A short article by Ed Sperling of Forbes.com on the importance of fine-tuning an organization's IT team is among the most eloquent we've seen recently when it comes to the realities of outsourcing, cost-cutting, and overall business value.

After acknowledging "the biggest areas for cutbacks in IT have always been people, new hardware purchases and infrastructure upgrades," Sperling notes that those kinds of cuts and the associated outsourcing are fine, but they're one-time gains, trading variable costs for "what are hopefully fixed ones."

But CIOs also need to be turning those savings to good use, and that means hiring in other areas. The real value for IT inside a company these days isn't managing the low-level stuff. It's finding new ways to grow business units and to enable communication across an enterprise. That's a combination of salesmanship, a solid understanding of business needs and knowing how technology works. This is a different breed of IT people altogether, and they're tough to find. They're also in high demand, much pricier than a Java programmer and much harder for companies to keep - which is why so few companies are talking about it.

His conclusion:

What's changing on a macro scale is a value shift in the CIO's world. It's not that staffing should be cut; it's that staffing needs to be re-balanced. The quantity part of the operation can be effectively outsourced with enough quality to make it work. But the quintessential part of the operation - what makes a company different and competitive - never will be

It's a valid point and one that's often overlooked in the rush to cut costs.

-- Don Willmott