Are you a part of a technology team struggling to keep up with the ever-evolving technological landscape? If so, you're not alone.
Managing change is one of the top challenges facing technology teams today. However, it's not the only challenge.
In this blog post, we'll explore the top five challenges facing technology teams (as reported by Gartner, Forbes, Forrester, CIO.com, TechTarget, and IDC) and how you can manage them. This is a follow up to our Impact of Change Webinar.
Here are the top five challenges facing technology teams:
1. Managing Change
The rapid rate of technology change requires IT teams to manage complex environments. IT teams need to ensure that team members are continually developing their skill sets and adapting to new tools, platforms, and frameworks. This forward-thinking view needs to be met with ongoing BAU work to reduce technology debt.
Managing multiple projects and BAU work can be challenging, but it's important to ensure that documented "as built" and processes are managed. If not, when changes happen undocumented elements and their impact on the rest of the business can’t be understood.
2. Cybersecurity
According to Gartner, 88% of boards see cybersecurity as the largest IT threat to their organisation. Cyber-attacks are becoming more sophisticated, and even simple ransom demands are catching organisations off guard.
Managing risk across a technology stack is important, but training staff to be your first line of defence is crucial. Additionally, organisations need to be sure of their compliance with NZ and overseas legislations.
3. Collaboration
The pandemic has sped up the need for organisations to support remote working. However, technology teams are constantly collaborating internally and remotely with team members and external vendors.
With the need to continually be supporting BAU and ongoing projects, ensuring everyone is on the same page is important. This is especially true if technology teams are relying on vendors to support key functions.
4. Talent Acquisition and Retention
The demand for skilled technology professionals is high, and competition for top talent can be fierce. Technology teams must attract and retain talented employees by offering competitive salaries and benefits, opportunities for growth and development, and a positive work culture. This can be tricky, especially in the public sector where increasing salaries and perks is not easily justifiable.
This can mean your staff are under more pressure in picking up the slack for ongoing vacancies, day to day technology hygiene can be ill managed, vendor partnering can leach knowledge from the organisation, and there can be issues with new staff onboarding.
5. Balancing Innovation and Stability
The demand to integrate new technology into existing technology environments is challenging. The latter is often a mix of legacy and new solutions, deployed on-premises or cloud, or in hybrid environments. Introducing a new solution on top of what can be an "unknown" environment is fraught with challenges.
These challenges can include needing vendors to understand the current state so they know how to architect a future state, and to know how change will impact both technology and processes, which can often be left out of discussions and cause problems down the track.
How to best manage these challenges?
To manage these challenges, organisations need to ensure that their current state is known, supported, and maintained through automation and updates by SMEs.
It's also essential to understand the impacts of change through impact assessment reports as part of the change management process.
Organisations must find, treat, and manage risk. They need to ensure that there is room for teams to innovate and use emergent technology.
Feeling overwhelmed with all that?
At STATE3, we specialise in helping organisations manage change.
STATE3 Enterprise:
enables organisations to determine their risk framework and posture and embed it into S3E. This allows end-users to find, treat, and manage risks.
plays nicely with all vendors and its pricing is 'site-wide' and includes other key vendors. This means that the S3E platform can be accessed by partners as you see fit.
allows you to easily manage and automate permissions and collaboration with team members and external vendors.
helps with talent acquisition and retention by providing information about the current state of the organisation, including catalogues, visualisations, and reports.
helps with balancing innovation and stability by providing information about the current and future states of the organisation, as well as business activities and process flow, through impact assessments reports as part of your change management process.
Overall, State3 provides a comprehensive solution for managing change in technology teams, helping organisations to reduce risk, collaborate effectively, manage talent, and balance innovation with stability.
Contact us today to learn more about how we can help your organisation manage change.
