Tag Archives: IT leaders

News, Talent Management

Organisations look to outsourcing again post-pandemic

Access to talent and cost savings key drivers to outsourcing revival

Bristol, UK; 10 May 2022: In a recent survey of 300 IT leaders, over half of business leaders are outsourcing to gain access to talent and save on costs.

The survey, conducted by Amdaris, the Bristol-based software development specialist, found that 64% are adopting a new outsourcing strategy in light of the pandemic. With 63% finding it difficult to find and hire strong talent, access to talent was a strong reason for deciding to outsource (54%). This was followed by the imperative to save on costs (54%), access to knowledge and experience (41%) and project support (33%).

Moreover, 74% of organisations believe that outsourcing can help to improve or adopt better software development practices such as agile delivery and quality auditing.

“With the majority of budgets for IT leaders going on tech and talent, it would seem that post-pandemic outsourcing has come into its own as a solution for the top challenges we face today,” said Vlad Nanu, Co-CEO at Amdaris. “Organisations not only face the major challenge of being able to find tech talent, but also improving its digital skills and development velocity. The best technical skills often lie in markets outside of the UK such as Eastern Europe, well known as a tech hub. Continuing the support for that region is particularly key at this time.”

Amdaris assists global companies through expert outsourcing, which provides a wider talent pool and access to multiple stakeholders. This can help dilute the potential risk of losing talent due to unforeseen circumstances. Furthermore, by having multiple centres across Europe, Amdaris is able to quickly mitigate potential risks and assist employees affected by global events.

To support Ukraine, the company relocated its Ukrainian employees from its Odesa facility to centres in neighbouring countries. Amdaris is also providing ongoing support to staff and their families who have been affected by the war through daily check-ins and pastoral care. Amdaris has pledged to help the wider Ukrainian tech community by providing secure employment to any tech professional being forced to flee the country due to the ongoing conflict.

Data, News

New Research Shows IT Leaders Need to Upskill Teams to Extract Value from Data

  • Nearly two thirds (65%) of IT leaders globally think they need to invest in data capability skills within their teams to extract value from data.
  • Over three quarters (78%) of IT leaders in North American businesses recognise a need to increase employee data competency, compared with 63% of Latin American businesses, 55% of European businesses and 48% of Asian businesses.

Dublin, 27 April, 2022 – New research from Digital Realty (NYSE: DLR) the largest global provider of cloud- and carrier-neutral data centers, colocation and interconnection solutions, today reveals that 65% of IT leaders from some of the world’s biggest businesses say they need to increase the data competency of their teams to remain competitive and extract value from data [1]. This increases to 78% when focusing on North American businesses, compared to 63% for Latin American businesses, 55% for European businesses and 48% for Asian businesses.

The importance of upskilling teams as a business-critical move out-performed AI investment (59%) and was the second most popular response amongst those surveyed when asked what the most important factor was for their companies in the next two years to enable more data-driven insights. Additionally, over one in five (21%) IT leaders globally highlighted that the lack of internal talent to analyse data, and the lack of talent to build technical capacity (21%), are among the greatest obstacles their organisations are facing when drawing insights from their data.

A wider issue

Crucially, IT leaders’ teams need to have the skills to unlock value from data and make data-driven strategies a priority if they want to stay competitive in an increasingly data centric world. Digital Realty’s research revealed that three quarters (75%) of >$1B companies do now have a formal data strategy in the planning, adoption or execution stage. This compares to 63% of global companies, suggesting that larger companies are operating slightly ahead of the curve from a data perspective, something which is likely to give them an advantage over smaller competitors as the amount of data grows and Data Gravity becomes a bigger challenge.

“As the volume of data grows exponentially across the world, the Data Gravity effect is inevitably going to intensify, particularly if employees do not have the skills to effectively process the data,” explains Séamus Dunne, Managing Director, at Interxion, a Digital Realty company. “This phenomenon sees large volumes of data continually attracting more data, making it impossible to move, manipulate or extract value from it. This creates barriers for businesses and rather than data being an enabler, it can have the opposite effect.

“Digital Realty understands the growing challenges business leaders face, which is why we’ve built PlatformDIGITAL®, our first of its kind global data center platform, to meet the ever-changing data, control and networking demands of global enterprises and help them realise new, data-first strategies.”

Looking ahead

The research shows that 17% of IT leaders expect data-driven insights to help them attract more talent in the future, suggesting that people will be drawn to organisations using data efficiently. This is likely to lead to a cumulative effect, with the more data savvy enterprises attracting more employees with data skills and building their competitive advantage.

[1] The Digital Realty research surveyed over 7,200 IT leaders from $100m – $1B+ revenue businesses across every sector and across 23 countries to understand the priorities of those leading digital strategy and transformation at the world’s largest companies.