The Talent Shortage

After attending my fifth straight Gartner Symposium a couple weeks back one common theme across all five has remained consistent, CIOs still sight lack of skills as their biggest inhibitor. Working in the IT industry for over 20+ years, I’ve experienced the talent shortage firsthand. We had it in the late 80s as the PC and LAN technology entered the business, through the 90s with the dotcom era, and 2000 with virtualization. With all of these trends the skillset required needs change. Although what I listed is a small sample of technologies, the point is that the CIO’s needs are constantly changing to keep up with these trends.

Business Skills are Trumping Technical in IT

At the Symposium 22% of CIOs said that lack of required skills held them back, well ahead of both budget and technology. The skills needed are not technical. As IT and business align, the skills needed to make IT become more successful become much more business orientated. Based on 10 “talent” areas, CIOs ranked Analytics, Business Knowledge, and Project Management in the top 5, and ranked 10^th was Technical Skills. Coming from a technical engineer background it was very eye opening to see the needs of these “business skills” trump technical skills in the field of IT.

Project Management

It is not surprising that at Focus we see this trend within our client base. As we continue to implement technical solutions for our clients more often than not our clients are asking for more Project Management services. As a company we see the value that Project Management brings to our customers. Focus has invested significantly and grown our Project Management Office over the last year. We expect this to continue as we strive to provide more value to our clients.

-Bill Smeltzer | CTO