Strategic Human Capital Insights

Are you ready to take an organizational Quality Assurance diagnostic?

As organizations move through continual change, the need to stay up-to-date and relevant is now a strategic imperative.  Nowhere in the organization is this more relevant than to a Quality Assurance Department whose function it is to maintain quality, always, despite the change swirling around it.  The challenge for managing quality assurance in a changing workplace is analogous to changing the tires on a car while the car is traveling at 60 miles per hour.  As difficult as it may seem, the goal is to always maintain Quality Assurance.

Members of the C-suite are becoming more and more aware of how critical information technology is to an organization.

In the tech industry, C-level leaders have different levels of education and work experience. Over half of the tech leaders in the hardware, software development and other online businesses have a bachelor's degree, while less than 40 percent in each of these disciplines have a master’s degree and less than 12 percent have a PhD. A recent JWC partners’ survey, as it relates to information technology, found that C-suite leaders are the most concerned with the following: cyber security, digital disruption, and innovative technology advances.

Technology leaders are now making more appearances before the C-suite to discuss the company's IT strategy and technology direction. For any technology leader, delivering insight and intelligence to help C-suite leaders better understand the value for their IT investment and IT team is imperative, but this is unfortunately easier said than done. If you are looking to deliver value to the C-Suite at your organization, here are 4 tips to help you get started:

Every human asset action has an equal and opposite human asset reaction.

At a recent Information Management forum, I presented this topic to senior IT leaders and here is a summary of the presentation topics.

Today’s IT Operating Context

According to Fortune’s Global Forum, we are now all technology companies. Companies with the best IT strategy can emerge as corporate winners. We know that the best corporate strategy can fail at implementation without a robust IT strategy supporting it. At the core of a robust IT strategy are the operating challenges of today’s human capital.

If people really are our most important asset, what does this truly mean around how we think and act? Let’s elevate the organizational narrative from Human Capital Management to the complex dynamics of Human Asset Management. It’s time to take a new approach to human asset management strategy including:

• Organizational Risk Management Assessment
  • Value Creation and Continual Transformation
  • Growth Acceleration and Competitive Advantage
• Challenges of Technology: IT – Business Alignment Model©
• Role and Competency Job Benchmarking Against the Business Strategy
• Asset-based Approach© to IT Human Capital Assessment and Gap Analysis
• Organizational Impact Assessment
• Future-focused IT Workforce / Human Asset Planning

Have you asked yourself the basic question, "Does your organization value IT as a good investment?" To help answer this question and others, we have developed an eBook with one of our strategic partners, Quality Service Solutions, Future Proof your It Organization.

THE HOLISTIC IT ALIGNMENT OF STRUCTURE, PROCESS AND PEOPLE

For decades, boards, corporate executives and IT directors have sought evidence that IT investments generate business value. Unfortunately, business executives continue to find the link between investments in IT and specific business benefits something of a mystery. Yet, IT executives often assume the link is obvious.

This eBook sets out a new approach that enables enterprises to:

• Construct a trail of evidence leading from measures of business value to indicators of the contribution made by both the IT function and each professional within IT
• Gauge the readiness of their organizations’ human capital to add value in the future

Hiring managers often say, ”I can teach people skills, but hiring people to work in our culture is more important. I can’t teach that!” These words are so true. So how important is this topic to hiring within IT? It’s critical! Get this right, and employee retention, productivity, and engagement will follow. Get this wrong, and the management nightmare begins. And with that nightmare goes productivity issues, disengagement, and the spread of discontent among your staff and the client users who must interact with your people. Culture clash affects and infects your entire organization.

Did you know that 69% of hiring managers say Adaptability is the most important soft skill they screen for? To stay competitive today, your company needs to be able to adapt to a changing economy and business needs. This means you also need to hire employees who can adapt as well.

So what does this mean for IT hiring? Adaptability is one of the most difficult challenges in the IT hiring process. Why? Because when you consider how positions in IT are evolving today, the role of IT employees increasingly requires the Adaptability soft skill. Adaptability is now required for multiple facets of the evolving IT position benchmark:

If you could focus on the one overarching skill that would make a profound impact in the world of technology, what would it be? Leadership, of course!

Why is this one skill so important?
Without effective leadership, all the other focus areas are built on a rocky foundation of shifting sand. What good is excellent problem solving without outstanding leadership to listen, change and / or implement? The traction point for all the other skills hinges on Leadership.

Is there really a leadership issue with Technology Leadership?
According to recent research, here’s how the C-Suite rates the newly-defined VUCA leadership skills for Technology.

 
We're all used to the issues related to assets in the Information Technology arena: equipment that is heading towards obsolescence by the time we get it in the rack, the exponentially growing thirst for storage by the users, and the new version of software that is released just as we finish the project to upgrade from our previous version.  This is just reality. These are things we are used to justifying to the C-suite - they are a cost of doing business. I'd like you to expand your vision a bit and look at some of the most critical assets in your Information Technology organization: your human assets and, as a whole, the human capital that is critical to your daily operation.

Think of People as an Asset with Investment Value

I know some of you are saying "you can't look at people like they are equipment". That's not what I'm suggesting. I believe you need to treat and evaluate your team as the most valuable item in your organization. There is a substantial investment in each individual - you may not have made the investment, but overall, a substantial investment has been made in your team through education, training and experience.

 
We all know, on an intellectual level, that the value of IT is critical to an organization’s success. That’s obvious and supported by extensive research. However, how IT, in reality lives, performs and produces in an organization often contradicts its critical need and limits its importance in the organization. It’s time to sync IT into the fabric of the organization because the organization needs you. However, IT, you have a lot of work to do in your own functional area before this synchronization can happen. Below are 5 IT operating myths that must be debunked by IT:

I recently hosted a forum with Fred Mapp of Mapping IT for CIO’s and Senior IT professionals entitled "Future Proofing the Business of IT" dealing with:

• Future organizational needs
• Future technology needs
• Future competitive advantage
• Company growth acceleration
• Maximum corporate profitability

Taking a page from the recent Fortune Global Forum, one of the 4 challenges facing business today:

The Greatest Challenge Isn’t Tech, but People - Creating the right culture is the central challenge for surviving technology-driven change. Process has dominated our business thinking and operations for the past 15 – 20 years.  At this point in business, we have taken process about as far as it can go.  People, a company’s human capital, have finally been acknowledged as a key, critical business driver for the future.