I'm an IT project manager for a Big Five bank. My observations? Lay offs of hundreds of people, many from IT alone, most of those IT layoffs are people in the late-50's, with years and years of industry experience. The other large chunk of lay offs are subject matter experts whose area of expertise has been outsourced to a third party (ASP vendors for example). Whatever possible to offshore or outsource I am being encouraged to do so, especially for Software development and Quality Assurance. I can outsource my QA testing to India for half the price. The quality of work is you get what you pay for, but these decisions are primarily price driven.  There is absolutely a direction to control resource costs and get the lowest price possible. Also, from a business perspective, IT is a cost centre, it is an expense, not a savings or revenue generator (yes, we can work on projects with those goals), so business leadership is always looking where they can "find efficiency" in IT.