Does a CFO really believe that the only way to run a business is by looking at the numbers (CIO role set to disappear, according to CFOs)?

Of course keeping the books balanced and managing cash flow is essential but without innovation, staff development, technological development, inspiring leadership, a CFO would end up managing the books of a business with no future.

George

Whitehall is doing it again – ignoring the low-hanging fruit to make a precarious climb in search of perfection (Analysis: Is the government’s fast broadband delivery strategy starting to fall apart?)

Even in rural areas, most customers are fairly close to distribution boxes, and upgrading these with a fibre to the exchange would greatly enhance the speed for every customer. OK, not super-fast, but an upgrade from 2Mbit/s to 8Mbit/s would be a big boon to rural businesses.

In my case, I get 2.2Mbit/s over a 3km run to the exchange, but the box is only 200m away. Upgrading the connection to a couple of boxes would give fast service to every ADSL user in the village, surely a better investment than offering super-fast service to the few subscribers willing to pay a premium. 

Just as NHS Connecting for Health ignored the cheaper option of building interfaces between systems that already worked, so the current initiative ignores a simple approach to reducing the urban/rural divide.

Eric Bodger

Your article about the skills gap is somewhat adrift from reality (Is the UK heading for another tech skills crisis?). The skills gap seems to be mythical, or at least artificial. As a recruiter I have not had any trouble finding good applicants for developer jobs.

The article also says that there are more senior jobs than applicants; in fact for any senior role there are likely to be several hundred applicants. Typically there are 300 applicants for every IT manager position and that has been so for at least the past 10 years, barring a brief excursion to 500-plus in 2001.

A lot of the key IT skills are vested in people who got fed up and decided that driving minicabs was better money for less stress. Next time you take a minicab, particularly in the south-west, ask your driver what they did before. You might then ask why so many people with sufficient commercial skills to become self-employed have all left IT.

The principal reason is that employers do not recruit people with business skills if those skills are on their CV. Those skills dilute the technology buzzwords that an agency needs to search for when they have 300-plus applicants for each job. If industry wants these skills it needs to take active steps to find the people who have them and then endeavour to keep them.

My advice to companies looking to recruit is to go easy on the mushroom management: your IT manager should be the first person you discuss strategic initiatives with. They budget today for the systems to buy next year to enable the bold initiatives that the consultants will sell you in five years’ time. 

The helpdesk knows more about how the business really works than the CEO does: tap that knowledge. Change your recruitment policies: insist on a much higher level of computer literacy in every management or potential management role: the poor technology knowledge of your middle-managers is a drag on your operational efficiency and agility. The poor technology knowledge in the boardroom is a drag on strategic agility: adapt or die.

Bernard Peek

John Carter uses the oft-quoted George Bernard Shaw to place himself firmly above teachers in the field of IT (Why ICT gurus don’t teach). “Skilled IT professionals”, he informs us, earn more than teachers and from this we are invited to join him in inferring that he is in IT because he “can” and those who are in teaching are there because presumably they “can not”.

Well, this rapier wit and piercing logic suggests he has yet to pass a trade qualification in philosophy but nonetheless, there is a story to tell.

The office software-based courses that have come to dominate IT teaching in schools are pretty much a direct result of a cynical target-setting culture that more or less guarantees students cross the 5 GCSEs at C+ threshold – with the student invariably bored witless in the process. The various Computer Science GCSEs that state schools were able to use withered on the vine and were withdrawn by the exam boards. As a consequence of all this, we are seeing applications for degree-level courses in Computer Science falling dramatically, and industry is now looking to schools to help fix the problem.

The Education Secretary’s proposals to overhaul ICT education are certainly welcome, and the Computing At School Working group is an important part of the effort to get something considerably more valuable into the school curriculum. I am a very small part of that group and since none of us gets a bean for our contribution I assume that Mr Carter would not be interested in helping out. Many people from the IT Industry are in the group, however, and some may even earn salaries approaching the princely sum that Mr Carter no doubt rakes in every month with his impressive skills. Their contribution is valued and we have lively and polite debates.

Contrary to Mr Carter’s view, teachers are often highly skilled but their key skills in IT are likely, at best, to be only in one or two areas from the dozens, if not hundreds of skill sets that exist in industry. However, by changing the content of the IT curriculum to include much more experience of computational thinking and other engaging areas of digital literacy we can remove the tedium of office-based studies that may have driven a generation of youngsters away from IT careers.

Meanwhile, the industry has a responsibility to provide a clear and comprehensive set of career paths and funded training for both graduates and non graduates. In medicine, hospitals do not expect graduates in Medical Science to be immediately useful on the ward, hence the years of clinical training, the endless professional exams and the training posts before they become consultants. A similar story can be told for law and for other professions.

As for Mr Carter, our “skilled professional” who can “do”, I have a challenge. In the next year he can do two courses I have successfully completed in my career and I will do two from his. At the end of the year he can teach for a term and I will do his job for the same period. We can then see what our respective HR departments think of our efforts.

Brian Lockwood, educator and volunteer for Computing at School

So the Department for Work and Pensions is basically paying Monster between £15m and £20m for a ready-made software package (DWP appoints Monster to overhaul Jobcentre Plus online services).

This is an absolute shocking waste of government money.

And surely this paragraph is a joke: “It is expected that the service will be available 24 hours a day, seven days a week, with the exception of planned downtime.”

Wow, 24/7 for an online service! What a novel idea. I guess that was the USP.

Eddie Jones