Best Buy age discrimination suit signals bigger issue for IT

Should companies expect more age discrimination suits as baby boomers grow older?

Bruce Barnes, president of Bold Vision LLC, a Dublin, Ohio-based peer-to-peer counseling firm for CIOs, said age discrimination suits are not new in IT. "They've been happening, or at least attempted, for several years. When a big company like Best Buy settles, it brings the topic to the fore, " Barnes said. "Now, do I think it opens the door for more of it? Yes it does."

The decision to outsource is not easy, he said, and has been plagued by "shortsightedness forever."

"What suits like this point out to me is that if you are thinking of repopulating or reskilling or outsourcing your workforce, there are many dimensions that need to be discussed. If you don't, if you make a snap decision in a complex situation and get slapped with a lawsuit, frankly, you deserve it. Maybe if Best Buy had thought a little more carefully, they could have avoided this," he said.

Phil Murphy, a principal analyst at Forrester Research Inc. in Cambridge, Mass., said age discrimination suits may have other consequences. "I think we'll see an increase in these suits and, oddly enough, an increase in demand for older workers."

Murphy, who writes about IT roles and skills, said he believes the baby-boomer retirement will drive a legacy skill shortage. But the big loss will not be technical skills, which can be taught, he said, but knowledge of how business is done.

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One "extreme example," he said, was a client company that had experienced high turnover in the executive ranks, but not in IT. "The IT folks were the ones with the business knowledge, and I'm not just talking about historical memory. These are people who were in the code, who know that when a customer does such and such, the company should do this," he said.

The knee-jerk approach to filling the IT skills deficit will be to hand over the IT functions and a portion of the in-house staff to an outsourcing firm, Murphy said, as Best Buy did to Accenture.

Under that scenario, older workers almost certainly will be passed over in favor of cheaper, more malleable younger employees. "So in that case, I can see an increase in lawsuits," he said.

Some businesses will decide to ship work offshore, to "make it someone else's problem," Murphy said. But offshore providers are already struggling to pay more highly skilled workers, creating demand for those very same baby boomers.

"It's not out of the realm of possibility that you could be suing your employers for firing you and walking into a better situation with a raise," Murphy said.

In any case, the debate over this shift in demographics -- confined to the "Chicken Littles" as recently as 2004, when Best Buy was sued -- now covers issues that go well beyond legacy skills, Murphy said.

"I think we have come to the point where the retirement of the baby boomers ceases to be a Chicken Little topic and becomes a significant business problem, which also happens to affect IT."