Only if you want to run afoul of your senior executives.

Whenever there's a shortage of personnel, wages rise, turnover increases and quality declines as companies hire less-qualified applicants. Every economic indicator confirms that this is happening today. IT staffs are being paid higher salaries than their business counterparts with equivalent educational and career backgrounds. Nearly 70% of the organizations surveyed by Meta Group say they pay their IT staffs more than what they pay end users.

Scarcities, whether in oil, steel, food supplies, switchboard operators or engineers, have never lasted too long. All forecasts that have extrapolated shortages into projections of chronic scarcities have always been proved wrong. This is particularly true when a sudden shortfall is caused by a combination of a cutback in supplies and a squandering of resources. The recent jumps in the prices of gasoline and heating oil are good examples of this phenomenon. Recent scarcities of plywood, orange juice, gold, wallboard and the metal palladium have shown similar patterns, but these shortages will be reversed as soon as higher prices bring supply and demand back into balance.

Current anxieties about the approach of an extreme IT labor shortage are ripe for such a reversal. Corporate executives are preparing to insist on fewer labor-intensive solutions to their software needs. Rising wages, increased turnover and declining quality won't be tolerated as the IT budgets keep creeping up to approach the size of corporate profits. While the employable U.S. workforce is growing at the annual pace of only 1.5%, adding another million positions to an IT workforce that's already expanding at a torrid rate of 15% is no way to improve the productivity of the computer people.

Enter the application service providers. As soon as ASPs can deliver reliable user support over networks, organizations will find that renting complete business solutions instead of constructing and maintaining their own home-cooked spaghetti code is an increasingly attractive alternative. There are already ASPs that can satisfy cross-functional systems needs, such as in enterprisewide resource management in specialized market segments like automobile assembly, wholesale drugs and electronic merchandising.

The idea that each organization must design its own computing infrastructure, master the adoption of technological innovations and maintain all software enhancements is obsolete. It's as medieval a concept as the dependency of each 12th century European town on its merchant, shoemaking, furniture manufacturing and ironworking guilds. These labor-intensive and immensely costly institutions lost their economic viability as soon as national and -- ultimately -- global trading organizations were able to deploy capital over a wider geographical base than was made possible by those who relied only on local economies.

Many IT executives will be sitting down this spring to draft their long-range plans. If they propose large salary increases to compensate for the prospect of a gruesome labor shortage, business executives will demand alternative solutions.

Business as usual, or even swapping company heads for offshore consultants, won't solve the problem. Instead, plan to phase out the wasteful insistence on IT self-sufficiency -- what I call the medieval guild phase of systems construction. Prepare to rent systems services from huge services corporations to spread the costs of an increasingly expensive and risky systems infrastructure that only giant integrated firms will be able to afford. This is why all the hand-wringing about the coming shortage of IT personnel should be seen as nothing but a self-serving prophecy by consultants who thrive on scare tactics that would increase the demand for their premium-priced services.