Today's rapidly changing technology environment is redefining traditional relationships within the enterprise. Business unit leaders are increasingly able to circumvent the IT organization to procure services, and the CIO is no longer the gatekeeper and final arbiter of technology decisions. To remain relevant, IT executives must be nimble and responsive and stay ahead of the curve of technology change. In addition to this strategic imperative, CIOs must stay on the "run the business" treadmill, and often find themselves constantly scrambling to do more work with limited resources.
An effective talent strategy can address both of these fundamental challenges.
While the ratios will vary, an optimal staffing model typically combines in-house and outsourced personnel. Similarly, skill sets should be a mix of traditional expertise along with emerging skill sets around areas such as cloud, big data and analytics.
In most cases, relying solely on in-house recruitment isn't viable. However, if a company's core business is tied to underlying technology such as cloud, analytics or encryption, then keeping more expertise in-house can make sense. For traditional businesses such as financial services, healthcare or insurance, focusing on third-party providers for the latest skills is a better option. In any event, some level of emerging technology expertise should be kept in-house; specifically, the purpose is to understand the technology and service provider landscape and to connect business needs to technology implementation.
Regardless of industry, the imperative for in-house IT is to develop a business mindset that filters down throughout the organization and is informed by emerging social, mobile, analytics and cloud technologies and concepts such as the Internet of Things. This role of "IT as business partner" is nothing new -- today, however, the problem statements coming from the business are becoming increasingly complex. Whereas five years ago the requirement was to procure and implement an effective CRM, today the requirement is to provide analytics coming out of and communications from within the CRM.
Enterprises have certainly recognized the need to bolster business-relevant IT expertise. But despite statements of organizational commitment to strategic hiring, many enterprises are still in the planning rather than the implementation stage. Moreover, in many cases we see other functions such as marketing and contact center -- rather than IT -- taking the lead in hiring titles such as "director of digital strategy" and "manager of analytics."
In addition to hiring and retaining new talent, IT departments must also find ways to maximize the contribution of legacy staff. Rather than asking employees who have been in place for 10 to 15 years to learn about emerging technologies, training should focus on understanding and mapping business objectives to commercially available solutions and services providers. IT personnel can then apply that knowledge in managing the service providers that bring technical expertise to the table. IT also must consider the impact of automation on eliminating lower skills-based tasks like server and PBX management as it defines new roles for retained staff. Specifically, retained staff will need to be able to map automation solutions to fundamentally new contractual terms and commercial relationships.
The role of outsourcing and managed services in filling talent gaps is also essential. While CIO can certainly leverage outsourcing to acquire expertise in areas such as cloud communications and analytics, in many cases they will have an opportunity to more effectively use outsourcing for the basic "keep the lights on" work of IT operations.
Whatever the mix between in-house and external expertise, the real key is to apply traditional sourcing discipline to identify what functions to outsource and which to keep in-house. For example, an enterprise might choose to outsource applications maintenance and management of the analytics platform, while retaining business intelligence and value-related functions.
While this functional segmentation sounds straightforward and relatively simple, enterprises often fail to delineate the specific break points between in-house and third-party activities. The resulting gray areas lead to duplication of effort and inefficiency, and contribute to the fundamental bandwidth challenge many IT organizations face today. Specifically, in the absence of clearly defined roles, IT staff end up with too much on their plates because they are doing work that should be done by a service provider. A clear organizational structure that reflects the role of technology in the business and how that technology is managed will help to define those critical insourced/outsourced points of differentiation.
IT effectiveness requires that talent and skills stay aligned with technology shifts driven by cloud, big data and analytics. At the same time, an effective talent strategy can ensure that the right people are doing the right tasks and driving efficient service delivery.
Katharine Rudd is a managing director for transformation services with Alsbridge, a sourcing advisory and consulting firm.
