【正文】 s necessary skill sets. It is also important not to restrict skills development to current IT personnel. In most anizations, there is a cadre of expert users— people who work on the business side, but possess advanced systems skills. This bination of business understanding and vision with IT skills makes them prime candidates for a move into IT. These people are often extremely effective at bridging the gap between IT and the business, primarily because of the credibility they bring. Effort should be expended in identifying these people and encouraging their ties with IT. 3 Be Creative in Your Approach to Hiring IT anizations will always need to hire new recruits if for no other reason than to fill vacancies due to retirements. Hiring will also be necessary to respond to needs that arise due to urgent business opportunities, unforeseen problems, or through unexpected turnover. Hiring presents an opportunity to wele new people with varied backgrounds who bring novel ideas and different viewpoints into the anization. Prudent management should be able to harness this influx of talent and energy to the benefit of the anization. Given the market situation as depicted earlier in this chapter, it is clear that new approaches to hiring are necessary. This observation is based on the fact that those anizations fairing the best in terms of hiring are using some very creative approaches. Some of the advice offered by members of the group follows: ? Maximize your hiring channels— jobs should be advertised in newspapers, on the Inter, on campuses, and in professional/trade journals. Examine media such as television and radio that are pervasive in society, but rarely used for recruiting. Participate in job fairs. Use headhunter agencies and search firms. There does not appear to be one best solution. Casting the widest possible is remended. One anization found that their municipal government, whose mandate was to encourage new business development in their geographic area, was willing to work with them on joint marketing campaigns to attract new employees. ? Attract your temporary help— most IT departments augment their regular staff with parttime personnel. Parttime help typically accounts for about 15— 20% of the total headcount. These individuals, who may be contractors, outsourcers,。s needed skills both now and in the future. If assigning the responsibility solely to individual employees is at one end of the continuum and developing a resource center approach is at the other end, an interesting midway approach is the development of employee managed skills teams. With this approach, teams assume the responsibility for developing critical skills plans to facilitate and support the employee skills inventory. Teams could be anized around technology platforms or along business lines. With each of these various approaches, the mon thread is the formalization of skill setplanning。s employability inside and outside the pany. How does the process work? To begin with, the skill needs assessment must be made public. This permits each employee to pare the anization39。re not meeting the expectations of many of our employees (ITAC, 2021). This needs to be addressed. It is well known that the cost of retaining an employee is a fraction of the total cost of acquiring a new employee. For this reason alone, it is in an anization39。s current environment as one with host MVS transaction processors, host VM applications, many departmental local area works (LANs), some midrange equipment, and an emerging enterprise LAN service. This was in contrast to their future environment which used the mainframe primarily as a data server, VM applications on Lotus Notes, transaction processors on AIX, and application integration on the workstation. Moving from the current technical environment to its desired future environment will drive a shift in the types of skill needed as well as the quantity of skills needed. ? Assess the business environment. It is important to assess the business environment since it will dictate many of the critical skills needed for the future. Failure to do so can result in some nasty surprises. In one pany, the business was planning some extensive process reengineering to move them into a highly matrix environment with crossfunctional clients. This could only be supported with highly integrated data, and the capability to provide this was not currently available. The IT group was not aware of this situation in time to build the necessary resources and, as a result, forced the plans to be delayed. What is the partnership between IT and the business? Is the business looking to IT for technical leadership or workable options? Will there be significant change in the nature of the relationship between IT and the business? What sort of change is anticipated? In most anizations, the relationship between IT and the business is being more plex. This drives the demand for additional leadership and relationship skills. Making these assessments, apart from the technological considerations, will highlight the need for skills to be acquired by IT. ? Assess the work environment. Because most anizations already perform an annual budgeting exercise for IT expenditures, an assessment of the actual systems to be delivered over the next two years can be created with reasonable accuracy. This assessment should be adjusted in light of the assessments of the technical and business environments (as described above). The analysis must classify the work by technical environment (., different platforms), estimate the amount of work, and identify the necessary roles (project managers, programmers, business analysts, etc.) and the numbers required for each role. This will outline the skills base necessary in the near term. A second aspect of work assessment is creating an inventory of re