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Strategic IT Staffing: How to Remain Competitive in 2018

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Strategic IT Staffing How to Remain Competitive in 2018

As enterprises pursue digital transformations that impact infrastructure and operations, they face evolving IT needs requiring new skills and expertise for either finite project implementations or ongoing infrastructure needs. Simultaneously, some legacy systems, such as mainframes, may require updates and maintenance to remain viable, while other infrastructure needs may call for new platform implementations.

These infrastructure requirements leave  enterprises with the need to find technicians with legacy and emerging technology expertise. This challenge can be seen in the CompTIA 2018 IT Industry Outlook. The report shows that the biggest IT staffing concerns faced by companies are:

  • Competing with other firms for IT talent
  • Meeting IT expertise needs
  • The operating expense (OPEX) impact of IT salary needs

Organizations are under pressure to find a more viable approach to IT project management and maintenance that supports operational and business goals. Most organizations in 2018 will face project goals encompassing:

Meeting Evolving IT Staffing Needs

These project goals are focused on operational agility, market development, customer/user experience, and data security vital to top- and bottom-line growth. Forward-thinking organizations understand that digital transformation is about more than technology.

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The bigger picture involves developing innovative strategies that align your approach to IT staffing with efficient implementation and maintenance needs. To be effective, these strategies must holistically fit with business goals based on real-world operational use cases.

Those use cases will include the need for data scientists, business intelligence analysts, and Big Data engineers to develop data-driven solutions made possible by highly integrated and intuitive technology. These data-centric solutions will draw on artificial intelligence (AI), IoT, and the cloud stack to support new lines of business, customer experience, app development, and marketing strategies, among others.

Every organization faces the high demand for and the challenges of drawing from a finite pool of these types of experienced specialists. The best recourse is to implement IT solutions capable of delivering operational capabilities to non-data scientists and analysts wherever possible. Small or overtaxed internal IT teams are a mix of IT generalists and specialists. They will need tools, platforms, and support capable of delivering and streamlining:

  • App development
  • Virtualization
  • Multi-cloud orchestration and management
  • Help desk support
  • Complex portal and e-commerce website development in the cloud

To remain competitive in 2018 and going forward, organizations will need a strategy that makes these and other initiatives possible within tight capital expenditure and OPEX budgets. The answer may lie in the support of an IT outsourcing partner for these large and small businesses.

A New IT Staffing Approach for Digital Transformation

The goal, as always, is to quickly deliver operational and business line changes across the enterprise that further real-world business goals and eliminate pain points. By leveraging outsourcing partners that bring broad, on-demand expertise; vendor partnerships; and deep platform implementation and management knowledge, organizations can broaden business opportunities while minimizing OPEX.

Systems analysts, engineers, and network architects that further network infrastructure development don’t always have to be part of an in-house team to help a business or enterprise accomplish its goals. Digital transformation is a gradual and ongoing process requiring a mix of legacy and new technology.

The winning approach is to see strategic IT staffing through the lens of expediency, expertise, agility, and cost efficiency. For example, the mission of legacy and new platform approaches can be accomplished with iSeries and AS/400 outsourcing to support cloud strategies capable of furthering IoT, business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR), and Big Data objectives.

Overextended CIOs realize the traditional IT operating models cannot achieve evolving mission and goal execution for the business. Technological advances are creating entirely new ways of getting work done that are changing how IT teams execute everything from the help desk to DevOps, data security, and mobility.

IT Outsourcing for Strategic IT Staffing

Technology now lies at the core of the business, which is driving enterprise talent from all operational areas to develop tech fluency. Having IT teams organized in siloes by function or skill set where expertise gaps exist can slow or stop project implementation progress.

For example, the separation between network engineering, system admins and database admins, and application development can hamper cloud strategies that encompass, rely on, or support:

  • BCDR
  • SaaS
  • DaaS
  • SDN and SD-WAN
  • Mobility and BYOD initiatives

While each skill group contributes its own expertise to different project phases, skill and personnel gaps make it impossible to execute everything that needs to be done in an efficient and cost-effective manner.

Clearly, the skills available to enterprises should line up with what they need to drive innovation. Applying AI or machine learning effectively will be a requirement for support of enterprise business innovations. Putting these tools in the hands of administrators and in-house IT teams will enable:

  • Increased application performance and agility
  • Sound identity access management strategies
  • Network bandwidth agility for holistic unified communications and mobility
  • Comprehensive cloud strategy execution

Looking to a consulting and outsourcing partner can deliver the return on investment of strategic IT staffing that enables the development of flexible greenfield teams. Augmenting these teams through managed service provider outsourcing can break down skill set silos in ways that enable more holistic, multi-skill, results-oriented teams so the business achieves faster and better outcomes.

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