According to the 2004 IT Staffing and Compensation Guide, an annual report released by Meta Group, 24% of the more than 650 companies surveyed indicated that IT professionals in the application development field were the most difficult to retain. Respondents also indicated high turnover among employees who specialize in security (13%) and those who hold networking job functions (13%).
There are 1.3 million information security professionals worldwide, a 14.5% increase over 2003, according to estimates by IDC, and that number is expected to increase to 2.1 million by 2008. In a survey of 5,371 full-time information security professionals in more than 80 countries, IDC and its co-sponsor, the International Information Systems Security Certification Consortium, also found the following:
Unlike the wild hiring of the '90s, the slow rebuilding of bare-bones IT shops over the next few years will provide an opportunity to staff up thoughtfully. It's another chance to get diversity right. Lots of IT organizations talk about diversity, but some are better at achieving it than others. We spoke with representatives of five IT groups that have been repeatedly cited as diversity leaders by the Black Data Processing Association to discover how companies can find, recruit and retain top minority talent in IT.
"You can't make intelligent investments within your organization unless you understand how your whole industry is changing," writes Anita McGahan in October's Harvard Business Review. McGahan, author of How Industries Evolve: Principles for Achieving and Sustaining Superior Performance (Harvard Business School Press, 2004), bases her theories on more than a decade of research on four trajectories of industry change. She told Kathleen Melymuka how CIOs can align IT investments with those changes.
The typical company's senior executives spend less than three hours a month working together on strategic issues, and those hours are seldom well spent, says Michael C. Mankins in September's Harvard Business Review. Mankins, a San Francisco-based managing partner at consulting firm Marakon Associates, told Computerworld's Kathleen Melymuka what's wrong with team decision-making and how to fix it.
DBAs are often the last to be involved in planning but the first to be called when things go wrong.
Nothing in life is really free, says Larry Rosen, and that includes open-source software. As open-source gains traction in business, it's increasingly important to understand the licenses under which it's used. Rosen, who formerly taught programming and database design at Stanford University, is also a founding partner of Rosenlaw & Einschlag, a technology law firm in California, and the author of Open Source Licensing: Software Freedom and Intellectual Property Law (Prentice Hall PTR, 2004). He talked with Computerworld's Kathleen Melymuka about rights and obligations under open-source.
In the 1990s, Whirlpool, the No. 1 U.S. appliance maker, was a model "metal bender" -- an engineering and manufacturing company whose core competencies were quality and cost reduction. It sold to big retailers, and customers viewed its products as commodities differentiated only by price.
How valuable are a company's IT systems, employee skills, culture? For many, they are worth far more than the physical and financial assets that can be tallied on a balance sheet. Measuring the value of intangible assets has been the Holy Grail of accounting, but in February's Harvard Business Review, Robert S. Kaplan and David P. Norton, who created the balanced scorecard, propose a new approach. "You cannot 'value' intangible assets," says Kaplan, "but you can certainly measure them and their alignment with value-creating strategies."
Warren Bennis got his first taste of leadership as a green, 19-year-old lieutenant during World War II. In January's Harvard Business Review, he says that those days were in many ways typical of first leadership experiences anywhere. Bennis, who has written more than 25 books on leadership and change and currently serves on the faculties of the University of Southern California and Harvard Business School, says that Shakespeare's seven ages of man apply to leaders as well. He explained to Kathleen Melymuka how knowing what to expect at each age could help you survive and grow as a business leader.
Half your IT middle managers may be planning to quit as soon as the economy improves. Recent surveys and anecdotal evidence indicate that many have already checked out psychologically and are just waiting for the chance to move on. If you don't prepare for this exodus, when the money loosens up and IT initiatives begin to flow, you may find that you lack the talent to deliver.
Research shows that well-meaning managers aren't quite as unbiased and ethical as they think they are.
Today's obsession with leadership has taken the focus off the critical importance of good management.
A turnaround, says Gary Hamel, is transformation tragically delayed. In this month's Harvard Business Review, Hamel and co-author Liisa Valikangas argue that in today's turbulent times, turning a company around after the market slips out from under it might be too little, too late. Your company needs to continuously morph to meet new opportunities and challenges, to constantly build the future rather than defend the past. Hamel, director of the Woodside Institute, a nonprofit research organization in Woodside, Calif., that focuses on management innovation, spoke with Kathleen Melymuka about resilience and its implications for IT leaders.
Even in the economic doldrums, CIOs are planning for better days. "We know we can't do it now, but we can plan now so when things get better we're ready to go," says Tony Romero, CIO at Mitsubishi Motor Sales of America. "If you wait for things to get better, it can take you a year to plan, and you've wasted a year."