A survey conducted on behalf of Legacy Systems Specialist, Micro Focus, by the European Business School INSEAD, found out that core IT skills have fell in the list of IT Priorities superseded by newer areas such as Web 2.0.
The survey, which was carried out amongst 450 CFOs, CIOs and HR directors in Italy, France, Germany, the UK and the US, in companies with revenue from $100m to over $1bn, found out that the current economic situation means that support for business critical applications - such as those written in COBOL - is pushed down the agenda.
The research makes chilling reading; around one in eight CFOs in the survey said they were confident that their firms had the inhouse skills needed to maintain their existing technology. In other words, seven out of eight CFOs in the report have no clue whatsoever whether they can effectively weather the storm (ed: Maybe the CIOs should have answered instead).
Only 29 percent of CIOs were happy that their organisation was recruiting enough staff to prevent their IT systems from failing and, to illustrate, the trust gap between management strata, none of the UK CIO's interviewed say they were totally confident that fresh IT graduates within their company have the necessary skills to keep core IT assets tick-tocking.
And in what is a paradoxical statement, 66 percent of UK HR directors said that IT was the area in their businesses that needed the most fresh blood but the overwhelming majority of UK CIOs (87 percent), say that they do not hire staff that understand IT and business alignment.
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