BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT Annual Report and Consolidated ...

BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT
CHIEF EXECUTIVE’S REPORT
This year has been quite a tumultuous one, with increasingly difficult trading conditions and, from January
to the end of June 2010, having to cope with a very divisive Extraordinary General Meeting (EGM). Either
of these two situations would have put a substantial strain on the organisation, but having both at the same
time has been unprecedented.
In view of this environment, I am tremendously proud of what we have been able to achieve during the last
twelve months.
We have delivered on our operating plan for this year in terms of surplus, and have grown our revenues by
around 2% year on year. However, all of this has come at a cost, with very tight cost management being
the key approach. This has meant salary and recruitment freezes for the second year running and the
continued reduction in our total staff resources of around 10% over the course of the year. With the latest
round of Government Spending cuts being announced as we write this report and our historic dependence
on government funded programmes in the education sector, the environment we work in is only going to
get harder.
It has been very disappointing that the momentum we built through the launch of our new transformation
programmes in September 2009 was dissipated by the EGM work, which took a number of key managers
out of their normal work into dealing with this activity. It was a huge relief to be able to get back to the real
job of supporting our broader membership and wider professional activities after July, and focus on the
external activities the Institute should be engaged in rather than the EGM work which had no clear
objectives articulated to improve what we had already planned to do. My regret is that we were not able to
avoid the EGM and it was disappointing that many of the earlier exchanges of communication were overshadowed
by what, in many cases, proved to be unfounded misrepresentation. It did feel as though we
had just lost seven critical months at exactly the wrong time, however, we have still managed to invest in
new markets and new products, and will try to catch up on the lost ground from this year in the coming
months. We are predicting that in the coming year we will see a growth of around 3% year on year.
On the specific areas for the current year:
Membership revenues have remained strong throughout the year and we have once again achieved our
goal of recruiting over 10,000 new members in the year. Renewals have pretty much stayed up to the
extraordinarily high levels of retention in numbers of the previous three years. There has though been a
substantial increase in the number of discounted rate applications due to unemployment which has had a
small effect on renewal income. However, the good news is that CITP applications have increased
substantially in the second half of the year after a slow start to the new standard being introduced in
September of 2009. All of this means that we will close the year with over 70,000 members in total.
BCS Examinations and Professional Development Activities:
All of these revenues come from “product” sales where the products are in IT career development or IT end
user skills development areas, which are of course absolutely in line with our Royal Charter, charitable
objects (see page 7) and the five key objectives of our strategy (see page 8). These product sales are not
only two thirds of our revenues but also by far the highest surplus generating activities within the Institute
and are the critical major sources of funding for all of our other activities.
IT Practitioner Qualifications continue to be a big concern both now and looking forward, particularly in
ITIL-based service management. The market here is considerably down year on year, over 30%, but the
real pressure for us is on margins as the training provider market continues to shrink to just a few very big
players, and the examining institutes, especially APMG with their privileged position, grow in number.
It is really important going forward that we reduce our dependence on the UK market in general, and in UK
government funded activities in particular, and we are now starting to see the results of three years of hard
work and investment in international activities.
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