INFO~TECH RESEARCH GROUP

Build an Annual IT Talent Strategy

A strategic approach to enable the IT workforce.

EXECUTIVE BRIEF

Analyst perspective

Give your talent strategy the same intention you give your IT strategy.

When was the last time you asked your employees if they were satisfied with their job and if they have the skills they need to thrive? Effective people management requires you to keep these questions top of mind and use the answers to inform decisions.

It’s easy to bump up against the current people trends and buzzwords. Avoid that dead end and focus on what your company and employee data is telling you. Focus on continuous improvement and moving forward by creating an environment that enables people to reach their potential, be successful, and fulfill the organization’s needs.

Organizations spend a lot of time, energy, and money building organizational strategies without making sure they are set up to successfully fulfill them from a people perspective. Just like other strategies, you need to continuously refer to your IT talent strategy and reevaluate it on an annual basis at a minimum.

Understand the people on your team, your organizational systems, and the route to organizational excellence and performance.

Heather Leier-Murray Research Director, CIO Info-Tech Research Group

Executive summary

Your Challenge

Demand for technology-enabled IT services is steadily increasing while finding and retaining talent remains difficult.

• IT leaders need to maintain and sustain a workforce that enables and accelerates the realization of organizational strategies.
• Unfortunately, IT doesn’t have a great reputation for designing a positive employee experience, which correlates with overall organizational performance.

IT leaders are looking for clear, achievable steps to improve performance.

Common Obstacles

The ability for IT to acquire, retain, and develop critical skills is a legitimate IT risk.

• A growing number of IT leaders do not have the right IT structure for their organizational objectives.
• Talent-related changes feel unapproachable because they aren’t fully understood and behavior change is hard. It’s difficult to know where to start.

Conventional approaches fail because they look at factors separately and don’t have a formal approach to continuously improve talent-related activities.

Info-Tech’s Approach

Adapt your IT talent strategies to meet the demands on IT:

• Treat your IT talent activities as strategic initiatives that add value.
• Build an annual IT talent strategy focused on optimizing four key pillars: culture, organizational structure and roles, learning and development, and recruitment and retention.

Deliver value to the business by making the IT employee experience a strategic priority.

Info-Tech Insight

Talent strategy is not a set-it-and-forget-it exercise. Annually enhance your talent strategy across four key pillars – culture, organizational structure and roles, learning and development, and recruitment and retention – to drive organizational excellence and add value.

Employee expectations of employers are changing

People practices in IT can no longer take a back seat. Balancing organizational and employee needs is a priority.

91% of responding IT departments believe they either outright own or closely collaborate with HR on IT employee experience. (Source: Info-Tech Research Group, “IT Talent Trends 2024”)

However, only…

12% indicated that their IT organization is highly effective at designing a positive employee experience. (Source: Info-Tech Research Group, “IT Talent Trends 2024”)

This demonstrates that either what employers are doing in IT to impact the employee experience isn’t working or that employee expectations are changing more often than employers are adjusting their approaches.

Your challenge

Most IT departments lack the time and expertise to integrate their IT strategy, management expectations, and people management practices to operate effectively in an Exponential IT world. This is due to:

• A lack of knowledge and expertise on the parts of both IT and HR about each other’s disciplines.
• People-related decisions made based on intuition, assumption, and perception instead of data.
• A lack of planning mechanisms and tools to assess the organizational context, which would illuminate underlying assumptions about IT’s people and people operations.
• A tendency to take a reactive approach to people issues instead of a future-looking, proactive one that enables workforce excellence.

Not only are opportunities to advance business strategies and transform the organization missed but the employee experience is negatively impacted, leading to demotivation, disengagement, waste, and turnover.

Common obstacles

A lack of reflection and continuous improvement is further complicated by a range of internal and external factors:

• Too many assumptions

  The root causes of problems are left undiscovered and buried, compounding year over year, creating talent gaps, issues with spans and layers, difficulties with talent attraction and retention, and undesirable behaviors.

• Need to lead differently

  Traditional workplace structures and processes struggle to accommodate the new reality of the workforce: It is not monolithic but compiled of distinct individuals. You need to adjust how you lead based on that compilation.

• Leadership gap

  Leaders at every level find it difficult to adapt to the new workforce dynamic and don’t feel like they have the skills or support to effectively lead and support employees.

• IT’s recruitment role

  While HR owns recruitment, IT leaders play a critical role in managing the candidate experience and promoting the employer brand. IT Leaders need to prioritize their role in attraction, recruitment, and retention.

• Misaligned culture

  Despite what many organizations want, their behaviors, reward and recognition practices, and performance management processes fail to nurture their desired cultures.

Info-Tech’s approach

Evaluate these four key pillars annually so your talent-related efforts in IT will be more effective:

• Culture: Align talent practices that reinforce behaviors with the desired culture of the IT organization.
• Organizational Structure and Roles: Determine the structural changes necessary to support optimal interactions.
• Learning and Development: Define the skills that support organizational objectives and methods for obtaining those skills.
• Recruitment and Retention: Ensure IT leaders participate in recruitment and identify the most impactful components for retention.

The Info-Tech difference:

1. Build behaviors that support the desired culture and align at all levels.
2. Ensure teams and individuals understand how to interact, collaborate, and make decisions.
3. Integrate workplace practices with learning and development so the organization is investing in the right skills.
4. Manage retention intentionally and actively participate in the recruitment process to build candidate relations.

Info-Tech’s methodology

Insight summary

Talent strategy is not a set-it-and-forget-it exercise.

Annually enhance your IT talent strategies across four pillars – culture, organizational structure and roles, learning and development, and recruitment and retention – to drive organizational excellence and add value.

Name your desired culture, then actively live it and sustain it.

Defining the desired culture without identifying the behaviors that support it and planning how to sustainably reinforce it leads to misalignment at all levels.

Don’t greenfield your organization structure.

A full redesign of the IT organization is often unnecessary but sounds appealing and is used when a less invasive approach could be taken.

Don’t invest in the wrong skills.

The integration of learning and development practices with other workplace practices tends to be overlooked, so organizations end up investing in the wrong skills using ineffective learning mechanisms.

Avoid shiny object syndrome.

CIOs need to recognize the power of their people and stop chasing the perfect players as a measure to resolve deep-set issues. Instead, focus on creating an environment that enables success.

Adaptability is critical yet missing.

Adaptability is one of the most important components of every IT workforce trying to keep up with the pace of change – yet most IT organizations do not have it.

Blueprint deliverables

Each step of this blueprint is accompanied by supporting deliverables to help you accomplish your goals:

Key deliverable:

IT Talent Optimization Report Template

Use this report template to confidently communicate the outputs of this blueprint to executive leadership or (with a slimmed down version) the IT department.

IT Talent Strategy Workbook

Use this tool to analyze, build, and document your intended plans and priorities and track accountability.

Blueprint benefits

IT Benefits

• Having a clear talent strategy helps reduce turnover and decreases the amount of time it takes to successfully hire a new employee in IT.
• Building an IT talent strategy versus hiring a consultant to do it can save mid-sized IT organizations between $250,000 and $500,000.

Business Benefits

• Vacant roles can cost more than $1,500 per day depending on the role. Save time and money by minimizing the time it takes to hire in IT and, more importantly, avoid missing strategic objectives due to vacancies.
• IT talent management and culture will be aligned with the direction of the organization and focused on proactively adding value.
• Ensure the organization’s IT department is prepared for the future of work.

Measure the value of this blueprint

Using Info-Tech resources to support the annual talent optimization efforts of your IT organization, you will experience significant benefits:

• Clear assessment of staffing

  • Save approximately 25 days using Info-Tech’s IT Staffing Assessment.
  • Don’t spend time building and executing the assessment yourself.

• Talent strategy in four days

  • On average it can take four to six months to build a talent strategy without Info-Tech’s resources.
  • Avoid consulting costs, which would be upwards of $500,000, to execute a talent strategy.

• Reduced turnover and time to fill roles

  • Minimize time to hire and number of vacancies.
  • Vacant leadership roles cost on average $1,500 per day.

Other measures of successful talent strategy include:

• Increased stakeholder satisfaction with the IT organization using the CIO Business Vision Diagnostic.
• Increased positive employee experience using the Employee Experience Monitor.
• The maturing of IT capabilities using the Management and Governance Diagnostic.
• The percentage of resources dedicated to strategic priorities using the IT Staffing Assessment.
• User satisfaction with technology-enabled services and products using the End User Satisfaction Program.

Case study

INDUSTRY: Hospitality | SOURCE: Michael Mahar, SVP, Head of Technology & Digital Products at Wyndham Hotels & Resorts

Small shifts can have a big impact.

Digital Development and Support at Wyndham Hotels & Resorts (WHR) was struggling to meet the business’s speed-to-market demands. This prompted a review of the digital development and business teams to identify a stronger, more efficient operating model.

The transition to being product driven.

WHR merged product teams under one leader in IT, launched a Digital Factory, and developed product lifecycle metrics. These operational tweaks began to change the culture. WHR continued to review and refine via monthly continuous improvement meetings and started to work through their action plan focusing on day-to-day improvements.

Results

WHR implemented a continuous improvement model, sought out candid feedback from team members, and maintained an open mind, willing to make small shifts on an ongoing basis.

The operating changes paired with role clarity have made a huge impact on the communication and collaboration of the team; built trust at all levels, within the team and externally; and created an environment where everyone provides valuable feedback. In addition, the team has doubled their delivery of releases from the previous year and experienced success with acquisitions not stalling other projects.

Info-Tech offers various levels of support to best suit your needs

Guided Implementation

A Guided Implementation (GI) is a series of calls with an Info-Tech analyst to help implement our best practices in your organization.

A typical GI is 8 to 12 calls over the course of 4 to 6 months.

What does a typical GI on this topic look like?

Workshop overview

Contact your account representative for more information.
workshops@infotech.com 1-888-670-8889

Build an Annual IT Talent Strategy

Phase 1

Establish the IT talent strategy map

This phase will walk you through the following activities:

• Assess IT’s current performance state
• Analyze IT talent management effectiveness
• Identify talent risks that will impact organizational goals
• Write IT talent goal statements
• Identify success measures

This phase involves the following participants:

• CIO
• IT leaders
• HR business partner

Key elements of the IT talent strategy

The IT talent management strategy flows from high-level key pillars to more concrete outcomes and specific initiatives needed to achieve the key pillars.

Key Pillars

Directional statements about the future of the workforce in IT. Four critical pillars are identified for IT to focus on to achieve the greatest value:

• Culture
• Structure & Roles
• Learning & Development
• Recruitment & Retention

Outcomes

Items IT will change within the strategy timeline.

Initiatives

Specific deliverables needed for IT to support organizational excellence, add value, and internally improve the IT employee experience.

Info-Tech Insight

Talent-related activities are often considered time-consuming and repetitive. This is because we wait too long to find the root causes of an issue and think a complete overhaul is necessary when a continuous improvement approach with information custom to IT would be superior.