Every now and then, vendors get a taste of what life is really like for corporate IS shops. Informix cried foul and filed suit over this Great Brain Robbery by its big rival. The lawyers will be sorting it out for months or even years. But based on the early line, it looks like Informix is out of luck just like any IS department that hires top talent in a hot new technology and then discovers how hard it is to hold on to those people. Whether you're building intranets, electronic commerce or data warehousing, it's the same problem.
Technology changes so fast that the demand for technical experts in new areas far outstrips supply.
That means good people are hard to find, expensive to hire and almost impossible to keep. It's a problem that will just get worse. And there isn't much you can do about it. When an expensive hired gun walks out the door one night and doesn't return, you don't just lose that techie's talents. You've probably also lost a lot of information about how your systems work and what your organization needs.