Guild Companies

My main job is to listen to what key IT vendors and users have to say about the problems companies face in their data centers and on their desktops every day. I can't count the number of times I have heard someone say over the past two years, "We have to do more with less." We're all living in this pressure cooker, from the largest multinational to the smallest mom-and-pop shop, and it's a testament to human nature that we keep moving, and not just for the door.

According to a new survey of 1,400 chief information officers performed by Robert Half Technology, the workloads of IT workers are up across the United States. RHT, which specializes in executive placement, online job searches, and supplying contract IT workers, commissioned a third-party survey firm to poll a random sample of U.S. companies from its database, choosing only companies with 100 or more employees. RHT is based in the heart of Silicon Valley, in Menlo Park, California, and puts out a quarterly report on IT hiring plans as well.

The good news, according to the poll, is that new projects and corporate expansion (driven in part by company mergers and acquisitions) is giving IT professionals more work to do. I say this is good news because it is better to have too much work than not enough, as was the case in many IT organizations back in the early 1990s. Back then, the manufacturing, distribution, and financial services sectors were all hit hard by a recession and companies were actually letting go of IT staff--particularly in the IBM midrange. As bad as being tired is, it is not nearly as bad as worrying about the mortgage. According to the RHT survey (Figure 1), 46 percent of respondents indicated that new projects were driving up IT workloads in their organizations, with another 36 percent saying that corporate expansion--which means merging as well as jumping into new markets to chase new business opportunities--was driving up workloads. Only 9 percent of those surveyed said that decreasing IT staffs was the main reason for the increased workloads.

There is, however, according to Katherine Spencer Lee, executive director of RHT, another factor at work here. "Many companies that postponed hardware and software upgrades to save costs are now faced with a business need to move forward with these projects," she said in a report accompanying the poll data. "A number of the systems purchased during the technology boom of the late 1990s, for example, are nearing the end of their lifecycle and must be updated or replaced."

I don't think this is the whole story, though. Application modernization for legacy applications that reside on mainframes and midrange gear, as well as integration of multiple platforms with Web front-ends for end users and partners, are also piling the work on programmers, system analysts, project managers, and CIOs. I also happen to think that a lot of the activity in IT land has to do with server consolidation and moving from proprietary platforms to Windows and Linux platforms that offer compelling price/performance. This is particularly the case in the Unix market, where Unix skills and source code can transfer pretty easily to Linux. The dirty little secret in the Unix market is that even though vendors have been shipping 64-bit RISC/Unix boxes for nearly a decade, many applications running in production are still 32-bit applications that date from an even earlier time. Porting these applications to 32-bit Lintel machinery is a relative snap, and for those Unix applications that are indeed running in 64-bit mode, companies are exploring the option of running Linux on servers with either 64-bit Intel Itanium or 64-bit Advanced Micro Devices Opteron processors. The Windows platform is also getting some workloads that might have otherwise ended up on more expensive Unix, OS/400, or mainframe platforms before the economy went into the tank in early 2000.

So how much have workloads increased at IT shops? In a word, groan. And that is what IS managers must be hearing a lot of behind their backs.

According to the RHT poll (Figure 2), 20 percent of IT managers say the burden their IT workers are shouldering has increased significantly, and another 35 percent say that it has increased somewhat. Some 38 percent report workloads are unchanged, while 6 percent report a decrease. This suggests that a large minority--but not a majority--of IT shops are seeing their workload increase substantially, while the rest are not seeing a significant change at all.

We could be seeing the first wave of improvement in the economy as it ripples from company to company, or it could mean that many companies are still making IT workers sit on their hands until the economy improves a little more.

Here are the main points that Lee says IT managers should consider as their employees face growing workloads:

The real question that most programmers and analysts want to have answered is, When will their bosses and their bosses' bosses loosen the purse strings and hire more people to share the IT burden? The prospects are not so good, according to a survey RHT did at the end of May for IT hiring plans during the third quarter of 2003. RHT polled another 1,400 CIOs at random in the United States and found that 86 percent of them did not plan to change their hiring activity in the third quarter. However, CIOs at midsized firms were the most optimistic about their hiring plans. The demand seems to be for skillsets centered around Windows NT/2000 administration.

Only 10 percent of those CIOs surveyed expected to increase hiring in the third quarter. To put a little perspective on that, in the fourth quarter of 2001, when the economies were plummeting in the wake of the September 11 attacks, 18 percent of CIOs said they were going to increase IT staff. Hiring has been trending downward ever since, with only a slight blip up every now and then. We are not out of the woods yet, and the work is probably going to get harder. There's no sugar-coating that.