He warns that from his macro world view, CIOs must accept that the talent distribution picture is not going to improve any time soon; rather, the movement of IT talent of almost all kinds into employment with larger providers or vendors is certain to accelerate. Given that reality, Curtis urges them to get to know their community of providers, to test them before buying big and then to attempt to build long-term partnerships with the best of them.

That is an approach that certainly seems to be working for Unisys. Director of HR Melanie Laing says Unisys recognizes that when it has to buy talent it needs to work with a very smart partner. It has forged a strategic outsourced recruitment arrangement where the agency recruits not only against a demand plan but also for the future. "We obviously have a sense of what we have needed and we're able to plan against typical types of project or program or client work that will arise, and obviously that's in our pipeline constantly anyway in terms of deals that we are trying to close," Laing says.

Unisys also has a high potential program for building talent in-house and has pooled the resources that once sat within individual business units. Being able to deploy that talent against planned engagements removes some of the pressure involved in recruiting in the market and also provides a much better development platform for the individuals involved, Laing says.

For other organizations the decision revolves around core and non-core competencies. Tony Young is CIO of Informatica, a software company based in Silicon Valley where competition for talent is fierce. In 2006, out of an IT staff of 75 people, the company lost just one employee. Young says that with a culture strongly based on building trust among all members of its team, Informatica seeks to staff at peak capacity and augment when necessary, while always maintaining its core competencies.

"Geoffrey Moore, the author of Crossing the Chasm, writes about two terms: core versus context," Young says. "The way that we say it in our group is you have to define where you are going to be good and where you're going to be great, and the rule we generally follow is where we're going to be great we're going to invest in. Where we're going to be good we're going to outsource to people whose core competency is to be great. I would rather work with somebody who is going to be great at it and augment us in those areas."