Everyone keeps slating IT. What is wrong with working as an IT consultant? Opportunities to earn great money. Constant demand for consultants with IT skills. Contract roles galore. Investment in IT is clearly one of the top priorities for organizations. With IT you also can become a technical expert and get into a niche where you provide very real and tangible benefits to companies. Strategy monkeys, in my opinion, are 10 a penny. In a downturn these will be the first in line at the DSS queue. See you there.

....hmmm the constant threat of your skills coming under pressure (both job and wages) from the guys in India......no thanks.

I would most certainly agree with that comment if you are a developer or perhaps a tester. I believe there is a great deal of safety to be found in the jobs that sit between business and IT. People acting as middle men brokering requirements with delivery. Given the vast cultural differences between say India and the UK I think these jobs will never go. I also believe that the whole outsourcing malarkey is just another phase. Sooner or later the Indians/Chinese etc will want greater money and then companies in the UK will have to make the choice on quality rather than price. Again what is wrong with IT? I'm surprised more strategists sitting up in their ivory towers haven't chipped in. Boom Boom's one liner is about as original as giving a client a presentation on a re-hash of Michael Porter's five forces.

are you implying that with a choice based on quality the choice will be for a british it provider? Hehe...please....since quality includes speed and flexibility...british companies will almost always loose out in my humble opinion....Btw, middle man positions are increasingly threatened by this development called globalisation...What prevents a western company to set up a shop in India/china where people work harder and faster? As a company you still have yr good name, you set up a sales department over the phone with english speaking people in South Africa...and as not to loose touch, you set up a service department in the UK....They all work together with groupware....bye bye expensive middle man

Globalisation is just another strategy buzzword. I think it has now evolved anyway. Aren't companies like HSBC calling it Glocalisation i.e. we might be global but we understand local markets. Yadda yadda yadda - till the next strategy halfwit thinks up a new term - maybe Universilisation or some other arbitrary word. The implications of having your IT staff halfway across the other side of the world are more than just based upon speed and flexibility. Lets look towards other examples of outsourcing. The outsourcing call centers for example. Sounds easy. Pay someone in India slave wages to get educated people to deal with customers. It might be cheaper but the majority of people in the UK nowadays absolutely despise the lack of customer service which had dropped. Companies are now even able to use UK call centres as their unique selling point. IT is the same. South Africans might speak English as a first language (or Afrikaans but always English as well) but they are not British (well as good as I suppose). Even they have cultural differences to the UK. The whole point of IT is that it is supposed to support business needs. A sales team is interested in selling. Once sale is made move on. It is commission based. Who then will ensure business needs are met? Some Indian guy who doesn't understand the market in the UK? Sure you might be able to give some flashy sales speak, but ultimately you can't polish a turd.

It is incredibly dull, mediocre pay, poor exit options, non-transferable skillset and the women are frankly horrendous.

Incredibly dull = Depends what area. For many IT jobs I disagree. Compared to what exactly - analysing figures or making the perfect animation for your clients powerpoint?Mediocre pay = Is £500 - £600 per day mediocre? If so please let us know what your on as I'd truly be interested.Poor exit options = maybe I agree but why exit? Moneys good and I like my job. This is the problem with everyone talking about exit options. It implies you're not content. Why not?Non-transferable skillset - disagree. Totally transferable. More so also. Won't leave you thinking "what can I do I am too generalist."Women = aahh the achilles heel of IT. You have me there. They are indeed.

Perhaps I am being flippant. Undoubtedly there will always be niches in IT where things are good. E.g. some of my friends are top notch SAP contractors and effectively follow the product roll-outs around the globe. Charge out rate = £1,200. However, the point about exit options has some merit. Strategy provides a good route to the board / good grounding to start your own business. I am not sure that been hated on a client site has the same appeal.

Clients are generally reasonable - some hate us, fair point but aren't all consultants hated? Also it provides the ability to go in hated and if you do a good job to gain client respect and genuinely feel part of the team (maybe a better paid team but still!).Boards will always need people that know their way around IT. Living in the knowledge based economy, as we supposedly are, IT is crucial to most board level decisions. The point I am trying to make is that there are a vast amount of people here who think that IT consulting is a lesser practice. I disagree. Most people see IT as a support function. My clients are typically high tech - telecoms, media etc and working for these my job is both interesting and well rewarded. They come up with ideas and I enable them to get there by integrating new technology with their existing landscapes. I don't sit there taking calls all day telling people to reboot their computers. That side of IT is dull.

I would rather be in IT strategy than in IT operations. Most ops work consists of grunt work, and thats why its usually outsourced.

For someone with a non-IT background drafted in on the pretence that a move to a business role is achieveable the work (IME) is dull, repetitive and does not develop real business skills.

what is the work in enterprise applications at Deloitte like? is it all IT work, or is there any strategy in it?

Information Technology is a key enabler of human progress and can only be outsourced to a certain extend without loosing the connection that enables that progress.Being involved in IT/science, and not in strategy consulting, suggesting strategies that are unethical or short-term oriented, is the absolute greatest thing. After all, science and technical understanding/technology is solid and not dictated by stock market fluctuations and elitism. How many soft-skilled knowledge workers do you need to change a lightbulb ? ......

Is it genetics or bosses preventing good looking women working in IT? Discuss.

This year we concentrate on the 'cultural differences' having got most of the grunt work to India/China only to find out that the problems now get raised to middle management and that quality issues are an issue. Message from the top.. 'Deal with it'....Money is good if you know your job/role, but you can be cheapened/lessened if your project rests on these offshore workers so your in effect firing yourself due to incompetence.Many are still too blind to notice that bit, or te fact that the ivory tower has been breached and the lack of skills is biting hard, and no employing 10'000 footsoldires in a land far-far away is not going to fix the issue of culture, if it did then Iraq would be a white catholic country giving OIL to the USA.Discuss :)

Will IBM end up like Micro, SAP, Oracle..? say having just sales/marketing/Research labs in Europe? Can not see that happening within the next 3-4 years though. Probably they are waiting until the big outsourcing contracts are running out/get cancelled, lean out as many as possible and then sell GBS to a hedge fund or Wipro..

Your not a million miles away with the WIPRO statement :)