Are You Strategic When It Comes to
Staffing?
By: John Poracky, Senior Partner
Today you will find the CIO is charged with
contributing to the business plan and operations at a different level. In
order to position yourself as a strategic partner to the business, the CIO
can no longer depend upon his/her technical credentials to guarantee the
success of their career. The CIO needs a comprehensive understanding of
the business issues, and to become an active partner in owning the
company's success.
In addition to aligning the IT goals with the company's business
objectives, another overlooked area for CIOs has been in the issue of IT
recruiting and retention. As the role of the CIO has evolved into the
strategic thinker, M. Wood Company has been partnering with organizations
to recruit talented IT professionals who think, plan and act
strategically.
In the early days of information technology, the key positions were the
managers of system development and the data center. Both positions had a
very high technological skill component. As a result, when staffing an
organization, the director needed only to deal with a narrow spectrum of
skill sets and management styles. Staffing an organization was really a
case of "different degrees of sameness"; technology developers versus
technology managers.
Today the CIO faces an entirely different recruiting and management
development challenge. When a company changes its focal point and now
realizes IT can be an enabler, the CIO is left with the task of
re-engineering the staff. The critical part of the information
technology organization is to have the business systems consulting skills
required for re-engineering. Similarly, as end-user computing has emerged
and expanded rapidly, the need for an end-user consulting and training
capability has become all too obvious. The same can be said for network
computing.
In conjunction, information technology budgets have been growing
annually
and CIOs are being held more accountable for the business impact of
increased corporate expenditures. Having this accountability has resulted
in the need for a business/financial planning function within the
technology organization. This is another new function the CIO has to
manage and integrate into what was once an all "'high tech" group. In
addition, the CIO's ability to both acquire and integrate the diverse
skills sets while still building an integrated team that works well
together are increasingly crucial.
As these new "business" requirements emerged, many CIOs tried to tweak
their "high tech" managers' skill sets by sending them to management
development seminars or interpersonal training programs; usually with
minimal success. After many false starts, ClOs have learned they must
build their new team much as the CEO builds his corporate team - utilizing
the inherent power that comes from mixing people with complimentary skills
with a heavy dose of common goals. Not only does the CIO need to have the
staff in place, but they must possess the ability to convince functional
stakeholders in their plans.
What does all of this mean to a CIO's recruiting and management
development strategy? How can the CIO assure that the organization is not
only up to today's tasks but is also positioned for future challenges?
First, a CIO must push innovation to determine a clear picture of
the services and systems that are to be delivered by the group. This
picture is then used as a basis for constructing a skill matrix required
for the organization. The skill matrix should include the skill sets and
experience levels as well as the staffing requirements to recruit quality
personnel (both internal and external). The balance of skills needed will
be different from one organization to the next and will even be different
within the same organization. It is crucial to specifically define the
position, deliverables and skill sets needed before you evaluate potential
candidates and existing staff.
Second, the CIO must conduct a human capital assessment of the
existing organization. Once you have your skills matrix completed, you
must assess the existing skill sets and "talent" of your staff. M. Wood
recommends one key phrase to remember when assessing staff -- " talent
over skills". The worst decision a leader can make is to put an internal
candidate in a position where they cannot succeed.
Third, the CIO must, accept the fact that he/she cannot recruit an
all new, "all star team". This is true not only because of human
resource policy restrictions but also because such a staff would be devoid
of company knowledge and customer contacts and alliances.
M. Wood's experience in working with CIOs and staffing these new areas
leads us to "The Rule of 3". One-third of the existing staff makes
the transition into the new strategy, one-third needs additional training
and the balance must be replaced. It is the role of the CIO to devise a
method to build, maintain and restructure the organization.
Finally, the CIO must learn to focus the recruiting process on the
organization's capability as a unit, rather than on any one particular job
opening. The benefit of approaching departmental staffing
strategically will be the quality of work produced. The value of the
whole will truly exceed the sum of its parts, and often by a very wide
margin. This in turn will help the CIO position the IT organization as an
enterprise-wide unit that is capable of addressing future business
issues.
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