“It’s great for us senior-level professionals since our productivity has multiplied,” says Jeff Stucker, senior software engineer
at Rapidigm, referring to an offshore initiative that resulted in new software development contracts. And Stucker is by no
means alone. Having spooked IT professionals into fearing the possibility of their job moving overseas in 2004, managers in
2005 are half as likely to see offshoring as cause for alarm.
But down the ranks, where offshoring hits directly, IT staff are 14 percent more likely to fear the ax this year than in 2004.
More than one in four IT staff now worries his or her employer will export his or her job.
With the tech sector projecting a 10 percent work-force reliance on overseas services in the coming year, IT workers feel
like offshoring is nipping at their heels. At the same time, many companies are opting out of the offshoring trend. “We’ve
been approached on four occasions, and each time the cost/value proposition has been terrible,” the prevention manager says.
Instead, as part of “a six-year odyssey” from conventional PBX to VoIP, he and his team increased productivity with low-cost
automation. Learning curves and the need for certifications had left him and his co-workers with less time to devote to maintenance.
So the prevention manager “researched and adopted eight new open source tools to help with monitoring, alerting, and ticketing
to decrease the amount of actual work by staff when an actionable event occurs.”
Mark Ohlund, vice president of technology strategy at a third-party logistics company, also sees the value in opening the
enterprise to open source alternatives. To extend his company’s business, Ohlund will “employ Web services as a model for
integrating with our customers’ legacy systems and move to open source frameworks, so that we can integrate new development
team members quickly rather than having them scale the learning curve of proprietary solutions.” By adopting open standards,
Ohlund says he will be better positioned to “augment staff, as needed, through outsourcing opportunities familiar with the
standards.”
Peering at the horizon
Such technological shifts under way at many companies have employees worrying about the career consequences of not keeping
up. And with an ongoing moratorium on company-sponsored training at many organizations, IT professionals are tapping peers
and partaking in self-guided training out of pocket, not only to refresh skill sets, but in many cases to merely achieve what’s
expected of them. But as TEKsystems’ Bates notes, the most beneficial self-education may be a renewed effort to understand
business goals and how to support them.
“We have never really aligned ourselves with a business unit and are always talking gigabits,” Bates says. “The business unit
doesn’t know and doesn’t care. They are worried about productivity and cost of implementation. IT is just starting to learn
this lesson.”
Ohlund elaborates on this theme, core to IT’s new reality. “IT can’t expect respect; they have to earn it. Management won’t
reward and recognize IT’s value until the working ranks start recognizing its value,” he says. “The IT staff needs to be challenged
by better understanding the business they’re supporting and asking how they can positively impact the business solutions through
the appropriate use of technology.”
The prospects of such realizations leading to IT success, at this juncture at least, aren’t especially rosy. Confidence in
meeting business goals in the tech sector remains just above 50-50 at 53 percent, down slightly from last year despite an
expected 57 percent boost in IT budgets. But with bonuses for upper IT management increasingly tied to company performance,
it seems certain IT will strive to support the business side and its objectives like never before.
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