The opening of a National Skills Academy for IT in the UK has moved a step closer, after the government announced it has approved the business plan submitted by sector skills body e-skills UK. In October 2008 the government gave the green light to a tech academy on account of IT's "critical" role in growing the national economy, and because of strong and growing demand for tech workers - more than 140,000 new IT recruits are required by the industry every year, according to e-skills UK.

The IT gender pay gap is getting worse, according to results from the 2009 silicon.com Skills Survey. More than a third (35 per cent) of female IT workers responding to this year's survey said they were on the bottom rung of the tech pay ladder, earning less than £25k, compared to just under a third of women (32 per cent) last year. And only 14 per cent of male IT workers are in the lowest pay bracket this year, down from 20 per cent in 2008.

Web heavyweights have hit out against the Digital Economy Bill, claiming clauses in the legislation could put the UK's digital future at risk. In an open letter to the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills Peter Mandelson, published yesterday, representatives of eBay, Facebook, Google and Yahoo! call on the government to abandon "measures which risk stifling innovation and damaging the government's vision for a Digital Britain".

With so many businesses looking to cut costs, shared services have become a popular option. Stuart Roberts offers advice on making them deliver. I think everyone agrees that since mid-2008 the economic situation has been somewhat difficult, with all the cutting of costs and jobs.

Radio and tagging technologies have loads of promise - though the applications may not be quite what you were expecting, says Quocirca's Rob Bamforth. RFID and its close cousin near field communications (NFC) have both been touted for great and sexy futuristic applications. These range from the tagging and tracking of all consumer goods to the conversion of mobile phones into all purpose 'super wallets' where simply waving the phone at the checkout would pay for your items.

This month saw California's Hacker Dojo host the Random Hacks of Kindness event, which brought independent coders together with developers from Google, Microsoft, Nasa, Yahoo! and other organisations to work on projects to help with disaster relief. See more photos from the hackathon here.

Encouraging businesses to go green is good but the government must better incorporate outsourcing in its carbon control scheme, says the NOA's Mark Kobayashi-Hillary Much is being said about the UK government's upcoming Carbon Reduction Commitment (CRC) scheme but it remains unclear how much of this talk is translating into action and what impact the scheme will have on the outsourcing and offshoring industries.

Anti-ageism legislation isn't working and the IT industry continues to discriminate against older techies. That's the verdict of the exclusive 2009 silicon.com Skills Survey. The majority (51 per cent) of survey respondents agreed or strongly agreed that the IT industry discriminates against older workers, compared with less than a fifth (18 per cent) who held the opposite view.

November's top stories on silicon.com tackled some big questions: does my business need an office? Can I work solely on a netbook? Will the UK ever create a Google, Microsoft or Oracle of its very own? November also dealt with the perennial question of will the UK's ID cards programme ever run to plan?

Working out your budgets and trying to figure out the tech priorities for your HR department in 2010? Nick Heath has a few suggestions for HR directors as to where to invest that cash on technology to get the most benefits for your team and the rest of the business. Consider standardising your systemsTake a look at what you do in the HR department and the chances are a number of companies are doing exactly the same thing: processes like payroll and benefits administration or training and recruitment will need to be carried out at any large organisation. As a result, adopting standardised systems for common processes is worth considering for enterprises that are relying on expensive, bespoke IT systems.

With recession leading businesses to cut IT costs as much as they can, tech workers are increasingly feeling the impact of offshoring, results from the exclusive 2009 silicon.com Skills Survey show. Almost half (47.5 per cent) of respondents said their organisation has probably offshored IT jobs - up from more than a third (36 per cent) who thought that was the case last year.

Compiled on the M6 driving to Liverpool and dispatched to silicon.com a couple of weeks later via a free wi-fi connection in my hotel. I just cannot work any faster or smarter - I seem to have exhausted every degree of freedom, every element of efficiency improvement I can muster.

No longer just the domain of call centres, Bangalore has matured into the place for world-class research and development, says Saritha Rai. Years ago, when the world pictured Bangalore they imagined an outsourcing hub full of call centre agents and paid-by-the-hour software workers. How that has changed.

Apple's Mac Mini could really have become the "most important Mac", as Steve Jobs once called it. Seb Janacek explains what happened instead. As a Mac user it's not often I gaze admiringly at the product pages on Dell's website but this week was a notable exception.

The lack of women in IT is bad news for the industry and while the tech world doesn't discriminate against them, it does have an image problem that is off-putting to females, according to silicon.com's exclusive 2009 Skills Survey. The majority (51 per cent) of respondents agreed or strongly agreed the lack of women in IT is bad for the industry, slightly down on 2008 when 54 per cent held that view. The same proportion (51 per cent) believes the image of IT is off-putting to women, down one percentage point on last year.

Enterprise take-up of unified communications - the merging of IP telephony, conferencing and collaboration, messaging and communications tools - is on a "steeply rising curve", according to analysts. Spending on UC among businesses worldwide is expected to rise from just $302m last year to $4.2bn in five years' time, according to industry watchers ABI Research.

Marketing emails are at risk of being blocked as spam because businesses are not correctly managing the email communications they send out, a survey has found. More than half of the 157 marketing managers surveyed by the DMA Email Marketing Council said their business did not restrict the number of messages that could be sent to an email account in a given period.

The icy winds of economic gloom have put paid to talk of a tech skills shortage - at least for now, the exclusive 2009 silicon.com Skills Survey can reveal. While the proportion of respondents reporting empty IT seats dipped in 2008 after several years of rising steadily, this year's result shows a much steeper decline as the worldwide economic recession mothballs big tech projects and puts recruitment hopes on ice. With less positions for job hunters to choose from it seems employers are having less difficulty filling the few vacancies that do pop up.

The privileged users that manage your IT systems must be monitored as closely - if not more - than standard users, says Bob Tarzey. Within any organisation, a small group of employees have the ability to wreak havoc on its IT infrastructure: the privileged users that manage it. Granting privileges to such users is necessary for them to be able to do their job but when things go wrong the consequences can be serious.

Losing a mobile device is a common occurrence - but that's doesn't mean it's not serious. Jon Collins looks at what businesses can do to protect themselves from this vulnerability. These days, it's no surprise to anybody that staff mobility - everything from home working to being able to pick up email when out and about - brings with it a business advantage.

Outsourcing deals typically promise to deliver cost savings and increased efficiency - but all too often the promises fail to match the reality. At the National Outsourcing Association's Sourcing Summit last week, two heads of IT shared their experiences of how to get the best out of outsourcing agreements and make sure they're delivering long-term value.

In the main IT industry wages look to be weathering the economic storm, according to this year's silicon.com Skills Survey, but there are signs that first-time tech workers are taking a hit. The research shows that fewer tech workers are on the lowest rung of the pay ladder compared to last year, while the proportion taking home larger salaries is up on 2008.

The CIO role has always been about more than just technology but how much time do IT chiefs actually devote to it compared to business strategy? At this year's exclusive silicon.com CIO50 event, held in June this year, CIOs present revealed how they spend their time.

Despite the cost-cutting forced on many organisations by the recession, pay packets for the IT management team have held up - and for some even grown. According to the exclusive silicon.com 2009 Skills Survey a greater proportion of IT chiefs are now taking home bigger pay packets than in last year's survey.

Internet users who illegally download copyrighted content could have their connection cut off as part of the Digital Economy Bill unveiled on Friday. The bill - a major overhaul of the UK's technology legislation - will mean ISPs must send notices to those customers suspected of infringing copyright. They must also hold a record of how many notifications a customer has received and give this data to rights holders.