By Julie Bort
Network World, 07/23/01
If today's stormy economy comes with a silver lining, it's
the collective sigh of relief from IT. Business managers have learned that
Internet infrastructures implemented at breakneck speeds will not magically
generate growth. Consequently, sanity has begun to return to the IT project
workload.
And so, despite the economic ills that have characterized 2001,
Network World readers are not all that worried, according
to a survey of 100 IT executives conducted for us by Research
Concepts.
The most telling statistic is a 1.08-point drop in the concern
over balancing work and family. Clearly, IT workers are not especially frightened
about being laid off and are actually happier that they needn't pull so
many all-nighters on New Economy projects.
This drop is underscored by reduced concern over e-commerce
in total. The e-commerce rating dropped about a point, to 4.43, from 5.42
last year. It ended up one of the lowest rated items on the survey.
Obviously,
IT executives are now far less concerned about losing employees
to vendors or dot-coms with stock options than they had been last
year. The concern over this dropped 1.05 points, to 5.49.
But the real zinger is, troubled times or not, respondents
are overall less concerned about every aspect of their jobs this
year than last. Concern lessened on all but six items (see chart
below). In fact, the mean concern rating of all 45 items dropped
to 5.94, from 6.42 last year.
Ahhhh!
- Julie Bort
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