Tudor Aw is head of the growing technology practice at professional services giant KPMG. Based in London, Aw’s role requires him to manage clients’ business development and advise on where any investment should be targeted.

“I also have responsibility for delivering solutions ­everything from software to hardware and IT services ­which keeps me in touch with the real world,” he said.
With his broad remit and various multinational clients, Aw is in an excellent position to talk about the top challenges facing chief information officers (CIOs) today. One topic that has been cropping up a lot recently in conversations with clients is Web 2.0 ­ a subject that Aw seems decidedly cool about.

“A lot of clients are talking about it and putting a lot of money behind it, but still the million dollar question is how do you make money from it?” he said. Aw added that the situation reminds him of the early days of the dot-com boom, with everyone wanting to be seen to be doing something with the technology even though they do not have a clear idea of how they can actually drive revenue with it.

Aw said one of the key challenges facing CIOs today is the growing problem of how to recruit and keep the best people. Factors such as the UK’s aging population and the recent decline in the number of young people studying technology-related subjects have conspired to make this a more pressing issue for IT leaders, he added.

“It’s basically a smaller population studying the wrong things which is causing the problem,” Aw explained. “CIOs need to outsource what they don’t need to keep in-house, and think harder about where to put their people and what to train them in ­ the types of companies that are good to work for give IT staff challenging and creative stuff to do, not the routine work that can be outsourced.”

Aw believes UK organisations are now riding a second wave of technology outsourcing, following the first big push in the late 1990s. He said this revival is partly down to the fact that firms are becoming less risk averse, and also because there is now a widespread feeling among businesses that a failure to outsource will leave them at a competitive disadvantage.

Aw’s intimate knowledge of the Indian IT services market seems to bear this out. “We get the message that Indian services providers have a bullish strategic outlook ­ the numbers are still in line with analyst expectations,” he said.

Aw is similarly positive when he surveys the general state of the UK technology sector, although he is not blind to the economic clouds looming on the horizon. He believes the real danger is of businesses talking themselves into a recession. “It can be a self-fulfilling prophesy,” he said. “People hear about an economic downturn and then they have a reason to start cutting discretionary spend. That’s when it flows into a CIO’s agenda because IT gets pressurised, as a back-office function, to drive costs out and be more efficient.”

Aw believes India will be a strong outsourcing destination for years to come, despite growing competition from other regions. Eastern Europe, he said, does not have the sheer population scale of India, while China is hindered by the language barrier. “However, Latin America is up and coming, because many US firms want Spanish speaking skills ­ I’d see it as supplementing rather than replacing the current favoured destinations though,” he added.