One of the biggest narratives in the U.S. concerning the current wave of tech layoffs is the fact that ‘traditional’ sectors have a prime opportunity to snap up new tech teams and IT talent. This has always been a significant challenge for sectors such as banks, insurance and manufacturing that compete with big tech for talent. In 2022, a majority of CEOs (71%) identified skills and labor shortages to be that year’s biggest business disrupter.
And they were right to be worried. According to Salesforce, three in four workers do not have the digital skills needed by businesses to prepare for the future of work. The temptation in this environment for many traditional organizations is to enter the labor market to build larger tech teams to help drive their modernization programs. However, this may be a mistake.
Building large, expensive, bloated tech and IT teams is not always the answer. It’s critical that traditional companies learn this lesson from big tech.
Instead, traditional organizations should consider other avenues to drive their digital transformation ambitions with their lean resources. What does this look like?
What is the Real Challenge you are Trying to Solve?
Since COVID-19 hit, U.S. companies have been forced to reevaluate how they work, with remote working becoming commonplace–even for companies who couldn’t imagine themselves working remotely.
And the challenges have grown as U.S. businesses seek growth to recover lost gains from the last few years. Evanta’s 2022 CIO Leadership Perspectives study found that CIOs rate data and analytics as their second top priority within the IT function. It is clear that business leaders see advancing organizational use of data, analytics and automation as key to reaching enterprise objectives.
For many organizations, the biggest challenge they face is the unprecedented amount of data generated. Critically, more than 80% of all new data is unstructured and messy. This makes it difficult for data-driven companies to accurately review, gather, analyze and rely on what is mission-critical information.
Traditional industries such as health care, banking, insurance or the public sector, have even larger concerns because data is increasingly critical to how they build value and deliver services for customers. So, it is important for their IT teams to create a single source of truth and data governance framework across their organizations to ensure the right people and senior leaders have the most accurate information to make smarter decisions.
For instance, in the manufacturing industry, no-code database platforms can be leveraged to structure daily operational data and visualize insights through digital dashboards for quality assurance, continuous improvement and health safety.
Additionally, at Baserow, we work with treasury customers at some of the biggest international banks that use no-code platforms to keep track of local legislation around the world by centralizing information in real-time databases available to relevant teams, including compliance.
Modern organizations depend on their IT teams to accomplish a lot of their goals. So, it is important to provide them with the tools to focus on more complex development projects. No-code tools free your non-technical teams to address their pressing needs themselves without having to wait for budget or resource availability in the IT department.
Have you Also Considered Upskilling Your Current Team?
We know from the Salesforce survey that the vast majority of U.S. workers lack the digital skills to support their organizations’ ambitions and needs. This suggests that there is a wider issue within most companies at large. Do businesses need to prioritize upskilling their current team instead?
A U.S. Gallup report found that 72% of workers are overwhelmingly interested in pursuing additional digital training to prepare them for an increasingly digitilized workplace. Is there room for no-code technologies to supplement the digital capabilities within companies?
Enterprises are already expanding the responsibilities of application development outside their IT teams as well as increasing the productivity of their existing IT resources by automating and abstracting repetitive developer tasks. Gartner predicted that by 2025, 70% of apps will employ low-code/no-code technology. This trend aligns neatly with the business needs, such as the development of organization-specific applications and tools, because every business’s requirements are different.
Furthermore, no-code/low-code technology enables companies to drive innovation and shorten the idea-to-market cycle times. The technology’s pre-built components make it easier for end-users and workers to intuitively assemble the templates that solve their complex needs.
In Conclusion
U.S. companies that need to fill the IT skills gap should consider how technology can be leveraged to boost productivity and accelerate the speed of innovation while accepting that new technical resources will continue to be expensive and scarce.
These organizations are better off taking the lead in the democratization of IT within their teams. Only then can they keep up with the speed and agility required in today´s competitive environment.