Larry Dignan at ZDNet is reporting that 13 percent of CIOs in a recent Robert Half survey plan to add staff in Q1 2008, with only 3 percent planning on staffing cuts and the remainder holding steady.

Those numbers are actually down from this year and steady over the last two which seems reasonable to me: there haven't really been many substantial changes in the average corporate IT department recently. The surprise may be in fact that the percentage is so low; with many corporate IT managers also responding that they plan to roll out Vista finally sometime next year, one might expect some ramping up to deal with that. Of course, if they're doing it the smart way, they'll either scale the roll-out to something their departments can handle organically or bring in temporary staff or sub-contractors to handle it, numbers which probably wouldn't be reflected in this survey.

On a longer scale, I'm actually looking for corporate hiring of IT staff to drop considerably. I'm not sure that it will, mind you, but we keep hearing how SaaS, SOA, and more savvy end-users are reducing the need for coporate IT, and if those things are true then smart businesses should be able to reduce their IT staffing in-house, right? Of course there are other pressures on CIOs to counter-act those forces, but it tough to fight economic trends and one of the key indicators that this trend is for real would be substantial and lasting reductions in corporate IT FTEs.