Leverage non-traditional talent to accelerate digital business development

For years, the lack of talent and skills has been cited by China’s chief information officers (CIOs) as one of the biggest obstacles to increasing the speed of digital business development. China's CIOs have been trying to solve the talent gap problem using traditional methods. However, Gartner's recent conversations with many CIOs and other executives indicate that despite these efforts, talent gaps remain.

Traditional ways for enterprise CIOs to address talent gaps typically include training internal IT staff, hiring external technical talent, and working with traditional IT vendors (such as IT service providers or consulting firms) to leverage their talent resources. Developing business technical personnel and utilizing non-traditional external talent resources are two non-traditional ways that CIOs need to consider.

Figure 1: Ways to address the talent gap

CIOs must remember that non-traditional talent complements traditional talent and traditional solutions will continue to be used. CIOs should tap into and upskill IT employees who have a thorough understanding of the company and its culture, as this will provide the greatest return. Downsizing at digital companies provides more opportunities for CIOs to hire outside talent.

Here are two non-traditional approaches CIOs should consider.

Develop business technical staff

Business technicians are employees with technical skills outside of the IT department. Their most important advantage is that they have more business knowledge than full-time IT staff. Business technicians can be divided into two types: business-leading IT personnel and citizen technicians.

Business-leading IT personnel refer to those whose main job is technical work but whose reporting lines are not part of the IT department. 18% of business technicians fall into this category. Citizen technicians are also called citizen developers. The main job of citizen technicians is business work, but they have certain technical abilities and will use these technologies to develop some tools or solutions to help them complete their work. More than 80% of business technicians are citizen technicians. The emergence of no-code/low-code technologies has accelerated the rise of citizen technologists.

Business technologists can address the talent gap, but most organizations don’t currently have the processes in place. CIOs should ensure that HR and business leaders understand the strengths of business technologists and work with them to:

• Discover business technical staff and assess their capabilities across the enterprise

• Are business technologists’ skills aligned with digital business needs

• Helping business technologists advance the digital skills they need for their responsibilities

  
  

Leveraging non-traditional external talent sources

For decades, CIOs have tapped talent from traditional IT vendors, such as consulting firms or service providers. Now, they have begun to look to non-traditional external sources of talent.

China's CIOs may be more inclined to cooperate with the following non-traditional external talents, such as: digital disruptors, academic staff, customers, startups, students, government agencies, non-governmental organizations (such as industry associations), etc. Non-traditional talent resources also constitute future recruitment channels, improving the diversity, equality and inclusion of talents.

CIOs should understand the talent needs within the organization and identify the most appropriate talent resource channels. These resources can then be leveraged to address talent gaps and accelerate digital business development.