Martin Butler says the for e-commerce to blossom the IT skills gap
must be filled. This is what hinders e-business not a few
collapsing dotcoms with flaky business models
The Internet age is not over just because a few dotcoms have
run into difficulty, says Martin Butler, who believes that
the continuing skills shortage should be of more concernThe cold winds of recession may not have hit the global economy
just yet, but there are chilly winds starting to blow around parts
of the IT industry. Some 30 years ago, it was miners, shipbuilders,
car workers and steel workers that were facing the prospect of
being without work. Now, it is the IT corporations that are laying
off their workforces in large numbers.
If recession is an indication of a mature market then the
Internet age seems to have come and gone very quickly. And how does
the shedding of staff equate to the skills shortage? Accepted,
there is a skills gap to take into account, but although miners
might have found it hard to become Internet whiz-kids, are we
really to believe that there is no possible skills update roadmap
to follow? Is that boring phrase 'the rate of change' actually
being understated? The rate of change, given these two factors -
people out of work, and jobs available in the same sector that they
can't fill - must have exceeded anybody's imaginations.
Swallowing the truth
Perhaps the truth is less palatable, especially for those
e-businesses that thought anything Internet related was a licence
to print money. Any new age has its share of disappointments. Not
every new start-up company at the beginning of the Industrial Age
made it through to become a multi-national organisation. Many
folded in the first flush of youth. Similarly, even those that
survived to become household names didn't do so without some
digression from the straight and narrow path to success.
What is happening in the IT industry at the moment is no more
than a reflection of this. The market is immature. People are
trying out new ideas. This is not a bad thing, it is not something
to discourage. However, we must be wary of tarring everyone with
the same brush when failure occurs.
A couple of dotcoms run into difficulty, and every man and his
dog prophecises the end of e-business (before it's really got
started). This is patent nonsense. E-business is not going to fail
simply because some dotcoms didn't have a real business model.
The people who should be worried are not those that are
investing in a strong e-business infrastructure, but the
get-rich-quick merchants who saw an opportunity to continue the
culture of the 1980s and early 1990s and brought to market
solutions that never stood any chance of success. Not only were
these people trying to continue the culture of that period, but in
many cases they were bringing along the business morality (or lack
of it) as well.
I cannot believe that the whole future of business is going to
be put in jeopardy by the actions of a greedy few. This is not to
say that every company that has failed has done so by reasons of
bad management or that the motives were not genuine, but there were
some who climbed aboard what was seen as a gravy train of immense
proportions.
The skills gap that appears to be a constant state of concern is
more worrying. With experienced people available, this chasm should
not be as large as it is. Organisations have to take responsibility
in training their personnel in the latest techniques and systems.
The barrier to this is now quite visibly disappearing. The old
argument that spending money training staff was just an open
invitation for them to leave for a higher paid position is becoming
weaker by the day.
Change in the info age
The thought that people will be lured away from positions were
they are respected and in which they have operated effectively by
the promise of huge share options and instant fortune no longer
holds true. If people like that still exist, then you are probably
better off without them anyway.
The information age is going through rapid change. This change,
or maturing, is just the same as any other market repositioning
that has happened in the past. All we have is the same set of
circumstances compressed across the timeline.
The base on which we are all trying to build the new business
model is not fatally flawed, as some would have us believe. The
fact that one organisation in a specific solution space loses 84%
of its market value in a year, does not make the relevance of that
solution type invalid, it simply means that this specific solution
did not match up to what was required. It was the business model
that was wrong, not e-business itself - even though they were
playing in that large market space.
Recently C&A - the high-street clothes retailer - closed its
stores. I failed to hear any 'expert' saying that this would mean
we would all have to walk around naked, because 'clothes didn't
work'.