Diagnosis without prescription
E-Skills, the quango commissioned in 2005 to improve the skills base of the ITC workforce, has issued a report by Gartner Executive Partners on ITC trends and their implications for UK skills (registration required).
The report was delivered in January, but appears to have been held back to support e-Skills’ bid to renew its contract. It is notable mainly for its shameless ticking of politically correct boxes.
Thus the shrinking pool of domestic ITC talent is not the result of a crap educational system and gross underinvestment in infrastructure. No, it is because males are ‘increasingly disproportionate’ in IT. ‘Gender balance in IT is not only an issue of social equality,’ says the report. ‘It is central to the viability of an industry that does not have strong appeal among 51 per cent of the population.’
Furthermore, the report seems to conclude that the IT industry is not paying enough attention to environmental issues.
‘As IT moves from being an industrial commodity to a domestic differentiator,’ the report continues, ‘the IT industry faces the need to rebuild the skills of its onshore workforce, particularly in emerging areas such as analytics, information management, design and innovation.’
ITC has never been an ‘industrial commodity.’ It is an industrial and commercial facilitator. And what do the report’s authors mean by ‘domestic differentiator,’ in the context of IT outsourcing? A differentiator is a circuit designed so that its output is proportional to the derivative of the input.
Lump of labour fallacy
As used, the term seems to be a new name for the old ‘lump of labour’ fallacy: there is a finite amount of work to go round, so it must be protected and distributed according to political criteria. Bad ideas never die – their devotees simply express them differently.
If e-Skills’ contract is renewed, it will presumably operate under the aegis of the newly-activated Commission for Employment and Skills (CES), the quango set up last year to combine some of the functions of the Sector Skills Development Agency and the National Employment Panel.
The CES was born of the Leitch Report, commissioned by the Treasury in 2004, whose findings were published in December 2006. Leitch was the boss of Zurich Financial Services in the UK, chairman of the National Employment Panel and a close friend of Gordon Brown.
Given that E-skill’s remit is to improve the IT skills of the populace, it's surprising that its report doesn't at least address that premature closing of the Home Computer Initiative (HCI) by Brown, when Chancellor, in 2006.
As well as being an overt retraction of state encouragement for IT adoption and education, it was also held responsible for the collapse of Evesham Technology by its chairman, Richard Austin.
So, a quango whose sole purpose is to impove the nation's IT skills, that was inspired by one of Brown's mates, created by Brown and is wholly dependent on Brown's patronage for its continued existence has failed to address one of the most significant setbacks inflicted on its cause...by Brown.
It's almost enough to dent your faith in these things isn't it?
