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

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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. - 4 -
BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT CHIEF EXECUTIVE’S REPORT (continued) International Success: We have set up new distribution channels for ISEB in Australia, Germany and India. The distributor in Australia was successful in running the ITIL certifications on behalf of the Institute. Thanks to the activities of the Australian distributor we were able to grow our certification business in the region. In Germany the focus is on Green IT and Software Testing. In India we will focus on Software Testing. Later we will add ITIL certification to the Indian services. These distributors allow the Institute to create local presence with limited organisational and financial risk. We have also: � reached agreements with two key organisations in the Software Testing market. These agreements will help us grow the international presence of the Institute in this specific market. The agreements also protect our UK market; � signed a licence agreement with an Australian training and consultancy organisation. This agreement allows the Australian organisation to promote and sell SFIAplus related services. SFIA is becoming increasingly popular in Australia; � worked with the SFIA Foundation to update the strategy of the Foundation. The SFIA framework will become the leading international de facto standard for skills in IT. The Institute made an important contribution to the SFIA project aimed at defining skills for sustainable IT. We have initiated the SFIA project which will result in version 5 of the Framework. This version will be available in English, German and Spanish; � grown the relationships with a number of key partners such as CompTIA (in the area of Green IT, user skills and SFIA), Open Group (CITP), Irish Computer Society (CITP), itSMF (ITIL, SFIA), OGC (ITIL) and ISACA (SFIA); � supported the Institute’s Middle East section on a number of occasions, with the aim of growing the BCS membership in the region and growing the market for Higher Education Qualifications; � launched a plan to grow the membership in the US by setting up local groups. The first local group is based in Atlanta. This group is closely related to one of the main universities in the US; � launched the Green IT Foundation exam in a number of countries and see a promising start in India and the Asian Pacific region. We have developed a programme for the certification on Data Centres, based on the EU Code of Conduct for Energy Efficiency of Datacenters. This programme will be launched internationally and we have worked closely with Pearson VUE and Prometric to grow the international success of ISEB exams. End User Qualifications: The End User Qualifications area has held up through a very volatile year, however, we have gained QCF accreditation and therefore funding, as well as school performance points approval, for all of our products through to April 2013. All of our end user products have also been mapped to the new ITQ framework. Digital Creator has been heavily affected by discussions on the way IT is taught in schools, and exactly what gets accredited. This product alone makes up most of the shortfall from our plan in the end user certification revenues this year. However, more schools are starting to take it up, though again it will be the next school year before we see significant impact on our revenues even though we now have clarity around its accreditation status. We have had a really strong year for the Institute’s own Higher Education Examinations, growing the revenues in this area by 23% year on year. Although most of this business is still in Sri Lanka, the number of UK based graduates continues to grow. - 5 -
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