OK, so the $64,000 question for CIOs is this: what becomes of the CIO and IT department in a world where offshoring is mature, where remote, hosted, web-based applications are widely available, and where even changes to great big pieces of business logic can be achieved without significant manual intervention?

Sykes' answer is typically robust. CIOs might become more like COOs or might get another title and the UK might have to accept that pure IT skills need to be sourced from abroad, or that they belong to service providers.

"Younger people in the UK increasingly are not going into universities to do IT [and many regard this as an important problem]. My counter argument is that you need people who are going to be all-rounders. I have a relative who is studying aeronautical engineering at Imperial College, London.

"Do you know where they go when they graduate? The City! They've studied how to build airplanes but they're highly numerate, business-literate and instinctively IT-literate. If you do a law degree you don't get turned out into the world to be a lawyer. You're a broad player with broad business skills. In the UK, I'm less concerned that we're not producing pure IT professionals. I'm concerned about making more blended individuals."