Many people in the IT community have long said there s no IT staffing crisis at all only skills and management issues that show no signs of going away, despite the recent glut of layoffs. Norman Matloff, a computer science professor at the University of California, Davis, who has been dubbed the Scourge of Silicon Valley, insists there's plenty of evidence that the crisis is nothing more than companies practicing widespread age discrimination and looking for cheap labor. And Peter Cappelli, a management professor at the University of Pennsylvania s Wharton School, said in a paper published last autumn that if there is a staffing crisis it has more to do with management issues. Calif. With the help of moderator David Foote from Foote Partners, a New Canaan, Conn.-based research and advisory company that tracks, analyzes and reports on IT and business workforce management practices, we gave the group the ambitious goal of defining the IT staffing crisis and offering suggestions on how to overcome it.
Crisis is a strong word.
It usually connotes a state of emergency. To me a crisis would be a situation whereby we could not deliver the services that our user community needs. We re certainly not in that state. With that perception as pervasive as it is, it s very difficult to build stability within an organization. An unfortunate side effect is salary escalation.