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.

BT Global Services has until very recently been a shining star of the telecoms giant, and even after its shock profit warning last week, the division still accounts for £9bn of the group’s £20bn revenue.

In all the recrimination, resignation and share price falls since the financial announcement, one potential aspect of Global Services’ problems has been little discussed.

I’ve heard a few people wondering how much of the division’s troubles are down to its involvement in the NHS National Programme for IT (NPfIT).

BT is one of only two major contractors still involved, along with CSC. Accenture and Fujitsu have already pulled out due to concerns over potential losses, and BT had been expected to pick up the region ceded by Fujitsu’s departure.

Former NHS IT director general Richard Granger negotiated some tough terms and conditions for the key suppliers to the programme – in particular, that payments would be made on delivery of finished product. This is great news for the NHS – now that key parts of the project have been delayed, it doesn’t have to worry about the costs of software and services that are not yet fully operational.

This was a big factor in Accenture’s withdrawal as the supplier saw its costs increasing and its revenue being pushed further into the future.

In the early days of NPfIT, former BT chief executive Ben Verwaayen was asked by reporters about the impact on the firm’s bottom line, and he proudly explained that BT had not budgeted for a profit from the programme for some time ahead, seeing it as a long-term investment. A wise move – but one now wonders exactly when those profits were expected.

The core part of NPfIT –electronic patient records – is an area BT is most exposed to, and is the area most delayed. Recent reports suggested that many NHS trusts are refusing to implement software until they can see it working elsewhere. Considering that one of the BT pilot sites, the Royal Free Hospital in London, has just revealed it lost £7.2m due to the project, it isn’t looking promising.

BT meanwhile, is funding development and providing services to implement software and try to make it work – essentially without getting paid for it.

There has been no official word from BT one way or the other, but observers cannot help but speculate that the troubled National Programme may be a factor in Global Services' current struggles.

And if it is, and BT feels it has to reconsider or renegotiate its involvement, then the risks to the NHS IT scheme would be significant.

We’ve all heard about “greenwash” – the recent tendency of IT suppliers to add a green veneer to all their marketing, suddenly hailing the environmental credentials they didn’t realise they had until it became important to their biggest customers.

Well now we seem to have the “economic crisis-wash” if you’ll pardon the rather garbled grammar.

Computing journalists are regularly on the receiving end of PR executives ringing on behalf of IT vendors to promote their wares and try to get an inch of column space somewhere in the publication.

Probably every other call lately is pushing their clients’ ability to help users respond to the impending recession – usually the self-same products that were also just perfect to help you in the boom times.

Of course it’s easy to be cynical and you can’t blame IT marketing managers for trying to be topical and responding to the changing needs of prospective customers.

But if you’re not fed up already with recessionwash, I expect it’s only a matter of time…

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.

The shortlist for the Computing Awards for Excellence has been announced – so congratulations to all those who have made it to this stage.

This year’s awards achieved a record number of entries, and the quality of the companies, projects, teams and individuals shortlisted is a testament to the strength of UK IT today. If you have made it this far – you deserve to pat yourself on the back for a job very well done.

It’s not been an easy year for a lot of people, what with threats of job losses in the City, IT budgets on hold, and skills shortages biting, but the award nominations prove the excellence of our IT community.

Our panel of judges worked long and hard to come up with the shortlists and our thanks go to all of them.

Every year it seems to get harder to select the top entries – I know that’s an obvious thing to say, but it really is true. The innovation, ambition and quality of the work being undertaken by UK IT professionals is outstanding – it is great to see that so many of you are keen to shout about what you are doing, and rewarding for us to be able to recognise your achievements.

The winners will be announced at the awards ceremony in London on 5 November – it’s always a good night out, so if you want to come along and join the party, go to the web site at www.computing.co.uk/awards and book a table. I hope to see you there.

Welcome to the new look Computing web site – now incorporating our former sister-paper IT Week.

There’s been a lot of changes going on here at Computing – and now we can start to show our new face to readers.

As of today, Computing and IT Week are merging, in print and online. This marks an important milestone in the 35-year history of the UK’s leading business technology publication.

We are bringing together the high-quality journalism that readers of the two publications have come to expect, to provide UK IT decision-makers with the information they need in the format they want to access it.

From Computing, we bring the best coverage of the business issues facing IT managers, examining how companies are using technology to improve profitability and competitiveness, and how the public sector uses IT to deliver better public services and increased efficiency.

From IT Week, we bring the best insights into emerging technologies and the expertise behind the top product reviews in the industry.

Together, we offer the latest breaking IT news, exclusive insights, analysis, investigations, opinion and reviews, delivered online, in print, on video and audio – plus the chance to join the debate through commenting on any of our articles or blogs, or contributing to our discussion forums.

Look out also for the 4 September issue of Computing magazine as we evolve to meet the changing needs of our readers in the UK’s most exciting and challenging profession.

Let us  know what  you think of our new-look web site – you can email me at feedback@computing.co.uk, or submit a comment on this blog below.

I hope you enjoy the new site.

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.

Private Eye brought us an insight into the world of Google-chasing last week.

The satirical magazine and media-baiter revealed the “secrets of the Telegraph’s online success” after the newspaper claimed to have became the most-read daily paper on the web.

To quote from the Private Eye story: “News hacks [at the Daily Telegraph] are now sent a memo three or four times a day from the web site boffins listing the top subjects being searched in the last few hours on Google. They are then expected to write stories accordingly and/or get as many of those key words into the first paragraph of their story. Hence, if the top stories being Googled are ‘Britney Spears’ and ‘breast cancer’, hey presto, the hack is duly expected to file a piece about young women ‘such as Britney Spears’ being at risk from breast cancer.”

This sort of behaviour – relentlessly and shamelessly chasing the maximum number of hits from Google searches or Google News – is one of the unspoken facets of the internet news age.

From an editor’s point of view, one of the great things about the web is that you can track precisely what stories are being read and which are not. It is valuable information to understand the topics that matter to our audience – but some web sites take it to the sort of extreme described above.

In the IT world, if Computing were to publish more stories featuring Linux, Apple, open source product names, Microsoft product names, virus names, music downloads, iTunes or iPods – among others – it would comfortably provide a boost to our page impressions. The fact that we don’t reflects our desire to serve the needs of our target audience –senior IT decision-makers in the UK, whose interests lie in best practice technology implementations, case studies, market intelligence, skills and careers issues, leadership, management and how technology relates to the key business issues of the day.

If we really went hell-for-leather for hits, we could work in the occasional mention of Britney Spears or UFOs or Kate Moss. I’m sure Britney and Kate own a PC, so there’s bound to be an IT angle. In fact, I bet they own a trendy Mac, so double those hits.

The internet has been great for journalism – and more importantly for readers – but a future of Google-chasing strategies benefits nobody.

Readers would end up with the same old re-hashed stories about the same old topics, with little differentiation or editorial agenda to make them interesting beyond the basic facts. Worse, you would lose the diversity of topics needed to inform, entertain and educate.

For journalists, Google-chasing is the antithesis of good investigative reporting. If a specialist web site breaks a fantastic, exclusive, authoritative, ground-breaking story, Google will largely ignore it because its news selection algorithm assumes that the more web sites are featuring a particular story, the more important it must be. If one site breaks a great exclusive that does not go into the mainstream, it will barely be read. Chasing hits means chasing the stories that rank highest on Google, not necessarily the stories that matter.

And for advertisers – without whom, of course, there would not be the multitude of news sites available on the web – they lose the ability to target potential customers that comes from the in-depth understanding of a particular audience and their unique needs and interests.

If you want to read about reality TV stars and minor celebrities everywhere, the Google-chasing future will be for you. If you prefer bold to bland, diversity to conformity, special interests to special offers, then I hope your needs will be met too.

On the walk from Oxford Circus tube station to the Computing office in London’s Soho, there is a Carphone Warehouse shop. It is normally unremarkable – except today at 9am there was a queue of (mainly male) people outside, apparently eager to be the first to buy the new 3G iPhone, out today.

Well, you might have thought, there’s a popular product. The last times there were queues in Oxford Street were for the opening of a new Primark store and the latest Harry Potter book.

But in this case, there also happened to be a camera crew set up outside the phone shop to film the queue. And another camera crew inside, no doubt waiting to film the “rush” of punters to get their hands on an iPhone.

Hmm. In-demand, or very carefully stage managed? I think the latter.

Apple, O2 and Carphone Warehouse have done a great PR job on the new phone – creating the illusion of massive demand regardless of how many units they will ship.

Newspaper stories this morning claimed that supply was limited to one iPhone per customer, or two per business. Given the big bucks Apple is chasing by establishing the product as an genuine corporate alternative to the BlackBerry, this is hardly likely to be the case.

Imagine the conversation: “Hi Apple, I’m the IT manager at [insert global multinational company]. I’d like to buy 10,000 iPhones please.”

“Sorry Mr Global Multinational. You can only have two.”

Yeah, right.

It’s become classic consumer electronics marketing – create a buzz around a product by making people think everyone is desperate to own one.

In the case of the new iPhone, it probably needs the buzz. After all, the great new features of the second-generation product include 3G connectivity for faster web surfing – already available in, erm, every other product on the market. And an online store of 900 ready-to-download consumer and business applications to help make your smartphone more functional.

Or you could buy a Symbian-based phone and download any of the 9,000-plus applications already developed for that platform.

Oh, and the iPhone costs a bomb.

Perhaps I’ve been in this game too long and the cynicism has set in after seeing too many product launches, but if anything is more likely to turn me off the iPhone – already the most over-hyped technology product in history – it’s the stage-managed artifice surrounding a me-too, catch-up phone.

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.