IT Outsourcing Solves Major Issue Facing Miami CIOs: Talent Shortage
2022 will be the year that CIOs will have to look past short-term projects that deal with COVID-related workplace issues and focus on long-term IT projects. Despite the emergence of the Omicron COVID-19 variant, signs point to an economic recovery characterized by an increase in spending on digital transformation projects. In fact, according to a Worldwide IT Spending Forecast by Gartner, this year’s worldwide IT spending is expected to hit the $4.5 trillion mark. This will denote a 5.1% increase from the 2021 figure.
This year, wage inflation, limited IT skills by internal staff, and the increasing war for talent will probably drive CIOs to resort to outsourcing IT talent from managed service companies to pursue their digital strategies.
The escalating war for IT talent is a crucial battleground for CIOs. The amount of work that needs to be accomplished is growing every other day, and even though timelines to complete this work have somewhat extended, there’s still urgency.
To meet deadlines and maximize the productivity of their existing IT staff, CIOs will need to outsource more to free up time, train existing staff to equip them with the desired skills, and hire IT consultants to fulfill vital skilled roles.
What Are the Factors Driving the Increase in IT Outsourcing?
Here is an outline of some of the factors that drive the increased outsourcing of IT services by CIOs:
1. Difficulty of Hiring Staff Across the Entire Organization
As it is, most businesses have a shortage of IT staff. To fill this gap, they are faced with a dilemma of whether to hire additional staff in the IT areas they are lacking or to outsource from MSPs.
Hiring IT staff across the entire organization poses several challenges. For starters, the increasing war for top IT talent makes it difficult to find the best IT personnel. Also, there’s the issue of the high costs that come with hiring full-time IT personnel. Besides the wages and the cost of training them, you’ll also incur other costs such as healthcare and vacation benefits.
For this reason, most CIOs are opting to outsource IT staff to fill IT talent shortages. They are also making technological investments that either increase the productivity of existing staff or eliminate the need to rehire.
2. The Need to Make the Best Use of Internal IT Staff Expertise
The most successful CIOs recognize that their existing IT staff generally have the most knowledge of the organization’s internal processes and line of business applications. As such, having those staff members handle infrastructure management, maintenance, and level 1 end-user support is a big waste of their knowledge, provides little room for career growth, and often increases the risk of losing the best staff members to a more attractive position elsewhere.
By shifting IT work that doesn’t move the needle for the organization to an MSP, you’ll allow the transitioning of the existing staff to a better career path and more rewarding project work. When your staff members see that you find value in them, they are more likely to stick with your organization.
To recap: outsourcing part of your IT tasks frees up the backlog of your in-house IT staff, thereby allowing them to focus on critical tasks that improve the productivity of your business.
3. MSPs Have Better Resources, Maintenance, and Reporting Tools
CIOs also opt to outsource from MSPs because these entities have better resources, maintenance, and reporting tools and are also thorough at handling core infrastructure and support functions.
There are a few things more frustrating than investing in new technology only to find out that it does not meet the needs of your business – or your in-house IT team doesn’t know how to operate it properly.
One of the major benefits of outsourcing IT services to an MSP is constant access to up-to-date technology. You won’t have to worry about your systems becoming outdated or making an investment that doesn’t suit your business. In most cases, the cost of system upgrades is included in your MSP fee.
4. MSPs Are Particularly Effective for Organizations That Have IT Compliance Requirements
Your business’s data is subjected to a litany of regulations designed to keep it secure. Your internal team has to comb through hundreds of current standards and regulations to determine which ones apply to your business. They also have to ensure that all the applicable regulations are followed to the letter, all while still performing their daily tasks.
Given the multiple tasks that your internal staff handle, the likelihood of them making errors that may lead to your business being non-compliant is high. Needless to say, the consequences for violating these and other standards and regulations are hefty fines and damage to reputation.
An MSP can handle the complexities of compliance so that you don’t have to worry about violating data security regulations. Additionally, they can conduct audits and run reports that prove that your business meets all the compliance requirements. This saves your internal IT staff hundreds if not thousands of hours in the long run.
4it Solves All IT Challenges For Miami CIOs
In our forever evolving and quickly pivoting MSP space, our advantages are becoming clearer. In-house IT departments, with their limited staffing capacity and minimal exposure to systems outside what they’re used to, often find it hard to stay on top of the latest technology and security trends.
One of our advantages as an MSP is exposure to many systems and platforms across different clients. This gives us the knowledge and real-world experience to properly steer our clients in the right direction depending on their needs. An internal IT team may need to be trained and familiarized with a new platform, while an MSP would have already done several deployments of the same system and bring to the table real-world experience, which will save you time and money in the long run.
Take Advantage of 4it’s Proactive Managed IT Solutions
4it provides fully customizable, and cost-friendly Managed IT Services in Miami and Fort Lauderdale. Empower your business with our proactive network monitoring, responsive helpdesk, and cloud computing solutions. Contact us today for a free IT assessment.
Thanks to our friends at CTI Technology in Chicago for their help with this article.
