Fight for skills - things to think about when insourcing digital capability
- Summary:
- It increasingly appears that buyers are shifting from outsourcing their technical/digital capability to the large SIs and instead are choosing to bring skills in-house.
The classic example is, if you signed an outsourcing deal in 2006 for 10 years+, you’d potentially have had to wait until 2016 for any of the benefits realised by the release of the iPhone and subsequent smartphone devices.
Of course, that argument is a little rudimentary, but you get the idea. Given the fast changing nature of digital, organisations are seeing a strong need to bring those skills in-house, so as to become more agile and adapt to market changes.
Just recently we’ve seen the UK government, British Gas, Whitbread, plus others talk about their needs in this area.
However, given that the SIs and vendors had typically sucked up a lot of these skills in the past (and these were essentially often shared as a central resource amongst buyers), where are these skills going to come from?
The digital market is notoriously short of available talent and there isn’t going to be enough to go around. This is something that buyers should be thinking about now if they want to compete.
So what can an organisation that wants a strong ‘digital organisation’ do to acquire those skills? What should they be thinking about to make sure that a candidate that has five strong offers picks them?
This is by no means a full list, but it consists of some things I’ve been thinking about, some ideas I’ve been given during interviews and some advice from the very helpful followers I have on Twitter. If you’ve got more to add please feel free to comment!
Pay
This is the most obvious one. Basic supply and demand economics tells us that given the shortage in the skills market and the extensive need from organisations for those skills, that wages for tech-savvy people are going to be inflated. There’s never been a better time to learn how to code.
So if you’ve got the money to pay competitive wages (and by competitive, I mean to be able to compete with the vendors and the SIs), then you’re in a good position.
Pay will always play a part in people’s decision making process. But it’s not the be all and end all. I’ve spoken to many a person that has chosen to take a smaller wage because of other factors (see below). But if you’ve got the cash, it helps.
That being said, that doesn’t mean that you should ignore everything else listed here. Pay and nothing else will do little for retention of good staff.
Interesting projects
Which leads me on to the next most important thing (in my view). If you’ve got an interesting project or an interesting business, it’s going to be a lot easier to attract the talent. For example, I know plenty of people working for the government in the UK - not because it pays the best, because they want to make a difference to the lives of citizens. Equally, British Gas told me recently that they’d managed to attract some staff that turned down higher wages elsewhere because they wanted to work on the company’s interesting IoT project.
If you’ve got something really interesting going on, make that the central focus when trying to draw people in. Sell it. Sell it as an opportunity that they cannot find anywhere else, regardless of pay. This may work, it may not, but it gives you a better shot than those just wanting people to work on a website.
If you don’t have interesting projects, then find a way to build that in. For example, Google allows its staff to spend a certain amount of time working on their own ideas. That could be a huge incentive for some people to take a job - think cleverly about those types of things.
Senior executive commitment
This is critical. People don’t want to work somewhere where people at the very top
don’t understand the significance and central role of technology. We see time and time again CEOs or leaders talking about ‘digital’, but then never really rethinking how things can be done or seeking help from the skills that he or she has internally.Equally, there is nothing more frustrating than having a digital team with some excellent ideas, who find that they never get listened to.
If candidates believe that they’re going to play a central role in strategy, with support from the senior executive team, then your chances are again increased.
Culture
Culture means different things to different people. Having a culture of ‘digital’ is important to many, where the organisation understands the significance of modern internet technologies and does what it can to put these at the forefront. This is one element.
However, other elements of ‘culture’ are being given priority by people now when applying for jobs. People often apply for positions just because they’ve heard that the culture of a company is to their liking.
This can be anything from good maternity benefits, to LGBTI networks, to secondment options, to holiday, to flat hierarchies. There’s a lot to consider in this bracket, but if it’s something that you get right it certainly puts you at a distinct advantage.
Flexibility
Again, this can mean a number of things. But in my view, people will be less encouraged if they know that they are going to be forced to work on one project and will be chained to their desk from 9am until 6pm.
Whilst commitment from employees is obviously important, providing flexibility doesn’t necessarily negate this. A bit of freedom to do what’s important to people and a workplace that allows for the challenges of balancing work and life, can do wonders for recruitment.
Does your organisation allow for employees to dip in and out of teams that they think need some digital input? Does your organisation allow employees to work from home whenever they like? Does your organisation allow staff to take some time out of work to provide time to charitable projects that are important to them? These things can make a huge difference to people and again plays into the culture category.
Good people
Short one this, but if you can already provide evidence of good people, and good people that have produced good outcomes, that’s a huge win. People like to know that they’re going to learn something and work on something impactful with other impressive people.
Understanding requirements/ Proactive vs. reactive
I’ve combined these two, as I think when organisations get things wrong, they’re misunderstanding them both. Why do you actually want to insource your digital capability?
Is it because you understand your position as an organisation within the industry that you operate and you want to try and innovate ahead of your competitors? Or is it because you’re reacting to something and you think you just can plug a few holes to fix things?
Your digital strategy should be proactive and you should understand why and how your digital capability is going to execute on this strategy within the context of your organisation. Hiring a few mediocre people and getting them to sit in the IT department downstairs, all under the guise of ‘digital’, isn’t going to cut it.
You have to understand your requirements, and the whole of your organisation needs to understand exactly how these newly hired digital assets are going to work with you.
Limited by existing hierarchies and structures
Finally, and most importantly, your organisation needs to rethink its entire existing hierarchies and structures. Why? Because from everything we have discussed above, does it sound like your organisation is ready to attract the top digital talent in the market? If it does, then you could well be on your way to being an attractive digital employer.But more likely than not, your organisation would probably just be putting an ad out for some ‘digital people’ and hoping that HR figures it all out. That can’t be the case. This needs to be a top-down approach, whereby the organisation as a whole wants to embed digital into everything it does.
As someone on Twitter pointed out to me yesterday, organisations typically focus on consistency and fairness, rather than specialisms and market factors. Equally, organisations love to operate in silos that don’t talk to each other. Digital cannot be a silo, that is never going to work.
Rethinking how your organisation operates and is structured is daunting, I know. But it’s critical to future success. And if you understand this and get it right, you will have as good a chance as any.
My take
Please provide some feedback and add any additional ideas. I’d like to keep this as a live list that is updatable and can be a resource for people to consider when hiring digital talent.