بهبود استراتژی های حفظ متخصصان مشغول به کار فناوری اطلاعات در بخش دولتی

Despite much research interest, effective retention of IT professionals has proved difficult for many public sector organizations. By concentrating on intention to leave, researchers may not have provided a clear way to formulate effective retention strategies. Consequently, we used intention to stay as an alternative lens to identify factors that can reduce turnover of IT professionals. Our findings indicated that attitudes, perceived behavioral control (PBC), and identification with the organization all had a statistically significant relationship with intention to stay; attitude was the strongest. It was concluded that existing retention strategies needed to be refocused on the issues that make IT staff stay; a number of practical recommendations for IT managers are presented.

The IT profession in many countries has had high turnover rates in past years. These rates have ranged from 20% in the 1980s, to 30% in the late 1990s and between 5 and 14% in the 2000s [24]. More recent surveys suggested that while demand for IT professionals fell after the dot com bust, this trend was reversing, with the number of organizations adding exceeding those decreasing staff [26]. Indeed, it has been reported that attracting, developing, and retaining qualified IT staff was first in the top five IT executive management concerns for 2007/2008 [17]. High turnover of IS staff can result in failure of IT projects and persistent high turnover can result in projects being delayed, late, over budget or never completed. The effect of low morale due to burnout or low commitment may mirror the impact of employee turnover. Consequently, retaining a team of healthy, committed, and productive IT employees is vital for maintaining corporate advantage. In the public sector, creating effective workforce management strategies to retain IT professionals is particularly difficult; there is competition between the public and private sector for well-trained, experienced IT employees. For example, some US state governments have reported IT employee turnover rates of over 11% despite increasing salaries and the introduction of flexi-time. The constraints of civil service systems that emphasize rules and regulations, control systems, political context, and limited autonomy and flexibility hinder the effective recruitment and retention of new staff [12]. These factors are further compounded with the tendency to purchase package solutions that reduce in-house work to system maintenance and relatively simple high level programming. As a result, IT professionals with portable skills across industries are able to find work with greater challenges and higher salaries elsewhere. The public sector in the UK is also experiencing difficulties in the retention of IT professionals; problems in filling public sector vacancies are reported across all sectors and skill groups. The National Health Service (NHS) is particularly concerned; it currently requires a major overhaul of all core IS. This requires large numbers of skilled IT professionals to implement the national programme. The NHS requires detailed knowledge of the healthcare process and technologies that support it. Departing employees take with them valuable knowledge and expertise, so it is of paramount importance to retain current IT staff. However, despite the new challenges, the NHS has been having problems in retaining skilled professionals. Therefore we decided to examine the factors that influenced the intention of IS professionals in the public sector to stay with their current employer. The specific objective was to investigate factors and consider the views of current IS professionals working in the NHS. The theory of planned behavior (TPB) was utilized as the underlying theoretical framework; it has been used to investigate an individual's intention to perform a given behavior [4].

Overall, the results of this study help to explain why current retention strategies for IT staff in public sector organizations, are not providing the desired level of retention. Public sector IT managers should address some aspects to improve retention of precious IT staff; they need to consider both job design and issues such as the influence of people important to IT professionals and how their views can influence an IT professional's decision making about a career move. Our findings are, however, subject to a number of limitations. The data was drawn from a single organizational sector and consequently, they have limited generalisibility. However, the NHS is the largest employer in Europe and is a vast and complex organization that will have many issues that apply to other sectors. The study only employed a single research strategy, namely a questionnaire survey, and while surveys have a number of strengths, they do not allow respondents an opportunity to explain their answers or add information. It should also be noted that a large percentage of the respondents to the survey consisted of senior IT staff. Consequently, the findings and associated recommendations may be more closely linked to the needs of senior IT staff than junior IT professionals. A final limitation is that it attempts to predict behavior through measuring intention.