Software engineering is a misnomer. Engineering implies a stable body of knowledge, not something that gets thrown away every 2-3years. Combine that with corporate unwillingness to train & of course you have a worldwide labor shortage.
Who wants to be condemned to the fate of Sisyphus? And pay for the privledge of learning how to roll the new rocks?

If there's such a shortage, why is it that I just spent three months on unemployment?

Because of my skin color and age. The big companies like Microsoft whine about labor shortages so that the US government will remove the caps on immigrant labor.

1. Although championship for IT governance within the enterprise comes from the C-level, in daily practice, IT governance is still very much a CIO/IT director issue. The few non-IT people in the sample have a much more positive view of IT than do the IT professionals themselves.

And will continue to be as long as traditional business units continue to view IT as a cost center rather than an opportunity, efficiency and economic maximizer..

2. The importance of IT continues is increasing - 63 percent now say it's "very important" to strategy, up six points from 2005 and 11 from 2003. In North America, the figure is 60 percent. (Gartner's top analysts make the same argument IT also appears regularly or always on board agenda's at 70 percent of respondents' companies.

And yet companies expect IT to continue to increase its effectiveness in maximizing productivity without the same investment they are willing to put into other business units.

3. Self-assessment regarding IT governance has increased and is quite positive. There's been a huge jump in capability here: 54 percent gave their company a positive or very positive rating in the new survey, up to a 16 point increase from the 2005 study.

Yes, as long as IT shuts up and stays in their holes and does what their told and accepts responsibility for all the things that go wrong but are ignored when they bring opportunities to light, then everyone thinks IT is being governed well.

4. Communication between IT and users is improving, but slowly. Fifty -nine percent of IT departments always or regularly notify business executives about potential business opportunities they've uncovered. That's a lot of lost opportunity - both for business, and for CIOs and IT departments to improve their reputation.

This is a perspect held by non-IT persons. What typically happens is that IT identifies technology that can increase productivity or enhance customer service and all the non-IT person see is outgoing monies and so IT gets hammered back into their hole, told to sit down and shutup and stop trying to frivolously waste company money. The change happens when those same persons see what IT suggested at a trade show, or a competitor, custoemr or vendor and then wonder why their IT departments are not "proactive" and not "taking ownership" of their domain.

5. There is still substantial room for improvement in the alignment between IT governance and corporate governance--as well as for IT strategy and business strategy. Just 19 percent say alignment between IT strategy and business strategy is very good.

And it will remain low until other business units see IT as a peer rather than the Cinderella of corporate entities.

6. IT-related problems persist. While security/compliance is an issue, people are the most critical problem.

Other business units understand standardization in their own departments but do not feel compelled to adhere to them as it relates to IT. To them IT standards inhibit their abilities rather than focuses them to be more productive. This goes again to the "down their nose" view other departments have of IT.

7. Good IT governance practices are known and applied, but not universally.

Usually because of pressure from other business units to relax standards who want to have all the benefits with none of the the consequences.

8. Organizations know who can help them implement IT governance, but appreciation for the available expertise and delivery capability is only average.

Understatement of the year. Most business units' idea of IT governance is a variate of the 80/20 rule. We want IT to give us 100% of the services we want, we're willing to promise 80% of the funds it will take to get them but only 20% of those funds may ever make it into the budget or as personnel. Still expect to be evaluated on that 100%, though.

9. Action is being taken or plans are underway to implement IT governance activities. A large increase is evident when compared to the 2006 report.

Well, of course it is. IT obviously is not doing its job on its own and needs someone else to govern it.

10. Organizations use the well-known frameworks and solutions.

Which are relatively well proven to have little to no positive effect. But they are full of buzzwords and cool sounding phrases and the greasy snake oil salesmen who sell these certifications and solutions promise the respect and envy of the worls when we scan their logos and put them on our web sites.

11.COBIT awareness has exceeded 50 percent, and adoption and use remain around 30 percent.

Which is sad. COBIT is nothing new. All these pices, even the rediculous ones have been around since the inception of business use of IT. The most glaring problem COBIT and it's ilk, besides the glaring commercialism of the COBIT itself, is the insistence that IT is something that management needs "to get under control." These people are only perpetuating the inefficient integration of IT into business processes by trying to make a statement that IT Goals and Business/Enterprise Goals are not one in the same.

Please People, remember that every thing in IT is modeled after business. Most of the inefficiencies in IT are a direct result of the exact same inefficiencies that exist in the parent organization. What management cannot seem to grasp, and what makes IT the red-headed-stepchild of business is that IT is essentially as old as business. Without IT there could be no business. There has always been a need for business information to be recorded, stored, retrieved and manipulated. Those that have not done so wre onlu in business in their minds. It doesn't matter whether it was on clay tablets in cunieform or in RAID arrays utilizing perpendiculr nanorods as their medium.

If management would only relize this they'd realize that IT always has been the business, that IT has always been inextricable integrated with all business units. IT has a bad rep not because IT cannot grasp business but because managers are so intent on prtecting their own turf that they do not see that IT is a unique animal in business. It has deep ties to every single aspect of every business and no business unit can operate without IT in some form.

Let me say that again, no business unit can operate without IT.

IT, as important as it is, will never reach its full potential to respond to and drive the business until managers see that the business IS IT and allow it to intergrate rather than to beat it until you can find the individual IT guys and rape and pillage them.

And that is exactly what happens. No other business until has its individuals evaluated directly by every other business unit and manager the way IT does. IT is everywhere.

Atempts to commercialize snake oil such as this COBIT trash only perpetuates the idea that IT is the unruly black sheep of the family. The creators of these frameworks are only keeping IT and business from reaching full integration and thereby perpetuation the very problems it pretends to solve.

Please integrate IT into your departments. Allow them into your departments to learn your processes and allocate your best and brightest to be liasons to IT and to learn some of ours. Then stand back and watch your business grow and watch customers flock to you because you can do everything better.

Aw, you folks are always complaining.
What we NEED are developers and IT support staff that will sleep 6-8 to a room and be happy with a bowl of rice a day; maybe some veggies. Oh yeah, quit expecting to drive a car. A bicycle is cheaper and keeps you healthier. Why do you expect to have the same standard of living as those in sales/marketing or executive management? Just remember how fast those business degrees become technologically obsolete.