Resources needs and filling the gaps
A new low has been hit for our question on whether responders feel they have enough resources to do their job for the year.
The following chart shows the top-level answers. Perhaps the most telling one is those who consider they have enough resources — at 5% this is the lowest it has ever been in BCS surveys.
With BCS’ policy goals and royal charter aims in mind, it is also noteworthy that ‘enhanced IT capability and understanding in leadership team/board’ attracted 51% of participants as an issue. And ‘increased digital literacy among general workforce’ is a requirement noted by 48% (46% in 2024) of leaders and 49% (up from 43% in 2024) of professionals. These numbers are up on both 2024 and 2023.
The verbatims for this question had a lot to say about the board and culture, here is a sampling of what responders felt was needed:
- An imagination transplant for the senior team
- Competent management
- Culture change and business-led change that IT was part of rather than at the end of
- Additional board support for IT spending
In the business context, compliance expertise to streamline company work was cited, alongside increased on-premises IT and hardware security modules to insource encryption as mitigation for supply chain risks including cloud service provider risk concentrations.
There were four comments on the lack of time to get things done. And an interesting follow-up: ‘we need specialists to resolve working but poor solutions that are inefficient, or insecure, or unnecessarily complex.’
Capability gaps and filling the gaps
We asked leaders….
Most fell into these buckets, but a short list of other areas came up:
- Blockchain
- Carbon impact analysis
- Data, data architecture, data engineering
- IT supply chain management
- Service design, user research, UX/CX/EX
- User experience, research, and digital accessibility
AI has made inroads in anticipated ways of filling the skills gap.
In 2024, ‘use of AI/automation’ to fill the skills gap drew 33%, slightly reduced for 2025 at 29%, but an appreciable proportion.
Historically ‘on the job training’ and ‘use of professional certifications’ are largely consistent, but the biggest loser seems to be mentoring.
This is a snapshot of some of the historic trends.
