Techie jobs lost through automation

THE analysts who were first to predict the trend of 'offshoring' jobs to India have come up with another alarming forecast for British workers, saying that computer operations staff may well find themselves on the scrapheap beside their call centre colleagues.

But research company Gartner says it won't be cheap labour that condemns thousands of data centre staff to the dole queue but automation that makes the so-called 'boiler room engineering' jobs redundant.

Gartner analyst Donna Scott said standardisation of IT infrastructure, applications and processes will lead to productivity improvements and a major shift in skill needs.

Scott said that as many as 50% of the IT operational jobs in the US could disappear over the next two decades because of improvements in data centre technologies.

Similar job losses are likely in Britain. Just as the UK followed the offshoring trend that first started in the US, there is every reason to believe the culling of operations staff will follow the transatlantic model.

Systems administration, fixing day-to-day problems and introducing new technologies, account for about 55% of an IT department's labour cost, said Scott, adding that greater automation would make IT operations 'more like a factory'.

Low end jobs would then be lost, although demand would grow for employees who have IT architecture skills.