The IT brain drain?

2006-02-10

I had a very interesting conversation today with an IT consultant who was previously a network manager and who has been around the block a few times, so to speak. He saw one of the biggest problems in today's IT environments being that so many of the IT staff had been outsourced, many companies in question now lacked the capability to make decisions about new technologies. He'd been talking about this problem to outsourcing firms, who were now suffering from the fact that companies had less and less of the wherewithall to involve them in new technology deployments.

It sort of stands to reason - a bit like in the game of Monopoly, where you need a threshold of cash. Without enough of it, you find you spend more than you make and very quickly you find yourself out of the game. If this is a trend, then IT managers will find it increasingly hard to keep their levels of technology understanding current, and keep up with what is once again an accelerating field of innovation.

Unlike Monopoly of course, large corporations are extremely complex and the reduction of IT skills in the management layer is harder to identify. For now, we can only mention that this could be an issue, and hope we are wrong.