News UK embroiled in 'real war for digital talent'

Newspaper publisher has had to team up with app development agencies because it lacks in-house expertise

News UK is embroiled in a "real war for digital talent", according to its chief operating officer, Chris Taylor.

Taylor, who was promoted to COO in June 2013 after becoming CIO of the newspaper publisher in September 2012, explained that News UK is "pretty well staffed with all of the key skills that we require", but added that like any organisation in London, there is a real war for digital talent, particularly in the app space.

"I think it's a simple matter of the nature of supply and demand, there is a huge demand for app development resources and skills in particular, and when that happens you get an aggressive market," he said.

Taylor stated that the company, which publishes The Times, The Sunday Times and The Sun, has its own capabilities internally, but has tackled the issue of a shortage of app developers by partnering with select agencies.

"Instead of using day-rate contractors, which a lot of organisations do - and indeed we did a couple of years ago, we've cultivated relationships with a couple of carefully selected agencies within Soho, that we work with for our app development - the main one is called The App Business," he explained.

"These agencies understand how we work and our products and titles, our deployment process and how our infrastructure is configured - it's all on Amazon so it's pretty straightforward," he said.

"It means that we can use those people as an extension of our own organisation but without having to fight the challenge that a lot of other large companies have of trying to attract and hold permanent staff," he added.

According to the findings of Appcelerator's 2014 Mobile Trends report, finding skilled mobile developers is one of the top challenges when it comes to the timely delivery of new apps.

Research agency IDC surveyed over 8,000 mobile developers and 121 IT decision-makers, to find out how businesses use mobile in the workplace, and what factors limited mobile use.

The skills gap was rated by a third of developers and 41.3 per cent of decision-makers as the number one difficulty.