IT Skills
As a serving IT Director for two police forces in England, holding onto or attracting the right skills to a Police ICT department is almost impossible. My forces have just been through a job evaluation process (13 Factor) which has, for example, graded Oracle DBA's with a salary banding of £26-£29k. My DBA resource are quite rightly now leaving the organisation as jobs in the discipline are abundant and well paid in comparison. Despite my continuing protests the organisation is wedded to the scheme and will not budge on salaries, therefore it is clearly demonstrable that the public sector do not have a clue about staff retention for IT, so it comes as no surprise to me that projects fail. A business is only ever as good as the staff it employs, with the governments digital agenda surely employing the right skills and experience to facilitate transformational change is paramount to success, "pay peanuts get monkeys" - failure is the only guaranteed outcome.