Building Great Talent and Effective Teams

A successful IT organization demands having the right talent that works effectively and efficiently together. IT managers must focus on identifying the right people and then continuously build and develop the respective talent, while ensuring the cohesiveness of the team dynamics. The valuable vignettes illustrate the “know and grow” focus of this important chapter.

Attracting and Retaining ICT Professionals in Brazilian Companies

Results show that ICT professionals consider learning and development the most important expectancy in the workplace, followed by satisfaction and motivation. Women in ICT companies consider the learning and development expectancy much more important than their peers in non-ICT companies, and even more than men in both ICT and non-ICT companies. For HR and IT managers, this chapter provides some insights on what expectancy variables could be better explored and exploited to attract and retain IT professionals.

Producing Candidate Separation through Recruiting Technology

With millions of potential employment candidates leveraging the Internet to search for jobs (Borstorff et al, 2006) and a massive global economic recession providing increasing availability to otherwise gainfully employed professionals, it is staggering to think that employers cannot find qualified candidates. The number of global candidates is growing, but claims of weak qualifications or poorly drafted resumes that do not appropriately reflect skills or experience leave many positions open. Gallivan et al (2004) found that the technical gap is due to the ease of posting specific technical skills and recruiting for a specialty and the complex, multi-functional modern employee companies now desire. A better method of qualifying and matching candidates with broader skills is required to meet this ever-increasing demand. While no system can incorporate all information, this proposal would provide a modular Information System capable of providing the most relevant information.

In the Pipeline

New generations of Information Technology (IT) professionals are entering and preparing to enter the pipeline for a challenging IT career. This chapter will present their characteristics, compare them to the previous generations, and discuss how the different generations can be effectively deployed in IT organizations. The four key characteristics of the new generations are: First of all, the new generations of IT professionals realize that the globe has become an open and connected system. Their organization should operate as a holistic brain as well, with information-processing as the center. Second, they wonder why Information Technology should stand alone. They want to talk about Community Technology. In other words: all of the technologies needed to support communities. Sharing, creating, and utilizing knowledge in an all-embracing ‘space’ determined by location and time, is the third aspect that characterizes the new generations. They do not let knowledge flow only virtually, or physically or mentally. They let it flow in all those ‘spaces’. Fourth, they want their organization to take care of the planet: their planet. They are non wasteful, and they still keep in mind people and profit. The effective IT department understands the differences in generations and how to adapt and leverage the above characteristics.

Insourcing vs. Outsourcing

Most discussions of IT outsourcing focus on cost reductions and meeting skills requirements. This chapter focuses on the people considerations and the important role that HR must play to ensure success, especially as it pertains to evaluating the resources and managing the transition. HR must be engaged in monitoring the cost of talent, identifying the required skills, being sensitive to the timing of the requirements, and mitigating the strain on work balance.

Changing Capabilities and Capacities

Increasingly, the management of human capital management emerges as a key differentiator in the competitive marketplace. The talent pool and inventory of capabilities is a critical source of competitive differentiation, and also a key to accomplishing many of the strategic objectives essential for success of the competitive enterprise in the 21st century. Product and service innovation and process and practice improvement are essential in the modern market.

A Players

The term “A Players” was not a familiar categorization for staff until this author had been leading Information Technology organizations for over twenty five years. “A Players” as well as B, C and D Players is a common term for local charity and Pro-Am golf tournaments where competitively equal golf foursomes are created by balancing the known golf prowess and skills in each group. The “A Player” is the top ranked player in the group and “should” be the “low” or best scorer during play. The “B” Player is the next most skilled and so on. During my youth and mid-adult years, the author pursued other non-golf hobbies and activities such as boating and flying where “A Player” wasn’t a common term.

Retaining Global IT Talent

The general problem of employee retention and the ability of an organization to influence and change actual turnover behavior are of great concern to employers, consultants, and academicians alike. This has been especially true in the IT profession. The growing need for IT professionals, combined with a shrinking labor pool, has made recruitment and retention of IT talent a top priority in many organizations. Forward thinking companies are looking to find and retain qualified IT talent wherever in the world it is available at a reasonable price. This chapter presents research that provides nuggets of wisdom that can be used as best practices for retaining global IT talent.

Retaining IT Professionals

Retaining talent is one of the most important issues that HR Managers must address. This chapter discusses the retention practices model applied by IT. In accordance with the model developed by Julia Naggiar in 2001, it analyses six best practices: orientation, training, career development, motivation, compensation, feedback, and evaluation. Additionally, because of their importance, it also deals with turnover rate implications. To find the best retention practices for IT professionals, these variables have been evaluated in an investigation carried out with Latin-American IT professionals and HR Managers to find out which practices IT professionals consider paramount in retaining talent.

Selection

When studying job analysis, recruitment, training, and even retention in IT HR management, an oft-overlooked element of the picture is selection. This chapter acknowledges and models the interplay among these components and then focuses on selection. The general steps in designing an effective selection process are reviewed, and a particularly interesting and useful selection technique is examined: critical incidents (or CI). Data from a CI analysis of the job of IT project manager are used to illustrate how a CI study is conducted and how the output from CI can be used to improve a selection process, as well as inform job analysis and training. The chapter concludes by identifying ways that the examination of selection can extend IT HR research and, ultimately, improve the effectiveness of IT HR management.