Introduction
Organizations in all industries are struggling to attract talent. The shortage of potential employees is a problem that has plagued the IT sector for years but has possibly never been worse than it is now. In this blog IDC explores opportunities for dealing with this shortage.
Employee benefits
The most obvious perspective to consider is that of salary. Benchmarking employee expenses will allow your organization to match your peers and stop losing employees over salary competition.
Another benefit of benchmarking salary cost is tackling the possible internal tug of war for budget increases. An independent benchmark report is often useful to convince senior management that additional budget is required, if the benchmark points this out.
However, employees are not motivated by salary alone. For many, satisfaction also comes from working on cutting-edge technology, something that only some IT organizations allow an employee to do. In contrast, maintaining legacy systems at less competitive organizations may not be interesting to IT professionals who love to experience technology. In a benchmark, the technologies maintained by the IT staff are closely examined and compared to peers. IDC identifies key areas to innovate your business’ digital transformation, keeping IT staff engaged at the same time.
Optimize your current environment
Another perspective to take is optimizing the existing situation. If finding new IT talent is challenging, IT management must consider ways to maximize the use of existing employees. With talent being as scarce as it is, management must be fully aware of possible optimizations.
A benchmark will show how teams are performing in terms of productivity and where potential exists.
Because IDC’s data collection methods dive deep into your IT administration and governance, gaps that no doubt exist are discovered and reported on. The results of a benchmark will uncover where your automation is lacking and whether your end users are educated to market conform levels. All of these insights will allow you to deliver more and better IT with the resources that you already have available.
Rationalizing and consolidating your IT environment has many benefits and generally offers an attractive business case. That said, possibly the most interesting result is simply reducing the amount of IT that needs to be managed by the talent that is so scarce. The size and complexity of the IT environment is a large factor in our benchmarks, be it the complexity of the networks, the size of the datacenter services, the setup of the end user workplace, or the amount of contract management and governance required. IDC reports on all of these components and shows the way to reducing unnecessary complexity and size.
Is outsourcing the way?
Finally, if the options of increasing budgets, optimizing teams, and reducing complexity are exhausted, outsourcing more of the IT services can be considered. Outsourcing can be a relatively quick answer to a suboptimal internal IT team, but it does not come without its share of challenges. The first step is deciding which IT domains are attractive candidates to place under a contract. In other words, an organization needs a sourcing strategy. This strategy will determine how each part of the IT organization should be sourced and what a fitting roadmap to get there should look like. Prioritization of rationalization projects are also considered, as well as the potential to supplement existing teams with external talent from an IT supplier.
Cost is, of course, an important factor in deciding which sourcing scenarios are feasible for the organization. IDC will provide so called ‘landing zones’ in which the future cost of a sourcing scenario are modeled based on the current IT market. This is essentially a virtual benchmark of your IT organization as if parts of it were outsourced.
Finally, if IT is outsourced in some way, the existing organization should also change. External contract governance and service management capabilities need to evolve and a future organizational model needs to be constructed. When transforming the organization, one must also consider whether it is attractive to re-educate the existing teams into roles that are needed in the new organization.
The ongoing war on talent is challenging. This blog, however, has hopefully shown that the tools to navigate this challenge exist. IDC continues to help organizations daily and to us, the current market offers new and exciting ways to help CIOs globally.
Interested in diving deeper into IT Service Cost Management? Check out our infographic.
