John Pickett

Talk to me

The 2004 CIO Canada Outsourcing Summit has just wrapped up.

On my arrival in Canada from England some 30 years ago, I quickly learned to replace British terms with their Canadian equivalents.

Oh, I know, "change is the only constant, et cetera, et cetera."

The business climate that has been putting a clamp on corporate spending continues to improve according to all the surveys I've seen, and the vast majority of CIOs and IT vendors I've spoken with express a similarly optimistic view of 2004.

During the last couple of weeks we've seen various incarnations of the Mydoom worm propagate themselves throughout the Internet.

The movement to offshore outsourcing has been far more subdued here than in the U.S., where the trend has grown quickly, and opposing it has become a politically popular stance.

It's been more than three years since the technology stock crash and the events - economic and tragic - that combined to reduce IT investments to a trickle. Tight budgets have meant that CIOs have been forced to squeeze more from what they have, and many IT vendors have fed largely on small-upgrade scraps between rare new-project banquets.