Study Finds IT Staffing Shortage Could Impact Economy

By JO Y RUSSELL

In what is probably no surprise to IT managers, a government study release today warns of a growing IT staffing shortage.

In the short-term, IT departments and resources are being stretched thin by the demand for people to handle the Year 2000 problem. And long-term, IT staffing shortages will get worse as e-commerce, the Web, and extranets become more important to companies.

The report, conducted by the Office of Technology Policy and titled "America's New Deficit: The Shortage of Information Technology Workers," concludes that there is potential for a major shortage of information technology workers, computer scientists, engineers, systems analysts, and computer programmers. The report estimates that the U.S. will require more than one million IT workers by the year 2005.

If this IT worker shortage is not resolved soon, the report suggests the U.S. economy may suffer a significant decline in productivity. This decline will affect computer and software companies, as well as other mar kets including education, government, health care, manufacturing and transportation.

The new millennium and the implications it brings won't help relieve the staff shortage. "There currently aren't enough high-tech trained people and year 2000 issues will only add to the IT staff shortage," said Neil Cooper, research analyst at Cruttenden-Roth (www.crut.com) of Irvine, Calif. "Fortune 1000 companies have the technical and human resources to implement Y2K (Year 2000) programs, but in general, the smaller companies don't, and are in a lot more trouble." A recent figure from the Gartner Group (www.gartner.com), a Stamford, Conn., research firm, estimates about 80 percent of corporations will survive the year 2000 without suffering a disruption in their day-to-day business operations.

Another recent survey released this month by the Cutter Consortium, part of the Cutter Information Corp., (www.cutter.com) a research firm in Arlington, Mass. claims organizations are presently devoting about 20 percent of t heir existing IT staff to Y2K projects, however two-thirds of respondents believe that number will increase in the next few years.

The Cutter Consortium survey also states three aspects of the Y2K staff increases to consider; increased costs if an original Y2K project plan did not anticipate a significant increase in staff; deflection of other projects, where existing IT staff have already been shifted to work on Y2K projects; and staff shortages where a number of studies estimate the shortage of programmers alone to be 200,000 in the U.S.