National Statistics says there is a higher turnover among secondary school technology teachers than any other comparable role – hardly any wonder then, if pupils are failing to be engaged by the subject.

And within the profession itself, many IT leaders are warning of a looming skills gap – as more low-level technical roles are outsourced, increasingly to offshore destinations such as India, where will the next generation of managers come from? The traditional career ladder, typically starting in roles such as technical support or software programming, is being broken down from the bottom, rung by rung.

And then there is the sexist, ageist image of the industry. Only 18 per cent of UK IT professionals are women. Regular readers of Computing’s letters page will know that the two most common themes are women keen for a job in IT but struggling to find family-friendly working practices, and people the “wrong” side of 40 with bags of experience but who cannot even get an interview. Straight away, here are two important constituencies that could fill a gaping recruitment hole but are often given little encouragement to try.

IT sector skills council e-Skills UK says that half of those 140,000 entrants into the profession will need to come through people transferring from other specialisations. The need for more business-focused IT staff has long been an issue for IT directors, and such cross-pollination will no doubt help. But what is being done to convince suitable managers to change career direction into a profession that too many see as only for geeks and techies?

A two-pronged approach is clearly needed from leaders of the IT profession.

For those already working in IT, training and skills development is essential, both for the individual’s career goals and for the employer’s staff retention needs.

For attracting new entrants – a programme of education and awareness is needed to appeal to non-technologists and to the next generation of employees alike.

Central to both these aims is the recognition that working in IT is no longer simply about being a technical expert. With lower-level skills freely and cheaply available in India and elsewhere, the profile of the IT department is changing. Interpersonal skills, communications skills, and business knowledge are increasingly at the top of the list of recruitment prerequisites.

According to Gartner vice president Diane Morello: “The intersection of business models and IT requires people with varied experience, professional versatility, multi-discipline knowledge and technology understanding – a hybrid professional, in other words.”

So the demands on individuals are changing, and their expectations of IT employers will change too.

What makes an attractive workplace for an in-demand IT professional, perhaps one spoilt for choice in a jobseekers’ market?

One of the most important considerations is the company’s attitude to technology and its IT team. Is the IT department seen as a backwater, languishing in the basement, not really making a strategic contribution to the organisation? Or does the IT leader play an important role in the boardroom, with IT-enabled change on the business agenda and leading-edge technologies being put in place to maintain a competitive edge?

For ambitious IT workers, there would be only one option from the two.

At a more personal level, what is the commitment to training and development? IT changes so quickly that constant investment is needed in keeping up to date with the latest trends and technologies. An IT professional supporting Windows 2000 will hardly feel his or her career is on an upswing. Technologists are typically enthusiasts, they like to be challenged and are motivated by the new – or at the very least, by building world-class skills at the not-quite-so-new.

In the not-too-distant future, the quality of an organisation’s IT staff will be a determining factor in the success of that business. Outsourcing is fine up to a point, but ultimately it is the innovation, leadership and personal skills of in-house IT leaders and their teams that will make the difference between the technology-enabled companies that make their mark in the 21st century, and those consigned to the past.

Being recognised as a top IT employer is a pretty good place to start.

This article was originally written as an introduction to the Top IT Employers 2008 book, published by CRF in association with Computing. 

Last month, a three-man team from Computing joined a merry band of 15 Computing readers to cycle 370km across Cuba to raise money for our charity partner, Computer Aid International.

Now the aches, pains and chafing have faded, the memories of a fantastic trip remain – but more importantly, the cyclists’ efforts raised a grand total of £50,000 to help fund education and health projects in the developing world.

Now that the money is in and the fundraising is complete, this is my opportunity to thank the many people and organisations that sponsored the Computing Three on the cycle challenge – and I’m pleased to say we raised £14,000 of that grand total through your efforts.

Our corporate sponsors, all of whom donated at least £50 and in most cases a lot more, are listed here alphabetically, please click on the links to find out more about them:

Anymedia
Axios Systems
Blue Rubicon
FSA
Inferno PR
Information Management Group
IQ Resource
JD Marketing
Mark Kobayashi-Hillary
Nelson Bostock
Netevents TV
Preferred IT
Rethink Recruitment
Ricoh
SEC
Star
Stepstone

Plus of course there were many individual sponsors that contributed – see our Justgiving.com fundraising page for details, here: http://www.justgiving.com/computingcuba.

The money Computing raised will fund the distribution and set-up of refurbished PCs and IT equipment donated by Computing readers for a telemedicine project in Africa.

Computers provided by Computer Aid are helping to save lives in rural health clinics in some of the most isolated communities in sub-Saharan Africa, where there are just 12.5 doctors per 100,000 people compared to the European average of 340. Laptops supplied by Computer Aid, together with scanners and digital cameras, have been installed in clinics across Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania.

These clinics are regularly visited by flying doctors who can use the equipment to send x-ray images, medical notes and digital photographs of critically-ill patients to clinical specialists hundreds of miles away. By enabling instant expert diagnosis, this project is ensuring that medical conditions can be treated promptly and accurately with life-saving consequences.

The project is run by the African Medical Research and Education Foundation and provides a dramatic example of the way in which PCs donated in the UK are serving on the front-line against Africa’s biggest killers: HIV/AIDS, respiratory disease, malaria and water-borne infections.

The rural telemedicine project currently has just 12 PCs in four centres. But it needs many more. Computer Aid hopes to finance a further 43 centres based in Uganda, Tanzania and Kenya.

Computer Aid is organising another challenge later this year – cycling across the wildlife-rich African island of Madagascar – if you are interested in taking part and raising money for this fantastic cause, visit the web site here: http://www.computeraid.org/madagascar.htm

And finally, congratulations to all my fellow cyclists who completed the often arduous trip around Cuba. It was hard work, but a lot of fun, and all the better for helping such a great charity. Here is the roll of honour, pictured at the Bay of Pigs museum in Cuba (taken before we started cycling, so somewhat healthier-looking than at the end) :

Back row standing, left to right: Matt (part of support team), Dave North, Carl Davies, Stephen Campbell, Nick Kitson, Shelley Kingston, Megan Bassford, Jonathan Cooney, Zahid Hanif, Robin Booth, Dave Keniston

From row crouching, left to right: Computer Aid founder Tony Roberts, Emily Skelton, Justin Richards, me, Brett Mendoza.

What does 2008 hold for IT leaders? Let’s not talk about technology predictions this time, or go through a list of patently obvious forecasts or frankly ludicrous recommendations. Most IT leaders are more than capable of understanding what their technology priorities are for the year.

But what will 2008 mean for your job?

There has been plenty written in the past few years about the changing nature of the chief information officer (CIO) role, the need for more business knowledge, and the importance of soft skills. But did we see last year the first evidence of a more significant change in the role?

Perceptions of IT leadership are shifting – from above and from within.

Boots and House of Fraser dispensed with the CIO / IT director role last year. Technology is still just as important to their businesses, but they felt that the end of a major investment programme meant that top role was no longer needed, handing IT responsibility on the board to the finance director.

Separately, research by Harvey Nash and PA Consulting last year suggested that turnover in IT leaders is increasing fast - 23 per cent of UK CIOs have been in post for less than a year, compared to just four per cent in 2005 - with a further 34 per cent expecting to change employer this year.

Then look at one of the highest-profile CIOs in the UK, Colin Cobain at Tesco, who announced his departure in November after completing a major project for the retailer’s US business.

Put these strands together and you have a radically different perception of the IT leader’s role starting to emerge.

The job seems to be diverging into two types of individual.

First, there are the IT change managers – people whose expertise and motivation comes from starting and completing major technology transformations, but who balk at the thought of simply keeping the lights on.

Then you have the steady Eddies, whose skills are focused on running a world-class operation, delivering the best IT support and maximising the existing investment.

Boots and House of Fraser have, arguably, turned to the latter. Cobain is unquestionably an example of the former. Indeed, the now-departed Boots CIO, Rob Fraser, was another whose focus seemed to be the delivery of change, so perhaps his leaving was not so unexpected.

IT has a long history of navel-gazing about its role in the boardroom, and perhaps the emergence of these two leadership profiles reflects that dilemma.

In organisations where IT is seen as central to change, you tend to find CIOs in the boardroom. Where technology is seen as supporting the business, the IT manager tends to report to the board. As the role matures, perhaps the old definitions will no longer be relevant and we will instead talk about two distinctly different job titles.

So what lies in store for you in 2008? Are you excited by the prospect of IT-led change because of the benefits for your CV and the chance to move to pastures new? Or does the thought of delivering long-term, day-to-day IT excellence motivate your working day?

Perhaps it will soon be the case that fewer and fewer IT leaders will be answering “yes” to both questions.