The white paper ("New Mobile Technology Requires a New Breed of IT Leadership") explains why a new breed of IT leadership is required to successfully attract talent to address challenges in the coming years.
IT leadership is becoming concerned that they no longer find the talent they need, especially now with the transition from PCs to mobile devices. As pointed out earlier this week in the article Advice for Hiring Top Tech Talent, traditional ways of finding top talent are not working. But once you find someone you want, how do you keep them? My answer: You must offer top leadership talent that creates an open, trusted and passionate work-environment, offering top technical talent interesting work and unique learning and growth opportunities. If you've decided that you are pursuing an outsourced strategy for development and innovation you will have two problems. First, you will find it hard to create an elite staff. Second, you will find that it is much harder to make an outsourcing strategy work with respect to mobile technology.
Internal Development Scarce
Internal talent development has been scarce. In an effort to save costs, many high performers have been laid-off and replaced by vendor consultants through “strategic partnerships.” This is now creating a gap where internal talent is missing and where the remaining internal IT staff is mostly busy coordinating vendor consultants who are doing the heavy lifting.
This model worked for the last ten years, when enterprises largely relied on Microsoft for their basic office productivity infrastructure, large hardware vendors like HP, Dell, IBM and EMC for their end-user and data center computing devices, and Cisco to connect them all. It was easy to have these vendors provide experienced contractors; after all, every enterprise was implementing more or less the same infrastructure solutions.
The Transition to Mobility
With the transition to mobility, this model is drastically changing. For a start, the two leading companies in this space are Apple and Google, but with a primary focus on the consumer market, they are not equipped to provide consulting services like the traditional enterprise vendors. Both Apple and Google have teamed with local implementation companies, but this becomes increasingly complex for large enterprises to manage, as these local implementation companies are bidding for their consulting services and reselling Apple or Google solutions.
Enterprises typically have a long list of legacy hardware and solutions, which does not foster an exciting work environment. Top talent wants an environment where they can learn something new. Dealing with the migration of legacy systems into new infrastructures doesn’t really attract new talent; instead, it requires the older generation to stay and maintain legacy solutions.
The new breed of IT leadership must recognize that to attract top talent, they will need to provide work that is respected and exciting, enabling new hires to work with other top talent and find career advancing opportunities. If this is not offered, enterprise IT will find itself quickly in a position where legacy solutions create a large dependency and hinder a timely transition to mobile solutions.
For more about this topic, check out Stefan Dietrich's latest white paper, New Mobile Technology Requires a New Breed of IT Leadership.
