In a changing world, it's important to stay on top of how new trends and developments can impact on you and the way you and your business operates. The ongoing financial uncertainty in Europe, combined with an increase in those willing to adopt new, innovative services means that the world of IT outsourcing, perhaps more than any other industry, has been affected by change.

Indeed, in recent years we've started to see the slow evolution of IT into a commoditised service, or a utility, which has been encouraged by more widespread adoption of more innovative solutions such as cloud based services, as more and more organisations look to cut costs and increase efficiency. What this means is that the ITskills which will be required to design, build and maintain these services could migrate to cloud service providers and that we'll start to see many firms ceasing to have an ‘IT Department’ as we know it.

Clearly, IT skills will still need to be required to maintain these services, but although there will always be specialists in all aspects of IT, we'll start to see more and more of them working in the supplier community. So does this mean that every IT function will be outsourced in the future?

I suspect that this is unlikely, and it's clear that there will continue to be a need for IT specialists working on premise where firms have a security requirement that cannot be met by suppliers. Another area that will be important for firms who elect to move to cloud based services is they will need to retain some level of IT assurance, in terms of IT staff who are able to manage the supplier relationships, monitoring value for money, checking the quality of service and challenging suppliers when necessary. Of course these are capabilities that can be bought in from professional service companies, but they too would need to stay abreast of their IT.

Perhaps the biggest danger is that as the IT services industry changes, the skills gap could become bigger. In my opinion, the fact that many firms have had their IT budgets squeezed, means that training is often the first casualty. Clearly, this situation has not been helped by hiring freezes or headcount reductions, which mean that there areless IT people available.

If the IT services industry is to keep up with the rate of change, it is imperative that suppliers ensure their ITstaff are well trained in their jobs as any failures could jeopardise theirbusiness. As a result, we'll see firms becoming more and more determined toavoid ‘supplier lock in’, to give themselves the flexibility to take remedial action and move their services to an alternative supplier if they aren’t getting the desired level of service.

To summarise, I’d suggest that the key to successfully navigating the unchartered territories of these changing times is to ensure that the core skills required to bridge this gap are retained, and developed. Cutting costs is all well and good in these austere times – but businesses must learn the difference between retaining essential skills andthrowing the baby out with the bath water!