The rise of cloud computing has brought about a surge in demand for talent

As of 2011, although the U.S. economy has begun to show some hope, its distance from recession is a bit far away. High unemployment, the debt ceiling crisis and chaos around the government budget all contributed to more economic instability, coupled with Europe's unabated financial crisis, which posed a tremendous threat to global markets. If there is any good news, it is only found in the field of IT.

"No one in 2008 knew what the outcome of the global financial crisis would be and no one realized that spending on IT could be halted almost overnight," said Richard Gordon, research vice president at Gartner. "Although the situation is now changing and we have a good grasp of the solution to the problem, the crux of the matter is whether there is an enforceable political solution that can guarantee the effectiveness of these solutions."

In a worrisome economic context, the business still has to be cautious, though it must keep spending on IT. Despite the increase in the IT budget in 2011, there has been no significant increase due to exchange rate and other factors.

"If we calculate in constant dollars - in other words, if we remove changes in the exchange rate - we can see that there is still very low unit growth in the global economy in 2011, perhaps only 1% or 2% "Said Gordon. However, the healthy growth in emerging economies has more or less compensated for the slow economic growth in Europe and the United States, but in terms of IT spending, the net effect of such compensation has made IT spending in 2011 substantially the same as in 2010.

Gordon believes that in 2012 we will see basically the same situation. "From an enterprise IT perspective, many businesses are planning a slow economy."

While IDC's forecast is more optimistic, the company predicts global IT spending in 2012 will increase 6.9% from a year earlier to 1.8 trillion U.S. dollars. But IDC notes that one of the very healthy expenditures (up to 20%) is driven by technologies such as smartphones, media tablets, mobile networks, social networks and big data analytics that are reshaping the IT industry.

Mobility brings with it serious IT management and security issues while boosting employee productivity and improving customer service. Social networking is generating huge amounts of customer data gold but it also presents a huge challenge as to how to translate these data into business value.

Talent demand surge

Many companies are trying to balance technical challenges and opportunities, but they are also annoyed by the lack of skilled professionals. IT professionals with application deployment, virtualization, or cloud computing skills are scarce today, as are experts with business analytics skills.

According to Dice.com, a well-known job site, the number of IT jobs in the United States has increased by about 12% compared to a year ago, and the demand for IT professionals in 2012 will also see strong growth. The site surveyed 1,200 IT hiring managers who said they had plans to hire tech talent in the first half of 2012. 27% of hiring managers say they plan to hire more than 20% of their workforce.

IT professionals looking for the skills and experience listed above will find it easy to find a job, says Jack Cullen, president of IT talent and recruitment firm Modis. "If candidates have strong skills, deep technical background and good communication skills, then They will be very sought-after. "But in fact, many hiring managers did not speed up hiring. "They are still slow to respond, and still consider the very thoughtful. They want to recruit high-quality talent."

Cars.com continued to recruit people last year, and they are still very optimistic about the new year because the auto industry, which was originally affected by the financial crisis, is continuing to recover.

"We are pretty optimistic," said Cars.com CIO Bill Swislow, an online car sales website. "Although we also experienced the same economic recession as others, the auto industry has already started to rebound, and sales have been steadily growing, although we have not returned to pre-recession sales."

So the site's investment in IT has not been reduced. "We invested a lot in 2010 and 2011. We increased manpower, increased overall IT spending and completed many different strategic ideas and infrastructure upgrades," said Swislow.

In his view, such growth will continue in 2012, though less hired than in 2011. In 2011, his IT team added about 30% of the professionals. Swislow expects new staffing in 2012 to be around 10%.

As for specific projects, Cars.com plans to have fewer than 10 projects planned for 2012, including redesigning CRM and order fulfillment systems, deploying new data warehousing platforms and introducing new business intelligence technologies.

"Our customers, and especially car dealers, are optimistic about market growth and they can sign up on our site with one tool and see all the real-time statistics right now. Our existing data warehouse architecture Requires batch processing at night, while day-to-day processing requires continuous upload of data, "Swislow said. "At the business intelligence level, we need a massive upgrade of virtualization and dashboarding capabilities for both internal use and statistical reporting for our customers."

The site has successfully completed a number of major IT projects over the past few years, and in particular from a clueless state of affairs has evolved into a set of agile development methodology that has greatly increased the productivity of developers, which further The rationale for adding more people and IT budgets has become more reasonable and clear, Swislow said. "Effective spending power gives us more credible reasons for further spending increases in the future."