But the sharp end of the stick is being felt by the thousands of small and medium businesses running critical applications on proprietary server and storage platforms. Supporting these technologies takes personnel with in-depth vendor-specific training and many years experience in niche areas.

The gradual tightening of supply and a recent spike in demand has lead to significant salary increases to keep these specialists. The result is that organisations are spending larger portions of already stretched IT operating budgets on supporting these same environments. It's the same with IT capital budgets assigned to initiatives to upgrade legacy technology and applications.

While Global IT outsourcers and local fortune 100 organisations in Australia have the resources to pay top dollar for these specialists, it is those that have one or two business critical applications on proprietary technology that are unable to justify these in house support specialists.

The growing strategic importance of IT within Australian businesses along with the IT skills shortage has created an array of potentially serious and growing business risks. It's like the 1,000 pound gorilla in the data centre closet that is agitating to get out and cause havoc!

Key Person Risk. For IT departments that rely on a person with a key skill set that no one else in the company has, there can be significant consequences if that person leaves or is temporarily unavailable.

Financial Risk. The less the availability of the specialists, the greater the risk IT departments will need to spend above their assigned ongoing operating and capital project budgets to achieve their objectives.

Delivery Risk. Opportunity costs are incurred when strategic revenue generating business initiatives are compromised and when important project deadlines are put at risk.

Service Delivery Risk. With tightening IT budgets, IT departments will focus primarily on supporting core applications and databases, without setting systems to proactively manage the underlying server and storage infrastructure layer of an environment. Over time these foundations can weaken, exposing them to a higher likelihood of failures which compromise service level agreements set between IT and the other operating units.

The reality is that the demand for skilled and experienced IT professionals will continue to outstrip supply for the foreseeable future, driving up salary costs and increasing turnover rates.

Add to this the lure of positions at cashed up local and global IT companies, the retirement of experienced baby boomers and the brain drain to larger overseas markets and the challenge to business is clear.

So what are the solutions? How do businesses with proprietary IT systems minimise these risks and cost-effectively manage their business-critical IT systems in the face of the ongoing skill shortage?

The answer lies in building a sustainable support structure around this proprietary technology which meets the agreed service levels on these business critical systems without falling outside the budget framework given to IT by the business.

So that is great in theory. How does this work in action? It is clearly a question that requires a thorough and specialised response, however these broad steps can help get things started.

Detail and prioritise activities. The job descriptions of your key highlypaid IT specialists include a list of responsibilities. These range from operational activities which maintain uptime of critical systems but bring limited business benefits, all the way through to less urgent strategic tasks which deliver greater ROI on the cost of their employment.

All too often the valuable key IT staff whose market value is growing are being assigned to operational tasks which offer little opportunity to improve their productivity for the company.

Developing a knowledge base. In complex IT environments, personnel allocate their time to administering server and storage infrastructure. This is without developing a knowledge base (KB) on that environment. The urgent tasks of today need to be weighed up against the structural exposures of tomorrow. Documenting configurations, processes and other best practice activities are a must for a KB.

When reviewed periodically, a KB 'future-proofs' you from important skills walking out the door when key IT staff leave. In addition productivity gains may be secured when tasks previously the domain of one key staff member can be reassigned to less expensive junior staff.

Selective outsourcing. Once your tasks are prioritised and documented you have the information you need to identify your areas of exposure and productivity gains. Decisions can start being made on how to best allocate your in-house staff and where delegating tasks to external partners makes sense.

In many cases outsourcing important technical yet routine and time-consuming tasks such as systems administration, proactive monitoring, backups and disaster recovery can mitigate your risks and free up your team to focus on higher payoff strategic activities. This provides a greater return on your people and keeps them engaged and loyal as they are working on significant projects.

As Australian businesses rely more and more on business-critical IT proprietary systems for their day to day operations, the risks and consequences of infrastructure failure, loss of key staff and financial blowouts are getting more real by the day.

In the coming months, TRT will be releasing a report on how businesses can gain a greater return from their existing IT budget by systemising the support of their server and storage technology. This eliminates single point of failures, increases the productivity of IT staff, controls costs and develops an IT long term solution which sustains their business.

To register for your complimentary copy, please submit your details below.

Domenic Romanelli, Managing Director,
TRT - July, 2008