Skills and outsourcing are still in demand for the banks

Courtesy: http://www.sbpost.ie/

Banking clients are still looking for temporary staff to help run their IT infrastructure, and IT Force is getting a share of that business. Outsourcing is also becoming more popular, according to Joe O’Reilly, IT Force’s sales director for managed resources.

He said that many banks see the ‘out tasking’ of particular functions as the appropriate operational model as they hunker down and focus on core business applications. The two areas in which this is happening most are the IT helpdesk and the management of desktop PCs.

“ ‘Dynamic desktop management’ is quite prevalent,” said O’Reilly. ‘‘It’s a Microsoft initiative which helps you to automate the support of your PC environments by allowing you to roll out upgrades, security patches and so on from a central location. That’s an area where organizations see that, if they do some work, they can get a return on investment very quickly and reduce their service level costs.”

He identified centralized power management as another growth area. Many banks have literally thousands of PCs in use and can save themselves significant amounts of money by managing power consumption more efficiently. So one of the services IT Force offers is to set up an internal power management system on the client’s network which, at a predetermined time every evening, will send a message to each PC to find out whether it’s on or off.

‘‘If it’s on but has not been used for 15 minutes, the program sends an instruction to the PC to power itself down to ‘hibernate’ mode.

‘‘Organizations are seeing that this is one area where they can make substantial savings without affecting productivity in any shape or form,” said O’Reilly.

Despite these islands of activity, the overall picture in financial services is one of cuts, cuts and more cuts in IT spending. Not only is this hurting the ecosystem of suppliers feeding off the sector, it could also hurt the banks themselves in the long run, O’Reilly said.

‘‘There’s always a risk that if you don’t continue to invest in your IT infrastructure you’ll get left behind; you will end up having to spend more down the road for IT equipment or you run a bigger risk of your systems crashing, which could ultimately lose you your business.

‘‘Financial organizations are under serious, serious pressure but let’s hope they don’t throw the baby out with the bath water.”

As a company with a large footprint in the financial services sector, IT Force has been hit hard by the banking crisis. With fewer IT projects being undertaken, the project resourcing side, in particular, has suffered.

‘‘Previously, there would have been a bigger demand for specialist skills to deliver projects. Over the past six months, the past two months in particular, that has almost totally dried up,” said O’Reilly.

‘‘There are one or two exceptions: some financial institutions are requiring extra staff to speed up certain projects. But unless there is a true business demand, there are no projects are going on.”