8th November 2009
This week I took time out to meet with James Bradshaw, CEO of Systems Accountants the recruiter of specialised accountants and programme mangers for financial systems transformation and implementation projects. The good news is that the market is recovering from the slowdown and there are signs of movement across the board although it will take a while for investment to return to pre-2008 levels. What remains of concern is that despite the slowdown there is still a real shortage of good quality programme managers capable of running large scale transformation projects so when the market recovers fully, businesses and software providers will be at full stretch to provide enough suitably qualified resource to oversee major projects. The other trend, which is in line with Lesley Meall’s article this week, is that the shared services market is reaching maturity. No longer are large corporates very dependent on external resources for shared service centre implementations. Companies have endured the hard graft of implementing new processes and are now looking inwards to experienced staff to refine the systems that they have put in place. Given the skills shortage, that is probably just as well.
