By: James Stanger
Through discussion with IT and security leaders across the globe perhaps the most persistent message I hear is that employers are facing a serious tech talent supply chain problem. In spite of some of the noise you may be hearing from various media outlets, the problem lies in the fact that tech leaders simply don’t have the people they need to build effective teams.
The three main issues have traditionally been:
Technical foundations such as a detailed understanding of protocols like DNS, TCP, HTTP and TLS, among others are necessary for IT pros to be able to perform their jobs adequately and efficiently.
In order to help solve for these problems, organizations must get creative and leverage institutional knowledge by creating what Andy Flatt, CIO of National Healthcare Corporation (NHC), calls digital champions.
Tech leaders around the world have found that a strong digital champion can help act as useful force multiplier to help reskill and upskill tech professionals.
A digital champion has several characteristics that help them bridge the gap between IT or cybersecurity departments and the rest of the organization, including:
The work of a digital champion varies depending on the context. I once had a digital champion explain this concept to me by saying, “a lot of times, the situation is the boss.”
For example, a digital champion may be asked to help explain chronic problems a department is having with the computer network or piece of equipment. In these scenarios, traditional technical support workers might not see the nature of a particular technical problem like someone who works with these systems every day. One digital champion I know was able to explain how the PCs in her department couldn’t adequately support their custom patient information application. She was instrumental in having that particular department switch from PCs to Samsung tablets.
In other cases, digital champions are recruited to help make incident response more efficient. For instance, a retail organization in the United Kingdom uses digital champions to help conduct tabletop and real-time incident response activities. These digital champions have provided invaluable real-world, practical advice for what that company’s employees would need to do in case of an unchecked ransomware attack.
Flatt started by articulating his problem in writing and then explained in specific, linear terms how people in different departments could help. He determined how many hours a week, or month, these digital champions would need to help him and described any training or upskilling that was necessary.
By creating a firm, linear ask, he was able to overcome objections from managers and others who might otherwise feel that he was stealing or distracting their workers. He found that most managers appreciated the increased interaction with his IT and security workers; they all felt that they were now invested in a similar goal.
In Flatt’s case, he was able to recruit nurses or physician’s assistants who had the time and interest in helping him accomplish his goals. In other organizations, I’ve seen leaders recruit champions from various departments, from marketing to research.
It’s very difficult to find a ready-made digital champion. While such people may know the business, many of them need upskilling in topics such as:
Of course, your specific needs will determine the exact upskilling that your digital champions may need. While it is tempting to dismiss the idea of digital champions as an idea that doesn’t have real-world applications, organizations worldwide have adopted this strategy to do more than partially solve for the tech talent shortage.
Typically, more mature organizations tend to have more digital champions. And while it is ideal for organizations to hire more full-time workers to solve talent shortages, adopting this strategy helps make IT and security issues an organizational, cultural issue, not just somebody else’s problem.
Due to the nature of digital champions, they can’t operate as full-time IT or security technologists. But, in some cases, digital champion programs have been the catalyst for CIOs and CISOs to allocate funding for more dedicated technical workers. How? The organizations saw how effective these champions were and saw the benefit of having full-time workers. That means digital champions can help resolve our technical worker supply problem in more than one way.
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