R – is for Resources. As you move to new technologies and new computing models – you will need to manage your manpower to solve for today’s support issues and tomorrow’s resource needs.
PRIDES of Digital Transformation: What you need to solve for when you undertake a Digital Transformation Initiative. P=Protection … R=Resourcing … I=Identity … D=Data … E=Experience … S=Security.
R – is for Resources. As you move to new technologies and new computing models – you will need to manage your manpower to solve for today’s support issues and tomorrow’s resource needs.
Digital Transformation brings with it a familiar dynamic to any of us who have in in Information Technology Management for a while. The introduction of new technologies instantly creates a stress point on our skilled resources.
We all must make the best decisions in how we develop new skills. Do we train our existing team members and then shift them to the new technologies? If we do that, do we have the proper resource allocation for the existing technologies? How steep is the learning curve and will our movement up that learning curve prevent us from meeting our deadlines and goals for Digital Transformation? The task for each of us is to define the future state and the skills/resource gaps between our current state and the future state and then solve for those gaps in the timeframe required for us to achieve the desired business outcomes.
Over the past two years I have had this specific discussion with dozens of Senior I.T. Executives who were either in the midst of dealing with this problem or planning initiatives that required this be solved. The majority of these conversations revealed case studies in the flawed approach of training existing team members to provide full coverage in the future state.
The first critical success factor is to clearly understand what your resource and skills requirements are going to be in the future state and when those requirements need to be satisfied. The best approach that I have found is to seed the future state with demonstrated subject matter experts. This can be done by hiring for the future state skills or by ‘renting’ the skills. Renting the skills breaks down into either short-term resources that you contract with while you build up the required skills – or – looking for qualified Managed Services Offerings that could be either a temporary or longer-term resource solution.
These skills gaps are going to exist in some of the base technology requirements, but they will also be created in each of the PRIDES areas. My recommendation is that as you solve for each of the PRIDES of Digital Transformation (Protection, Identity, Data Integration, User Experience, and Security) you need to solve for the R in PRIDES – Resource Planning.
