EDITOR ’ S QUESTION
The demand for talent today is huge and companies everywhere are competing for skills . As such , the question of how CIOs can remain innovative while upskilling talent , is not an easy one . Fortunately , however , there are potential solutions .
It is widely agreed that in order to build for the future , businesses need to attract and retain a talented workforce . While the way to go about this is not quite so uniformly agreed , I believe that to retain brilliant people , a business must first focus on lowering the time spent on activities with low direct impact on the organisation ’ s value drivers , and instead deploy skilled employees to the highest value tasks .
Employees generally want to know that what they ’ re doing has an impact . The knowledge of this impact provides more fulfilling work and helps motivation , and employees are happier to upskill themselves and innovate . So , in this huge war for talent , it is vital that CIOs are taking note and working to empower workers to do just that , to focus on innovative work .
Here at Confluent , we see many companies working with specialists to manage parts of the technology ecosystem that , while mission critical , take away focus for employees from providing more value by working on higher value tasks . In our view , unless what you are working on is directly contributing to anything short of outstanding applications or solutions for customers or suppliers , then you should really be asking yourself if you should be doing it at all .
This year , when reviewing the ecosystem , CIOs should pay particular attention to the role technology is playing within the business and how it can be changed to only drive business value . They should remove or reduce tasks that do not contribute to it , that take up employee time needlessly and could very easily be done by others . Think of this as a comparative advantage applied to the workforce , and focus on those technology activities the team excel at .
A business must first focus on lowering the time spent on activities with low direct impact on the organisation ’ s value drivers , and instead deploy skilled employees to the highest value tasks .
With that underway , a CIO will very quickly find that its employees have more capacity and mental space to focus on what matters for growth this year : innovation . In the end , not only will they get a more creative employee that contributes to business success , but they may just well get a happier and more satisfied one too . p
PETER REEVE , VP NORTHERN EMEA AT
CONFLUENT
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