1

The New World of IT Work

By

Heather A. Smith James D. McKeen

The IT Forum … Is a focus group of senior IT managers from a variety of different industries convened regularly by the authors to address key management issues in IT. This report highlights a recent discussion.

– See back page for details of the IT Forum and other reports.

2

Introduction There's a business revolution taking place in the world of work, with more than 35 percent of world's workforce now classified as some form of contingent labor, such as independent contractors, freelancers, or consultants (Dwyer 2016). Although traditionally, contingent staff have been used in blue collar or administrative roles, this method of work has now spread to professional categories as well where approximately 20% of all professional workers currently fall into this category – and these numbers are growing (Soleran 2016, Mtoenedzadeh 2018). Other types of professional workers are employed by partner companies or vendors even though they work full time in an organization – and their numbers are growing too. In short, the people working in today's organizations are increasingly a mash-up of many different types of workers with various employment contracts. The reasons for this shift are complex. Companies believe this approach is cheaper and more flexible because they don't have to pay benefits and can easily let people go. Many also claim that workers with in-demand skills, especially millennials, want to work on this basis and reject the "old paradigm" of full-time employment, complete with security, benefits, and pensions although studies have found that many professionals working in this way have a "widespread sense of economic insecurity" and a majority would prefer a fulltime job (Dery and Sebastien 2017, Grinter et al. 2017, Mojtenedzadeh 2018). Regardless of whether one considers this type of work "precarious" or "desirable", the fact remains that organizations are increasingly opting to hire non-traditional workers for highly-skilled jobs, such as those in IT (Dery and Sebastien 2017, Dwyer 2016, Pointevin 2018). Researchers are also predicting that the future of work will be different because changes in technology are transforming the meaning and value of work and the reasons we do it (Pointevin, Iervolinao and Hanscome 2018). As new models of working with professional talent, changing work environments, and flexible working arrangements interact to drive significant changes in the working world, leaders and workers will need to adapt (Iervolino and Hanscome 2018). This paper explores how these factors are affecting IT work and how IT management is responding as a result. It first examines the nature and scope of today's IT work and the variety of different types of workers that are currently employed in IT. Next, it looks at the risks and opportunities involved in utilizing and integrating these different types of IT workers into an organization and then explores how best to achieve an optimal staffing balance. It concludes with a discussion and recommendations for how best to manage all types of staff in this brave new world of IT work.

The Evolving Composition of the IT Workforce The focus group agreed that IT work is changing in line with the broader trend towards a larger professional contingent and partner-staffed workforce. "The notion of employment is evolving beneath us," said a manager. In fact, many IT functions are on the leading edge of this curve. An informal survey of participants found that between 20% and 80% of their workforce is now some

3

form of non-traditional staff. "The number of these workers we have varies greatly by team," said a manager. "On some large projects, we can have up to 200 contract workers." This is consistent with other more formal surveys which have identified the same shifts (Geller and Mazor 2011, Bersohn 2015). The group felt there were several reasons for this change in the nature of the IT workforce in particular. First, it is becoming globalized as greatly improved communications make it easier to work from anywhere in the world. Work and workers can therefore be widely distributed geographically and are very mobile (Bersohn 2015). Second, it is becoming increasingly difficult for organizations to find and hire rare or "hot" skills in the marketplace. "Contingents and partners give us access to skills we are not able to obtain in-house," said a manager. "There's huge competition for new talent," said another. Third, as IT work has become more compartmentalized, it is much easier to utilize non-traditional workers than in the past. "It's simpler to do now we have fewer monolithic applications," said a member. Fourth, companies are finding that not everyone wants a corporate career. "The nature of the workforce is redefining itself," said a manager. "Many young people don't want a corporate career but an experiential lifestyle." "Many of our contractors want this lifestyle," said another. "They don't want to deal with politics, or to commute, and they don't see the value in corporate benefits when they can be bought elsewhere." Fifth, as noted above, companies believe it is a cheaper and more agile approach to resourcing. "Ideally, we would like to have full time people who are easy to fire, highly flexible, and highly skilled," said a manager. "This would provide us with a committed workforce with a long-term focus on our business and a flexible skills pool. Unfortunately, this isn't possible in today's workplace." Finally, participants added that they also believe their executives are often in denial about the number of staff needed to run the business. "Using non-fulltime workers doesn't count because they fall into a different budget bucket," said a member. All of these factors add up to a dramatically changed workplace from just a few years ago. "It's not a happy place to be in," said a manager. "It's a place of necessity but it's not ideal." What was most surprising however was not the fact that IT organizations are using such workers but the wide variety of different engagement contracts used in the same organization. Participants identified many different types of non-fulltime employees, any or all of which may be doing IT work for the same organization at a point in time (Oracle 2010, Soleran 2016). These can be grouped into three more generic sets of worker – each requiring somewhat different management and processes (see Table 1). The first group is traditional employees, but can include those staff who are permanently part-time. The second group is contingent – including the wide variety of flexible workers listed above – even those employed by an agency and contracted out to an organization. These workers have a variety of contractual relationships with a company but each reports principally to a leader within the company, even if technically "employed" by a vendor. The third group consists of partner entities whose staff provide specialized services to an organization's IT function. While these staff members interact with

4

other IT staff, their primary allegiance is outside of the contracting organization. Although this distinction can be fuzzy at times, it is helpful to consider when designing resourcing and management strategies (see below).

Types of IT Workers

Empl

oyee

s • Full-time workers Traditional employees with tenured employment and benefits. • Regular employees who work a reduced work week. This appears to be a very rare type of IT work. "Part-time doesn't

really work for us," said a manager. "There's always too much to do. Only a few kinds of IT work, like quality assurance, can be done part-time. The rest requires a more intense commitment."

Con

tinge

nt W

orkf

orce

• Contract executives or managers. These are individuals with specialized leadership skills hired for a specific term or project with an individualized contract of varying duration. Often these individuals are self-incorporated, protecting the hiring organization from having the worker deemed an employee. Many project managers fall into this category.

• Consultants. These are highly-skilled individuals who could be hired individually or through an agency to fill gaps in an organization's resource pool. Typically, they are brought in for a specific need or project, such as developing an enterprise architecture or creating a data strategy.

• Permanent contingents. These are generally long-term administrative staff, hired through an agency with benefits from the agency, or seasonal staff, who join the organization at peak times and who receive benefits accordingly.

• Outsourced workers. These local IT workers are employees of an outsourcing vendor and are dedicated either on or offsite to a particular project for development and/or maintenance. Many IT developers fall into this category these days.

• Offshore workers. These are remote IT workers, often working in more than one country, who assist in the development and/or maintenance of a particular project or application or who provide some sort of support function, such as the Help Desk. Some companies use offshore vendors who provide staff as specified in a contract; others have set up "captive" offshore entities and hired fulltime employees at that location for a fraction of the cost that would be paid in North America. Typically, this work is more clearly delineated than other in-house types of contingent work.

• Freelancers. These are usually highly-skilled individuals who are hired either directly or through a freelancer platform to do a specific technical job. The focus group stressed that it is rare for their companies to hire individuals and that they would only do so if they knew an individual well. Freelancer platforms aim to connect companies with skilled individuals around the world to do very focused work, often on a competitive basis

• Interns. These are students who work for a company during school breaks to gain experience. Often they have "hot" skills but lack business knowledge. This is an opportunity for both companies and students to learn if they are a good fit for full time employment after graduation.

• Retirees. These are known individuals who can be brought back to work as needed and are particularly valued for their subject matter expertise of the business and specific applications.

• Entrepreneurial student services. These offer innovation services or the incubation of new offerings and are provided by groups of students working under the aegis of a particular university and funded by an organization or group of organizations.

Part

ner S

taff

• Implementation partners. These are companies with staff who are skilled in a particular application or type of software (e.g., an ERP or a CRM system) and which are hired to provide these staff to help a company set up this software and integrate it with other corporate software.

• Cloud solution vendors. Similarly, cloud solution vendors will also provide skilled staff to help organizations migrate or set up solutions in the cloud.

• Managed services. These are organizations hired to manage specific types of infrastructure services for an organization, e.g., networks, telephony. Their staff may work at an organization but they report to the service provider.

Table 1. The Many Different Types of IT Workers

The Risks and Benefits of Using Non-traditional IT Workers Each of these sets of workers brings with them unique management requirements, risks, and benefits. Given the wide variety of contingent workers and their more direct relationship with the organization, it is especially important to identify how and when these workers can be best utilized and the value that they bring. Many of the risks and benefits of using contingent workers can also be applied to partner staff, but these may vary by situation, so it is essential that IT

5

leaders clearly understand the variables involved in each new working arrangement and assess the value in utilizing them (Soleran 2016). Benefits for a Company. The benefits of having fewer full-time staff and more contingent and partner staff are repeated so frequently, that the focus group questioned whether some of these have moved into the realm of myth rather than fact. Nevertheless, they acknowledged that contingent work has significant value including: • Lower Cost. Contingent and partner workers don't receive benefits such as health care,

vacations, and pension contributions and payroll taxes based on fulltime headcounts are avoided (Oracle 2010, Wikipedia 2018, Soleran 2016). Therefore, cutting "headcount costs" is attractive to organizations even if contingent or partner staff is used to replace them. There is also a general belief that administration time is shorter as companies can bypass such matters as onboarding and performance reviews. The focus group was skeptical about the true cost savings involved noting that both full-time and other IT work are costly. "At end of the day it's in our best interests to treat everyone fairly, so I'm not sure how great the savings actually are," said a manager.

• Flexibility. A more critical reason for newer types of IT work is flexibility. Organizations don't always have enough work to retain certain skills, said the focus group, and a quick response is often required when such skills are needed, making the traditional hiring process less than ideal. Since much IT work is project-based, organizations also like having the flexibility to adjust the number of workers they have according to their needs (Wikipedia 2018).

• Access to Specialized Skills. Contingent and partner staff enable companies to focus more fully on key organizational objectives, competency gaps, or strategic projects either because they can bring in specialized skills when they are needed or because non-employee staff can be used for non-strategic work releasing employees to work where they can add the most value (Soleran 2016 ).

• Try Before Buy. The focus group managers tend to use contingent workers as an opportunity for an extended job interview. This helps them better determine those to whom they would like to make offers of permanent employment. "We have an agreement with our vendors so we can offer employment to the people we like when their contract comes up for renewal," said a manager. "We're opportunitistic," said another. "If someone's good we'll go after them. Most people we want to hire have been working on contract first."

• Easy to Fire. One of the most important reasons for using contingent staff according to the focus group is the fact that it's easier to release them if they are not needed or if they don't work out. "We have a problem with too many people with long tenure," said a manager. "It's easier to make them go away when they're contingent and don't have the skills we need." Another added, "Hiring is a big deal because it's so difficult to fire for cause."

6

Risks for a Company. At the same time, companies must recognize that these new forms of IT work can introduce significant risk into the organization, such as: • Increased Likelihood of Failure. One of the biggest risks for companies can be found in the

theory of joint probabilities, which states that the more partners involved in a solution, the greater the likelihood of its failure. Building an ecosystem with numerous different types of workers and partners magnifies this problem. The risk is somewhat mitigated by modularization and the use of APIs to facilitate integration through pre-agreed standards (Tiwana 2013). However, "it's a real challenge to define the scope of the service you need from a vendor," said a manager. "This is a very difficult task so some level of risk remains."

• Regulation. With the growing use of contingent workers, governments around the world are looking at regulations to provide more security for them and this type of employment is coming under the increased scrutiny of taxation agencies who take a dim view of companies avoiding tax by utilizing "contingent" workers who are, in fact, long-term employees (Grinter et al. 2017, Geller and Mazor 2011). "Many of the arrangements we make with vendors are all about liability," said a manager. "We want to maintain the fiction that these workers are not employees, even if they work with us for a long time." To mitigate this risk, organizations need a clear understanding of existing and proposed legislation in the countries in which they operate and to review all hiring practices in light of these, creating clear rules and processes for utilizing contingent workers (Soleran 2016). However, as one manager pointed out, "Changes in our workplace are far outpacing legislation and regulation."

• Fragmentation. With so many different types of workers and contractual arrangements, there are considerable risks to a company stemming from fragmented policies, practices, and governance. Lack of consolidated resourcing practices can lead to poor regulatory compliance, inadequate planning, poor quality control, over-spending or disjointed spending on staff, and problems with business continuity (Grinter et al. 2017, Fournier 2016, Smers et al. 2018). For example, "We have a fulltime director of business continuity planning," explained a manager, "but its execution relies entirely on contingent workers. We clearly need more fulltime staff in this area." Managing staff in the new world of IT work can often be ad hoc, unintegrated, and ineffective, exposing companies to significant business, financial, and public relations risks. As one manager commented, "If you have five vendors, who's doing the oversight of their work?" These risks must be mitigated by developing a more strategic approach to using and managing non-employees that incorporates policy, governance, and decision-making about where to use this staff .

• Loss of knowledge. Over-dependence on contingent or partner staff can result in the loss of knowledge, trade secrets, and intellectual property in the longer-term (Geller and Mazor 2011, Soleran 2016). In areas where non-employees are widely used, knowledge gaps or silos can develop which can hamper collaboration and decision-making. A manager stated, "With

7

our current emphasis on younger workers and off shore staff, we are losing knowledge and subject matter expertise. It's a real challenge!" Another added, "Although we expect knowledge transfer between our contingent and fulltime workers, this rarely happens because we don't approach this problem realistically."

• Accountability. Finally, the focus group stressed problems with lack of accountability. "Our contingent and partner workers don't have 'skin in the game' so we must pick their roles carefully," one stated. "When everyone's contingent, no one owns the work," said another. Non-employees have no strong connection to a company and therefore no vision for it. This can be a serious risk for ensuring staff does its best for the organization. A manager stated, "We're actually thinking of increasing our fulltime staff by 10 to 20% to gain more accountability, continuity, and long-term vision."

Benefits and Risks for Contingent Workers. A similar list can be developed regarding the benefits and risks of contingent work for IT workers. On the plus side, contingent staff with high skills can choose their work and have the opportunity to become their own boss if they incorporate or can find work without going through a vendor (Dery and Sebastien 2017). They also gain broad job experience and have a greater degree of personal flexibility than they would if employed fulltime. However, they also have a greater risk of being fired or having financial gaps if the economy is depressed or their skills are no longer needed and of course, have no benefits unless they are purchased elsewhere or provided by an outsourcing vendor.

Finding the Right Staffing Balance Balancing the different types of IT staff within an organization to optimize cost and performance while minimizing risk is an art, not a science, said the focus group. There are many ways of determining an appropriate staffing balance and the target is rapidly evolving as organizations continue to experiment with new ways to acquire talent and get work done (Dery and Sebastien 2017). As noted above, today's IT workforce is already a hybrid mix of several types of IT workers and is more like an ever-evolving talent ecosystem than the traditional workplace for which most IT people management processes and procedures were created (Dwyer 2016). As a result, there is often a lack of integration between the various internal processes involved in acquiring, managing, and overseeing the different parts of this ecosystem and this is causing significant problems for IT leaders and for organizations as a whole (Geller and Mazor 2011). "We're using these different types of IT staff incorrectly," said a manager. "We've swung too far towards contingent staff and it's leading to failures," said another. There were few success stories about total talent management either in the focus group or in other research (Dwyer 2016). There appear to be two major gaps in organizations' approaches to using newer forms of IT talent or services.

8

1. Lack of a strategic approach to talent acquisition. The general unwillingness of leaders to address fulltime talent acquisition strategically also applies to acquiring non-fulltime IT workers. As we have noted elsewhere:

Even though most leaders agree that talent is a real differentiator, they simply don't commit the energy and resources to back up this belief. There is a lack of meaningful attention to developing a strategic and integrated people plan because personnel and workforce planning are the issues that managers dislike most about their job. There is also a lack of clear understanding of the value of formal workforce planning and the expertise to develop and execute a people strategy. As a result, most organizations reduce it to a headcount budgeting exercise and a set of transactional processes. These largely reactive approaches are ineffective in today's environment (Smith and McKeen, 2017).

When the wide variety of other types of IT workers are thrown into the mix, the challenges of strategic workforce planning become overwhelming and so, managers often choose the most expedient solutions to their talent management needs. Determining what workforce capabilities are needed both at present and in the future is one of the most difficult problems leaders face (Mok et al. 2012). Most organizations don't have an inventory of the skills they have, nor have they identified the emerging or hot skills they are likely to need in the near future and simply resort to headcount planning (Sommers et al. 2018). In many cases, contingent IT staff are used because it's too expensive to offer full time employment, said the focus group, rather than because the organization has a strategy regarding which skills should be fulltime, and which should be filled by other means. One of the first steps to finding the right staffing balance is therefore to better identify the critical segments of work required and the skills needed in each before determining how best to source this work. Modularization may be necessary in order to break out which roles need organizational knowledge and long-term vision and represent critical linkages with and oversight of other types of work, which should be provided by fulltime staff. Roles requiring specialized or compartmentalized knowledge and repeatable predictable activities can be more easily filled by contingent or partner staff (see Table 2).

Fulltime Contingent Partners • Developing processes and

frameworks, e.g., architecture, network, hardware, and software, security, APIs

• Strategic visioning

• Project management • Quality assurance • Support • Development • Testing • Operational needs

requiring flexibility

• Managed services for telephone, infrastructure, and networks

• Integration services • Cloud services

9

• Core activities requiring hard to replace enterprise knowledge

• Specialized skills, e.g., video, graphics, writing

• Hot skills needed immediately

• Small, relatively modular assignments

• Commodity work Table 2. Segments of Work Appropriate for Different Types of IT Workers

2. Lack of integrated talent management processes. An even larger challenge for organizations is the lack of integrated processes, practices, and oversight for all talent within IT. In general, few organizations have holistic processes in place to provide the integrated data and cross-functional leadership that are needed to manage the multiple relationships involved in today's IT workplace. This can lead to confusion between procurement and HR practices, multiple redundant vendor relationships, non-transparent workforce spending information, lack of guidance for managers regarding when to hire what type of person, and poor management of the risks involved (Dwyer 2016).

In contrast, an integrated approach to talent management considers the needs of all stakeholders, such as HR, IT, Procurement, Finance, Security, Real Estate, and Staffing Strategy internally, and Outsourcers, Vendors, Partners, Individual Consultants, and other Specialized Staff externally. It creates mechanisms to provide coordination and cross-functional leadership between the processes and systems used to manage full-time staff (typically through HR) and those used to manage contingent staff (which are often limited to Procurement), and partners (often Vendor Management), as well as those of other corporate functions such as security and finance. The focus group pointed out that contingent staff are often "invisible" to many of these organizational processes and therefore get missed in a number of key ways, such as equipment provisioning, communication, recognition, and training, and metrics.. Some of the particular benefits of having an integrated approach to talent management include: tracking and administering contingent workers; ensuring an appropriate mix of vendors; managing labor costs and geographic foot print; having accountability for a distributed contingent workforce; creation of specific and consolidated data that can be meaningfully communicated to stakeholders; action plans to remediate identified problem areas; and the ongoing assessment of workforce strategies and their effectiveness (Mok et al. 2012).

Effective Management of New IT Workers Regardless of the type of worker, IT leaders need to manage them effectively to drive performance and ensure high standards. Poor management of non-traditional staff can lead to a number of the negative consequences outlined above, such as overspending, legal challenges,

10

lack of compliance, loss of knowledge, fragmentation, and poor performance. The focus group found that there are a number of ways organizations could and should adapt their practices to get the most out of all types of IT workers, including: • Provide leadership for staffing issues. "IT is leading the way with these new forms of work,"

said a focus group member, "and we are pressuring HR to change our leadership practices in response." Simply putting a senior leader in charge of all talent management practices to coordinate them and involve the relevant stakeholders would be a huge step forward. This leader should identify gaps in processes, ways in which current practices are not working well, provide some guidance for others about when and how to use contingent workers and partners, how best to manage them, and explicitly identify and mitigate the risks involved. In the focus group companies, most require all workers to sign codes related to conduct and security responsibilities. Efforts are also being made to develop private talent pools of known individuals, such as alumni, retirees, and freelancers, who have worked well in order to improve continuity. One company uses internal crowdsourcing by identifying available positions in its newsletter and enabling existing contingent staff to apply for them. In such cases, leadership provides the necessary coordination and processes to bring together talent and positions available. Another area where leadership is needed is in shaping and selecting contingent work. Focus group members stressed the importance of understanding the nature of each type of engagement. For deployment work, the scope of the work involved should be very narrow. For strategic work, non-employees should not be expected to work in areas that require a good understanding of the business. "We often see a misalignment of expectations," said a manager. "You have to be very explicit in what you want and design the work appropriately. If you want knowledge transfer, for example, you need to have a consultant overseeing others and coaching them throughout."

• Unified Management. One of the leader's primary goals will be to understand how different

types of staff are currently managed and develop ways of ensuring that all staff are well treated and effectively coordinated to create the optimal workforce. With multiple stakeholders involved with different types of IT workers, each with their own goals, problems inevitably arise (Grinter et al. 2017). As a result, IT staff of all types can feel unfairly treated, said the focus group. Contingent workers tend to feel separate from fulltime workers, and are often given extra work and expected to work longer hours (Oracle 2010). Traditional employees may feel that contingents are compensated better, have more flexibility in hours and assignments, and that work is taken away from them. "We need to do a better job of understanding how all our people feel and manage them appropriately," said a manager.

"We also need a strong governance process to improve our staff management and utilization practices," said one focus group member. For example, at one focus group company contingent workers are not included in a manager's span of control. "In one group, we had four fulltime and 25 contingent workers," said a manager. "We had to push HR really hard to get them to recognize that contingent people need to be managed." In another example,

11

a group of consultants were engaged with no oversight and came into the organization with "a high and mighty attitude" which did not respect the experience and skills of the fulltime staff. "After some time, this project hit the wall and we pulled the plug but it was our lack of governance that let it happen," said the manager. Different systems for hiring, payment, and reporting exacerbate these challenges. Often, fulltime and contingent employees are never counted together (Grinter et al. 2017). Some management practices which are typically lacking for non-fulltime staff include: onboarding and orientation, development and training opportunities, performance management, offboarding, and back office procedures (Fournier 2018, Sommers et al. 2018). "Our HR is finally getting that our contractors are just people," said a manager. "We need to do a better job of treating contractors as our own and giving them feedback," suggested another. "We have no internal skills or staff to assess quality control for our non-fulltime staff," said a third.

• Treat everyone as part of the team. The focus group felt very strongly that making all staff

part of the team is essential to creating a productive and engaged workforce. "We have to see everyone as assets and treat them well," said a manager. "Right now, the way we treat contingents is divisive and it creates disgrunted employees." The group identified several areas where contingent and partner staff were not treated as part of the team, such as excluding them from team parties and recognition systems. "We can't formally thank our contractors," said a manager, "so we find work-arounds to do this. At the end of a project, we have a cake and call out individual contractor contributions verbally and take the time to give them our appreciation." At another firm, there is a quarterly afternoon social event for all employees. Although not sanctioned by the company, the fulltime staff provide funding so that contingent staff can attend. "This is really appreciated by our contractors. They have fun, it builds up our culture and they can see whether they would like to have an 'employee experience'," another manager stated. The group also identified lack of formal feedback procedures. "We do feedback for our contractors in the hall and it's really appreciated," said another manager. Internal processes and culture can create divisiveness on teams so managers need to identify these factors and do what they can to break down barriers between the various groups of workers. "Some may say that their contractors don't care about these things," noted a manager, "but the fact is that they don't work as well as when they are included." Focus group members noted many other "dehumanizing" elements in the way that non-fulltime staff are treated, including not including them in team meetings "because the organization doesn't want to pay them", not including them in volunteer opportunities, different badges and sign in procedures, expecting them to work on weekends, tracking them differently, and lack of skills training. The group added that while managed services and offshore staff need less integration, managers must still find ways to ensure they are treated as team members and appreciated.

12

• Develop face-to-face relationships. Several focus group members stressed the importance of developing face-to-face relationships with offshore and third party partners. One stated, "When we moved our call centre off shore, there was considerable frustration in our business with the time difference and language problems. They took longer to do the job and didn't deliver. So we brought the key players over to head office for about eight weeks so they could meet us on site and see our processes. This was worth the expense and we now have a successful and productive relationship." Another added, "We have had recurring failures with third parties. They'd give us fantastic commitments but then flounder when they saw the details of what they'd have to do. We've been under-impressed with these relationships and we need to find a way to short-circuit the learning curve." A third stated, "We moved our ERP offshore but there was no knowledge transfer so now we use in-house consultants but there's still no ownership." The group concluded that when considering a partnership, it is wise to agree on a "discovery statement of work" so that both parties understand the complexity involved. Ideally, if team members are not going to be working on site, efforts should be made to incorporate ongoing visits to build face-to-face relationships. This can include team members "going to their turf so that there is a blending of culture" and building vendor site visits into a statement of work. These efforts have many indirect benefits, the focus group said, such as changing partners' perspective on their customers and how they use their products and making offshore partners feeling more valued and important.

• Ensure provisioning. Many organizations neglect essential contingent provisioning tasks, such as security badges and systems IDs, and this gap needs to be addressed, said the focus group. "IT is pushing HR on this," said a manager. "Contingents don't have employee numbers so as far as HR is concerned, contingents don't exist," said another. "For example, you can't be a team lead without two employees but 30% of our staff are contingents without employee numbers." A third added, "We can't arrange laptops, phones, or email addresses without these numbers. We end up having to use floater equipment as a result."

Conclusion The world of IT employment is evolving rapidly as companies increasingly divest themselves of full-time employees and employ a wide variety of contingent and partner staff to fill a large number of positions. This transition has been so fast that many organizations have failed to adapt their leadership and processes accordingly. As a result, new staffing models have been deployed with varying degrees of effectiveness leaving many companies open to significant risk. The failure of organizational leadership to articulate and implement a comprehensive talent management strategy has led to much of the "imbalance" that we see today in IT staffing and to a broad lack of awareness regarding how to effectively deploy different types of IT staff within the organization. The lack of good data on numbers, cost, and performance tends to be the result of a failure to acknowledge (or "see") up to 50% of the people who work in IT. Such blindness has led to challenging and even dehumanizing situations for some IT workers, who are at the vanguard of these organizational changes. It is clear that the time has come for IT leaders to be more proactive in how they manage all IT staff working in their organizations, regardless of their

13

status. The first step has to be to take ownership of this situation and recognize that a company cannot absolve itself of its responsibilities for those who do their work. Failure to do so will likely lead to increasingly problematic working conditions in the short term and stricter regulation and control in the longer term.

References • Bersohn, D. How CIOs can create the IT workforce of the future, CIO, Jun 25, 2015. • Dery, K. and I. Sebastien. The four ways to manage digital talent and why two of them

don't work, MIT Sloan Management Review, August 17, 2017. • Dwyer, C. Contingent Workforce Management: the 2016 technology and innovation

outlook report, Ardent Partners, March 2016. • Fournier, J. Contingent workers are an essential part of innovation management,

HCMWorks, https://hcmworks.com/blog/contingent-workers-are-an essential part of innovation-management, 7 November 2016.

• Geller, J. and A. Mazor. HR functional perspectives, Global Business Driven HR

Transformation: The Journey Continues, Deloitte Consulting 2011. • Grinter, S., C. Pang, R. Hanscome and R. Chandra. Prepare yourself for the future of

workforce management, Gartner Research Note G00346993, 23 February 2018. • Iervolino, C. and R. Hanscome. Transforming human capital management primer for 2018,

Gartner Research Note G00344030, 09 January 2018. • Mojtenedzadeh, S. Growing number of professionals face job insecurity, study finds, The

Toronto Star, August 21 2018. • Mok, L., D. Berry, D. Morello, and J. Roberts. How to develop an IT strategic workforce

plan, Gartner Research Note G00246173, 30 November 2012. • Poitevin, H. The future of work and talent: culture, diversity, technology, Gartner Research

Note G00354454, 06 April 2018. • Richey, J. Successfully executing and managing a contingent workforce strategy, Oracle

White Paper, April 2010. • Smith H. and McKeen J. Developing new talent management capabilities, The IT Forum,

V.28, No.4, 2017.

14

• Soleran Inc. Contingent Workforce Management,

https://est05.esalestrack.com/esalestrack/Content/Content.ashx?aid=2181&system_filename=a068c52b-2ade-4b6f-bce3-53a70a3a3c43.pdf, December 2016.

• Sommers, K., M. Gergfors, and D. Edwards. Market guide for services procurement

solutions, Gartner Research Note G00346689, 15 May 2018. • Tiwana, A. Moving from products to platforms, presentation to the Society for Information

Management Advanced Practices Council, January 2018. • Wikipedia. Information technology and ethics/non-traditional workers,

https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/information_technology_and_ethics/non-traditional_workers, downloaded May 29, 2018.

15

Concept The purpose is to bring senior IT managers together to examine topics that are of critical concern to them and their organizations. Via the IT Forum (www.itmgmtforum.ca), members share experiences, learn from their peers, establish valuable networks, and develop practical strategies for creating, implementing, and managing IT solutions.

Recent Papers • Managing Maintenance • Managing IT Demand • IT in 2015 • Business Intelligence • Improving Customer Experience • Mobile Technology • Redefining IT

• Innovation with Technology • Emerging Technology Management • Developing a Data Strategy • Developing a Cloud Strategy • IT in 2020 • Transforming to Dev-Ops • Developing Thought Leaders in IT

Participating Organizations • Bell Canada • BMO Financial Group • CIBC • Empire Financial Group • LCBO

• Ontario Teachers Pension Plan • Ontario Universities’ Application Centre • OLG • Scotiabank • Sun Life

Membership Membership in the IT Forum is by invitation only. The annual fee is $3,000. Please direct inquiries to James McKeen at jmckeen@business.queensu.ca.