Hello and Happy New Year to all our clients and partners…

I trust everyone had a relaxing festive season and that you have all returned to work with high energy levels and rewarding goals in store!

The subject of Australia’s skill shortage has again been prominent in the media over the last few months. Whilst it is fair to say that most industries are suffering from an inability to find the right staff for the right salary, the Information Technology industry is particularly affected, and for a number of reasons;

• Technology solutions are becoming more complex and require business experience to provide maximum affect – no longer can professional IT consultants survive as purely “subject matter experts”
• The distinction between Technology and Business is rapidly becoming blurred, with “downtime” or “maintenance time” simply not an option
• Some boom industries are “stealing” career people away with the lure of well paying contracts, and
• Some of the once prevalent sources of staff, such as India, are starting to dry up as wages there are not too dissimilar to Australia’s.

In response to this RDA has adopted a number of tactics to ensure we continue to deliver outstanding advice and services to our clients. Some of the changes we made were;

• Increasing our technical and consulting staff by over 120% in the last 12 months – and we are still looking for more experienced and qualified staff
• Extending our Helpdesk hours, and
• Introducing Service Level Agreements for guaranteed response times.

We also remained open over the Christmas period, a first for RDA. From our point of view, having certain staff members on call and our Service Desk open worked well. We are constantly looking to improve our service, so if you have any suggestions or feedback, please do let me know.

For now though, I wish you a wonderful year ahead and enjoyable reading of our monthly Wrap!

Ian Cook
Managing Director