Are People Our Most Valuable Commodity? - Part 2

Written by Phil Gillard,
General Manager, SolutionsPT

During my last blog I talked about whether a shortage of skilled resource could be one of the main restrictions to growth in the UK economy.  As we emerge from recession, the common view being that the main restriction is a shortage of available cash or confidence to release cash. At a macro-economic level, much of the evidence for this thought is anecdotal via conversations with other business leaders. Clearly if things were critical, we would expect pressure on general labour rates and this is not yet happening.

However in the world of automation and industrial IT, I believe the situation is more serious. Firstly because of the increasing lack of skilled resource and secondly because the skill base of the existing resource is being stretched and challenged by an increasing influence of IT and the need to understand new technologies which have a faster cycle time.  

What evidence do we have for this? 

- Some of our systems integration community are able to select which jobs they bid for or accept - an indication of capacity constraint, we also see these decisions as being risk based with some organisations focusing on projects where there is low technical (IT) risk

- Some end user projects are being delayed due to lack of resource (again an indication of capacity constraint)

- Both end users and systems integrators are asking us to take more responsibility for putting together and supporting industrial IT infrastructures, this is especially true in cases where there is higher technical (IT) risk

- Interest in and attendance at (SolutionsPT) events which focus on the application of how newer IT technology is applied in automation and the industrial world is phenomenally high  - in a climate where time is very precious, people are putting time aside to educate themselves
If we consider the role and aspiration of the ambitious engineer in a production or infrastructure company, the effective (for the employer) and stimulating (for the employee) use of this individual will be to focus on use of the Industrial IT system to make business improvement by new projects or better application.  

How does an Industrial IT supplier help make this individual more effective and stimulated i.e. making best use of the limited resource. In our opinion part of the answer is to release the engineer from the routine and mundane activity which is vital to the availability of the Industrial IT system, if we look to the world of mainstream IT (as opposed to industrial) the routine monitoring of machine, network and application performance is highly automated, in the world of Industrial IT this is not yet the case. What are the barriers to this?

Is it our mind-set and the lack of openness to adopt leading IT technology? Or is it the specialist requirements of the Industrial world which prevent the more general IT technology being adopted? 

Certainly some of our customers who are working with us to bridge this gap seem to be reaping the rewards of increasing the availability of their systems and allowing their staff to work on the “interesting stuff”.