"We are in this situation where we are hiring each other's folks," he said. "It's a tough job market."

Katrina also has made it more expensive to operate IT facilities in the region because of decisions that executives have made to fund improvements in disaster recovery.

For instance, Tulane has been spending about US$12 million annually on IT, but added disaster recovery costs will increase annual spending by $500,000, Barron said. In part, the increase will help pay for a new contract with SunGard Data Systems Inc.'s Availability Services unit, which is providing the school with a mirrored Web site, e-mail fail-over and resumption of data processing.

Tulane could easily spend more on disaster recovery if it moved from backing up data on tapes to online backup, Barron said. But, he added, the cost of the bandwidth that would be needed to support the electronic data transfers is too expensive.

Barron said that at some point, Tulane will study outsourcing, but it isn't on the horizon now. "What's going to push us toward outsourcing is going to be our inability to recruit people with the skill sets necessary to do the work," he said, adding that a job-market turnaround will depend on New Orleans' overall recovery.