It's not just about technology: only effective tech people can make it happen for you.
Business success through your Tech people
Access ideas, experience and a range of contacts: call Iain Smith
Despite today’s relentless focus on technology, a less talked-of factor is vital for all Tech teams:
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- The performance of IT people will make or break companies and their CIOs.
- Even ‘technical’ issues may, at heart, be about IT people - not technology.
Tech leaders and those in HR who support them must keep on improving “people and organization” aspects. That is where my practical consulting experience can be of help.
ABOUT iain smith
& diaz research
After extended periods spent firstly in IT/engineering then in organization and HR management consulting, I quit my job as Hay Group Sector leader for Technology, Media and Telecoms (TMT) to start Diaz Research.
For 15 years Diaz Research filled a unique space by providing large companies' IT functions with research on topics that no-one else was bothering with. Private peer-peer meetings were a favourite feature with our blue chip clients who ranged from most of the seriously large IT functions in the UK (all big four banks, insurance companies, AstraZeneca, GSK, Unilever, Mars, IAG/BA, Thomson Reuters, BP, Mars, Diageo, Virgin Media, Visa and many more), plus the big UK, US, Swiss and German investment banks. Then from 2010 on, many major non-UK based companies like Airbus, Orange, ING, BNP Paribas, Nestle, Novartis, Danone, Standard Chartered, Zurich, Nokia and Aegon.
Today, I respond to requests for assistance including providing advice and critiquing plans, specialized IT HR research providing data that is simply not available elsewhere, and expert assistance in implementation.
Visit my LinkedIn profile here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/iain-smith-8566a83/ and get in touch for details of my involvement in specific types of project.
useful IT HR content
I will in this section provide some downloadable papers designed to help with some key aspects of managing the IT workforce. In the meantime ....
IT HR strategy: useful or not?
Many IT functions operate quite successfully without ever stopping to ask what the underlying principles should be regarding their IT workforce. Such employers resolve difficult IT HR dilemmas one by one, without giving much thought to the linkages, and unintended consequences, that might cause undermine their subsequent success.
So an IT function may operate apparently reasonably well without any recognised guiding people management principles, or HR strategy in placve.
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In these circumstances some issues may arise that might suggest things something more is needed. For example, the company whose pay and reward policies and practices for its IT workforce needed renewal. But it wasn't clear how. There was a range of views about performance pay, about pay when hiring new staff, about pay for individual technical contributors and, not least, how pay should be aligned to the external market.
These reward issues raised so many questions about what, exactly, the principles underlying how the IT workforce was recruited, developed, rewarded and managed that the IT leadership team agreed to sort out the guiding principles driving all HR and reward policies. Once that was done, work quickly proceeded to construct a suitable reward framework that helped support all subsidiary HR objectives.
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