CyberSecurity Institute

Luckily for financial services, one of the most heavily regulated industries, IT vendors are providing a competitive array of compliance solutions.

IT’s role in compliance is growing because regulation increasingly requires that business activities be monitored, audited, and scrutinised; this translates to the storage and retention of vast amounts of data — and only technology can handle that load. “The nature of IT’s role in compliance varies widely among companies, but it’s clear that growing regulatory requirements are giving IT specialists in companies a lot more work and bringing them into contact with different corporate departments,” says Nigel Holloway, director of executive services for the Americas at the Economist Intelligence Unit in New York.

However, just because technology can assist with compliance, does not mean that it comes cheap. And this is making for a further imperative: spending on compliance must be linked to the investment in wider business goals. For many, this is likely to be the only way they can justify the expenditure compliance necessitates.

According to the EIU, over half of the executives they spoke to said that the annual expenditure in this area of IT is expanding by over 10 percent a year.

http://insight.zdnet.co.uk/business/legal/0,39020487,39200378,00.htm

By 2010, the number of IT staff in the profession will shrink by 15 percent, Gartner predicted Tuesday.

Apart from the rise of outsourcers–who often provide their services from lower-cost countries like India–IT departments also face the diffusion of tech skills throughout an organization, Gartner said. “As IT becomes a more integral part of every business function, there will be increasing numbers of people outside the (information systems organization) whose work involves IT,” Gartner said in the report, “and as IT skills become a more important component of business professionalism, in-house IS staff will be displaced.”

The report adds to somewhat confusing signals about the future of the IT profession. The U.S. Department of Labor forecasts that computer software engineering and network systems and data communications analysis will be among the top 10 fastest-growing occupations between 2002 and 2012.

And last fall, a Gartner analyst predicted a shortage of technology professionals in the United States in the near future, thanks to factors such as declining student interest in the tech field.

But a study in 2004 from research organization Rand did not find evidence that shortages of scientific, technical, engineering and mathematics personnel in the U.S. work force are on the horizon. And a separate Gartner analyst last year predicted that over the next 20 years, changes in computing technology will erase the need for much of the work that employs IT staff today.

In addition, the growing trend of shipping IT work offshore seems likely to harm U.S. techies in the form of fewer U.S. jobs created, at least in the short run. A report last year sponsored by the Information Technology Association of America trade group on offshore outsourcing of software and IT services indicated that sacrifices by American IT workers would result in an improved U.S. economy overall.

In its latest report, Gartner forecasts increased involvement by IT staffers in business matters. By 2010, the firm said, 60 percent of the people affiliated with the information systems group will assume “business-facing roles around information, process and relationships.” As a result, Gartner predicted, “the size of the IS organization will decrease, and…by 2010, IT departments in midsize and large companies will be at least one-third smaller than they were in 2000.”

“As we see departments within businesses taking on the traditional functions of IT, so IS professionals and leaders will have to choose between careers as technologists, technical managers and business professionals,” David Flint, research vice president at Gartner, said in a statement.

http://news.zdnet.com/2100-3513_22-5722019.html