The necessity to simplify and consolidate your operations – a couple of quick points...
Last week an article in the AFR talked about how Telstra had more than 1000 job vacancies they cannot fill and discussed the “spiralling skills crisis” in the technology sector citing a few points:
- Lack of immigration and explosion of focus on digital transformation;
- Companies now searching nationally rather than locally, out of necessity;
- US companies are now looking globally for skills creating more competition;
- Tech Council of Australia indicates the skills shortage
To me this highlights a couple of things. They may seem obvious but it’s remarkable how many organisations haven’t considered these:
1. The best technology is no technology; if there is an opportunity to consolidate technology services that reduce time and tech skills requirements take it! Better yet, if you can consolidate and move to the cloud eliminating technology skills to manage, even better.
e.g., cloud based unified communications (UCaaS) typically consolidate messaging (Teams, Slack), Video (Zoom) and telephone (PBX or private cloud) and eliminate the need for IT support services for infrastructure or managed hosted servers, upgrades, etc.
This will help:
- Reduce or eliminate need for tech skills to manage (can be managed by non-technical staff);
- Help with digital transformation plans;
- Greatly reduce risk and dependencies on 3rd party IT companies who may be hosting these services for you – where you can, go directly to the source vendor for these services. Keep it simple, less moving parts, and generally better security and service levels
2. Automate where you can and take repetitive work flows and deploy robotic process automation (RPA)
e.g., software robots are becoming increasingly intelligent and adaptable providing enterprise grade, low code on premise or in cloud automation with no additional technology debt.
In an environment where talent availability is lean and competitive and operations can be “death by 1,000 cuts” as the saying goes, we need to look at all angles.