Talent Priorities for

the Digital Enterprise

Digitization creates new opportunities
across the enterprise and shifts
expectations around how IT supports the
rest of the business. This whitepaper will
help you anticipate changes in the talent
landscape to avoid the risks that talent
shortfalls create.

White Paper
CEB Corporate Leadership Council™
Contents

4 Executive Summary
Digitization is reshaping the talent landscape, not just within the IT function,
but also throughout the broader enterprise.

4 Introduction: Preparing IT for the New Talent Landscape

Almost two-thirds of IT leaders are changing or have recently changed their
operating model. These CIOs are transforming corporate IT into a function that
supports digitization across the enterprise. This includes changes to the skills,
competencies, and mind-set of the IT organization (Figure 1).

5 Why the Talent Landscape Is Changing

Digitization creates new opportunities across the enterprise and shifts
expectations around how IT supports the rest of the business.

6 The Talent Landscape in 2020

To prepare for 2020 and avoid the risks that talent shortfalls create, IT leaders
must anticipate changes in the talent landscape and the key steps they can
take to match their talent management strategies to future needs.

7 1. Recruit for Technical Versatility

For many years, IT roles were designed to fit into operating models that
segmented processes and delivery steps and that tapped outsourcing for
specific, often narrowly defined tasks. Digitization will compel IT groups to seek
“versatile players” who can help IT move faster and be more adaptive.

10 2. Focus on Collaboration and Engagement

In the past, IT employees have largely focused on developing key technical
skills that were critical to technology delivery. In the digital era, IT staff will
focus on developing key collaboration and engagement competencies and
behaviors.

14 3. Create Experience-Based Careers

Most career development in IT has been structured around a traditional, linear
model that provides steady, upward progress across positions in a functional
hierarchy. By 2020, IT leaders will instead design careers around critical
experiences inside and outside IT.
Contents

17 4. Build Fusion Teams

Traditional IT teams are defined by organizational boundaries and exist within
functional siloes. In the digital era, IT leaders will rely more heavily on a “fusion
team” model that cuts across enterprise boundaries and intermingles technical
and nontechnical staff.

19 5. Foster a Climate of Openness

Most IT employees have developed a mind-set that supports standardized,
regimented technology delivery. Digitization will demand a mind-set that is
collaborative, open to new ways of working, and risk tolerant.

21 6. Invest in Diversity
IT organizations struggle to attract and retain underrepresented and
nontraditional talent. Digitization will demand a greater diversity of skills,
perspectives, and experiences and will require the investment, policies, and
behaviors needed to attract new pools of candidates.

23 Conclusion
In 2020, high-performing IT organizations will differentiate themselves based
on their ability to respond to the ways digitization has changed the talent
landscape. IT leaders should take action now to ensure that their teams are
prepared to support broad-based digitization.

24 About This Research

To understand what will really contribute to effective IT talent management in
2020, we surveyed over 2,400 business leaders and over 500 IT employees and
spoke with over 100 CIOs and other IT leaders.

24 Presentation Material
Download Slides
Talent Priorities for
the Digital Enterprise
CEB Corporate Leadership Council™

Executive Summary

Digitization is reshaping the talent landscape, not just within the IT function, but
also throughout the broader enterprise. Digitization transforms the kinds of skills
IT teams need and resets the division of responsibilities between IT staff and
employees in the rest of the business. Digitization creates opportunities to pursue
new ways of working and emerging business models, but failure to secure critical
technical skills, cultivate the right mind-set among IT employees, and create a
flexible, cross-enterprise structure for managing talent will keep these opportunities
from being realized. For many IT leaders, talent change will be the rate-limiting
factor in their ability to take advantage of digital opportunities; therefore, an
effective workforce strategy is a critical component of overall digital strategy.

Introduction: Preparing IT for the New Talent Landscape

Almost two-thirds of IT leaders are changing or have recently changed their operating
model. These CIOs are transforming corporate IT into a function that supports
digitization across the enterprise. This includes changes to the skills, competencies,
and mind-set of the IT organization (Figure 1).

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 Figure 1: Key Features of the IT Operating Model for Digital

For many years, IT’s talent management has centered on sourcing and developing
key skills for technology delivery. Many IT functions structure their recruitment,
development, and workforce planning around putting specific technical skills in place.
Digitization, however, changes talent needs, and CIOs realize that new talent gaps
may present the biggest barrier to adopting the new IT operating model and realizing
their digitization goals.

Why the Talent Landscape Is Changing

Digitization creates new opportunities across the enterprise and
shifts expectations around how IT supports the rest of the business.
As business leaders pursue digitization and new roles and applications for technology
across their operations, channels, and products, they are finding that they must rethink
the role IT plays. They should plan to meet three broad changes across IT’s talent
landscape as they plan for 2020:

■ Digitization requires IT to play a more diverse range of roles. As companies

pursue new digital opportunities, business partners exhibit a wider range of IT
needs.

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 ■ Digitization changes where technical expertise lies. With more business leaders
leading their own technology initiatives, a growing number of technical employees
will sit outside IT and other traditionally technical functions, such as Marketing,
HR, and Finance.
■ Digitization reshapes how employees use technology. As technology plays an
increasingly central role in all parts of the organization, all employees will engage
in technical tasks such as running analytics projects and building applications.

Digitization raises the costs of getting talent wrong. IT leaders without an effective
talent management strategy will not be able to meet business leaders’ demand for new
and continuously changing support from IT. A reactive, piecemeal approach to filling
IT’s skills gaps creates uncertainty about what is expected of employees, which, in turn,
lowers staff effort and increases turnover. And higher turnover is expensive and makes
IT leaders vulnerable to the whims of an increasingly tight IT talent market, while also
making longer-term changes to the IT organization’s culture nearly impossible.

The Talent Landscape in 2020

To prepare for 2020 and avoid the risks that talent shortfalls create,
IT leaders must anticipate changes in the talent landscape and the
key steps they can take to match their talent management strategies
to future needs.
As IT leaders look ahead to 2020, they must evolve their talent strategy to reflect six
critical priorities (Figure 2):

1. Recruit for technical versatility. Seek staff with the ability to adapt and work in
more versatile technology roles.

2. Focus on collaboration and engagement. Prepare staff to flex modes of working

and collaborate directly with business partners.

3. Create experience-based careers. Offer new pathways that give staff experiences
for growth.

4. Build fusion teams. Mix delivery teams with IT and staff from other functions to
embrace agile at scale.

5. Foster a climate of openness. Promote appropriate risk-taking and adaptability to

digital business models.

6. Invest in diversity. Strengthen retention and development for women and other
underrepresented groups.

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 Figure 2: IT Talent Priorities for 2020

1. Recruit for Technical Versatility

For many years, IT roles were designed to fit into operating models
that segmented processes and delivery steps and that tapped
outsourcing for specific, often narrowly defined tasks. Digitization
will compel IT groups to seek “versatile players” who can help IT
move faster and be more adaptive.
Why Will IT Recruit for Technical Versatility Over More Targeted Skill Sets?

To determine if the IT skills and competencies that companies need are changing,
we analyzed IT job listings posted between 2012 and 2016, finding that while more
targeted listings are still the norm for IT jobs, postings for a broader, versatile profile
are rising (Figure 3).

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 Figure 3: Change in the Mix of IT Staff

Traditional IT roles focus on one area within one IT domain (e.g., an identity and
access management role in information risk). However, the IT roles that are emerging
to support digitization demand more varied skills and an employee who can act as a
“versatile player” and work broadly within a business and technical domain. A versatile
player, for example, plays a number of different roles in application delivery (e.g.,
development, testing, requirements gathering and analysis).

Several factors are driving demand for employees who fit this profile:

■ Technical skills have a shorter shelf life. The pace of digitization means that roles
defined around specific technology skills expire quickly, and employees must learn
and apply new skills frequently and rapidly.
■ Digital initiatives require IT staff with breadth and ability to flex. Initiatives in
areas such as digital product development, omnichannel, and big data cut across
IT domains and business areas and channels, and they often extend into products.
Employees must cultivate broad, interdisciplinary experience and demonstrate the
flexibility needed to work in new contexts.
■ Digitization places a greater emphasis on combining technical skills with so-
called “soft skills.” As more nontechnical employees lead their own technology
initiatives, technical employees must be skilled at engaging and working with
business partners.

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What Will Technical Versatility Look Like in 2020?

Many analysts are calling for a host of new digital roles to respond to digitization.
Although legitimate reasons may exist for certain new roles (e.g., chief data officer),
the best IT organizations will grow their stock of versatile players—not add new digital
specialists to their functions.

Figure 4: Activities of IT Staff in 2020

Versatile players will take diverse roles and partner with different internal IT
stakeholders, business partners, and external staff (Figure 4). In 2020, versatile players
will be different from today’s IT workforce in the following ways:

■ Mobility: Because IT will no longer focus exclusively on delivery, and will rely less
on stage-gated ways of working, versatile players will move around IT and business
areas as demands change. To do this, more roles will be in-house, and reliance on
[1]
outsourcing staff will continue to decline.
■ Emphasis on continuous learning: Staff will learn new technical skills as needed.
■ Focus on customer-centric design skills: Some staff will work on technologies that
go directly into customer-facing products, and this will require an understanding
of customer experience that goes beyond traditional UI design skills.
■ Data skills: All IT roles will require a deeper understanding of data strategy,
management, and architecture.
■ Risk taking: For versatile players to succeed, IT’s climate will need to move from
risk averse to openness to appropriate risk taking.

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Take Action

Leading IT executives take the following approaches to recruit or build more versatile
players:

■ Reframe job and roles descriptions for versatility. Many IT organizations are
revising role and job descriptions to better reflect the emerging skills that
digital initiatives require. Recognizing that adding more requirements to job
descriptions reduces the likelihood of finding suitable candidates, the most
progressive IT leaders take a different approach by redesigning roles to place a
greater emphasis on key behaviors and responsibilities rather than focusing on
narrowly defined skills. At Mutual of Omaha, for example, leaders in the Information
Risk function reframed job descriptions around more general technical skills and
responsibilities. Rather than recruiting for security applications developers, they
sought applications developers with a demonstrated ability to learn new processes
and technologies and an interest in security.
■ Create profiles for key positions based on future skills needs. IT organizations
that want to stay ahead of the curve develop strategic workforce plans to
ensure that they have the right versatile talent in place. The most progressive
IT organizations create holistic profiles for key positions based on a systematic
analysis of emerging and future needs. At Australia Post, IT and HR leaders create
“success profiles” using data collected from interviews and focus groups with
incumbents in key roles; internal surveys of role incumbents’ direct managers,
peers, and direct reports; and external benchmarking data. These “success
profiles” are used to inform ongoing strategic workforce planning.
■ Enable diamond-shaped career paths for experience-based learning. Instead of
traditional career ladders, progressive companies are shaping career paths like
a diamond to encourage employees to acquire a broader range of skills and
experiences by combining lateral and vertical career moves. (For more on new
career paths, see priority 3.)

2. Focus on Collaboration and Engagement

In the past, IT employees have largely focused on developing key
technical skills that were critical to technology delivery. In the
digital era, IT staff will focus on developing key collaboration and
engagement competencies and behaviors.
Why Will IT Focus on Collaboration and Engagement?

[2]
IT groups have traditionally focused on cultivating process-oriented competencies,
such as the ability to follow directions, design practices and systems to simplify
work, and use resources efficiently. However, IT leaders are shifting their focus to
collaboration and engagement competencies such as influencing or the ability to
assert ideas and persuade others. This change is due to a rise in the number of business

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leaders funding and steering their own technology initiatives, as well as the growing
need for IT staff who can effectively pivot between a variety of engagement and
collaboration activities based on the digital ambition and ability of their business
partners.

The most common collaboration and engagement activities IT staff perform include
evangelizing, consulting, brokering, coaching, and delivering (Figure 5). When IT
staff evangelize, for example, they educate internal stakeholders on the benefits of
digitization and high-potential opportunities to use new technology. As consultants,
IT staff combine their knowledge of the existing IT environment and the goals and
constraints of business units to equip business partners with the tools and knowledge
they need to take full advantage of their technology investments without stepping in
to take ownership. Brokering involves creating and facilitating clear, visible networks
that provide seamless access to technical resources and that all employees can draw
on to make the most of investments in technology. Finally, as coaches, IT staff address
the last mile of enterprise-wide digitization by helping employees in the rest of the
business build the skills and competencies they need to effectively use new digital
capabilities.

Figure 5: Five IT Engagement Activities for the Digital Enterprise

What Will Collaboration and Engagement Look Like in 2020?

Although IT employees must demonstrate proficiency across a range of competencies,

a handful of competencies disproportionately drive high performance. The

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collaboration and engagement competencies IT leaders are looking for to drive high
performance in 2020 include:

■ Business results orientation: Employees seek to understand business needs and

to deliver prompt, efficient, high-quality service to the business.
■ Influence: Employees apply different strategies to convince others to change their
opinions or plans.
■ Relationship management: Employees create relationships with new
acquaintances quickly and confidently.
■ Teamwork: Employees promote and facilitate coordination and cooperation
among peers.
■ Creativity: Employees apply original thinking to produce new ideas and innovative
products.
■ Learning agility: Employees rapidly acquire new knowledge and learn new skills.

Although demand for engagement and collaboration competencies is increasing

dramatically, a significant portion of the IT workforce is below proficient today (Figure
6).

Figure 6: Growth in Demand for Key IT Competencies

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Take Action

The most progressive companies have taken several key steps to prepare their teams
to effectively engage and collaborate with business partners:

■ Add competencies that support collaboration and engagement to IT’s

competency model. To prepare teams for the digital era, IT leaders are
revisiting their competency model and prioritizing competencies related to
collaboration and engagement. For example, IT leaders at Heineken identified new
competencies such as “digital business context,” the capacity to analyze trends in
how other businesses are implementing digital technologies in specific business
domains, the ability to understand and help shape business partners’ emerging
digital capability needs, and knowledge of digital capabilities and vendors.
■ Evaluate staff and identify gaps around competencies needed for digitization.
IT leaders should measure employee proficiency on competencies that will be
essential in the digital era. Progressive leaders identify key opportunities for formal
and informal experiential learning followed by assessment. This approach gives
IT leaders a sense of where they should anticipate gaps and allows them to
proactively allocate training and development resources to close those gaps.

Case in Point
Inform Digital Transformation Through Talent

To ensure that IT employees are prepared to support Heineken’s digital ambitions,

IT leaders evaluate all staff against their newly defined “digital business context”
competency. They design training that provides opportunities to develop and
demonstrate proficiency in digital business context via virtual learning and exercises,
coaching, and experienced-based learning. All staff are expected to demonstrate
a baseline level of proficiency. Using data collected from this initiative, IT leaders
at Heineken were able to conduct a competency audit across the organization and
create a heat map to identify gaps in IT’s preparedness for digitization.

■ Communicate how and why competencies have changed. Staff may not
exhibit the competencies needed for engagement and collaboration not because
they lack the capability, but because they do not fully understand what’s
expected of them. First, tell employees directly what competencies and
behavioral expectations have changed. Highlight new-to-world competencies and
underscore where existing competencies need to be adjusted. Next, link the new
competency expectations to role expectations. Provide examples of actions that
employees can take to demonstrate new or adjusted competencies.

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3. Create Experience-Based Careers
Most career development in IT has been structured around a
traditional, linear model that provides steady, upward progress
across positions in a functional hierarchy. By 2020, IT leaders
will instead design careers around critical experiences inside and
outside IT.
Why Should IT Create Experienced-Based Careers?

In the past, career paths were structured around gradually ascending positions within
functional siloes (e.g., associate developer, developer, senior developer, development
manager). IT career paths are shifting away from this linear, position-based approach
and toward a more flexible, nonlinear model that exposes employees to critical
experiences and opportunities for on-the-job learning. Although most business and
IT leaders have always emphasized the importance of on-the-job training to develop
critical talent, the new model places these experiences, rather than positions, at the
center of their talent management and development strategy.

Three broad changes are driving the shift to an experience-based career model. Digital
initiatives place a growing premium on cross-functional experiences and the technical
versatility those experiences generate. At the same time, companies are shedding
layers of middle management to become flatter and leaner, which, in turn, leads IT
employees to worry about a lack of future career opportunities.

What Should Experience-Based Careers Look Like in 2020?

The new IT career path will differ from career ladders or pyramids (Figure 7) in several
ways:

■ Careers will be designed around experiences, not positions. Employees will

map their career progression based on experiences that build current and future
capabilities—not on positions, titles, or an organizational chart. Companies will
need to restructure incentives for both managers and employees to emphasize
developing specific capabilities, rather than promotions up a career ladder.
■ Business needs and employee interest will drive lateral moves. Employees will
seek development opportunities in other parts of the company, and managers
will encourage direct reports to move across team, functional, and organization
boundaries.
■ Employees will focus on their “employability.” Employees will plan their moves
around building the capabilities, skills, knowledge, experiences, and personal
attributes that make them more valuable internally or externally, and thus more
likely to achieve success in their careers.

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 Figure 7: Promotion-Based vs. Growth-Based Career Culture

Take Action

More than 90% of organizations want to shift to an experienced-based career model,

but only 10% of organizations have successfully implemented one. Most employees are
oriented toward the predictable promotions of the old career model, and the absence
of regular opportunities for upward promotion may harm employee engagement. IT
leaders should take two steps to move to this model:

■ Embed experienced-based development in performance management.

Progressive companies are designing employee development around activities
and experiences that build key skills. They identify the best experiences to
develop high-value skills—such as project leadership, budget management, and
exposure to specific technical projects—and directly tie employee career paths
to developing those skills. Companies that use this approach find that it
closes skill gaps, increases employee engagement, and facilitates agile resource
management.

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Case in Point
“Experience-Based” Skills Accentuators

To ensure that employees were equipped to add value to the business and satisfied
with their opportunities for advancement, Kimberly-Clark identified a set of broadly
available work experiences that were also proven to help develop high-value
employee skills. These “career accentuators” include experiences such as team
leadership, financial planning, complex project participation, and experience in a
particular business function.

In addition to evaluating employees against traditional performance objectives,

managers also evaluate employees against these career accentuators. Performance
on career accentuators is used to guide individual advancement and to identify
qualified internal candidates for open positions.

■ Promote lateral movement by building career maps. Career mapping helps

employees manage cross-functional moves and think clearly about their future
choices in a complex and volatile business environment. National Grid (Figure 8)
built career maps to help employees visualize how they can advance into critical
roles. Focusing on experiences allows managers to highlight the benefits of lateral
moves and helps employees visualize the best path for advancement.

Figure 8: Generate Intentional Movement with Career Maps

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4. Build Fusion Teams
Traditional IT teams are defined by organizational boundaries and
exist within functional siloes. In the digital era, IT leaders will rely
more heavily on a “fusion team” model that cuts across enterprise
boundaries and intermingles technical and nontechnical staff.
Why Will IT Build Fusion Teams?

Today, most teams form within functions and collaborate across a formal interface.
This model, which relies on multiple handoffs and formally separates business and
technology skills, cannot support digitization. Digital initiatives often require IT and
business partners to collaborate closely and iteratively. Second, digitization demands
that technical and nontechnical employees all contribute business and technology
skills. Finally, responding to digital opportunities requires teams that can rapidly form,
adjust, and disband as these opportunities arise. Fusion teams with participants from
across organizational boundaries and functions offer a way to enable ongoing and
seamless collaboration, resource allocation, and talent management.

What Will Fusion Teams Looks Like in 2020?

Fusion teams will build on existing structures that support hybrid initiatives (e.g.,
MarTech, FinTech) and cross-functional and iterative initiatives (e.g., DevOps, Agile)
that all demand close and continuous collaboration between employees in different
organizational units. These emerging teams include everything from standing
product-support teams to temporary, innovation teams developing proofs of concept.
The fusion model differs from existing teams in four key ways (Figure 9):

■ Fusion teams form across traditional boundaries. These teams intermingle staff
from different functions, business lines, and third-party partners.
■ Fusion teams integrate business and technical skills. Team members are expected
to contribute both technical skills and business skills.
■ Fusion teams deliver technology via continuous collaboration. These teams are
more likely to use an iterative delivery structure.
■ Fusion teams draw leaders from across the enterprise. Team members report to
leaders who sit outside their function or outside their established reporting line.

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 Figure 9: From Traditional Teams to Fusion Teams

Take Action

IT and business leaders should plan for the organizational, process, and mind-set
changes required to support fusion teams. Leading organizations have identified
several steps to build and support fusion teams:

■ Focus on the desired outcomes that fusion teams generate.Early adopters of

DevOps and Agile methodologies have found that efforts to build and support
fusion teams frequently fail as a result of too much focus on getting the prescribed
practices, team structures, and tool sets right. Leading companies find that when
implementing DevOps, effectively structuring and supporting the cross-functional
team is contingent on having a clear sense of the product outcomes the teams
need to generate.
■ Make reporting lines and incentives function agnostic. Traditional reporting
lines and function-specific incentives block employees from fully contributing
to a fusion team. A critical first-step for restructuring reporting lines and
incentives involves overhauling the metrics that measure employee and manager
performance. The ultimate goal is to promote a sense of shared responsibility for
cross-functional outcomes. IT organizations that have had the most success with
hybrid initiatives have found that identifying shared metrics and emphasizing their
importance on team scorecards has been essential to making fusion teams work.

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Case in Point
“Driver/Drafter” Approach to Outcomes from DevOps

IT leaders at Molina Healthcare developed a “drafter/driver” framework to

identify and align shared responsibilities across employees from Applications
and Infrastructure functions working together on DevOps teams. The framework
identifies “driver” roles that are ultimately responsible for delivering a particular
outcome and “drafter” roles that are responsible for supporting “driver” roles. With
interdependencies and points of commonality clearly defined, IT leaders at Molina
select key metrics that accelerate this specific type of cross-functional collaboration
and unify team members from previously distinct functions.

■ Make IT budgeting and workforce planning iterative and cross-functional.

Fusion teams require processes that allow managers to easily identify and
share resources. For this to work, business leaders should implement a new
approach to internal budgeting and strategic workforce planning. In the past,
business and IT leaders used annual or ongoing projects or programs as the
primary unit for planning. These projects and programs usually aligned to fixed
functional boundaries. As IT and business leaders structure fusion teams that
adhere to a variety of timelines and align to business capabilities that span
function boundaries, budgeting and strategic workforce planning will have to
mirror this shift. This means that IT budget and workforce planning should involve
leaders from other parts of the business and should be conducted iteratively (e.g.,
quarterly or as-needed, rather than annually).

5. Foster a Climate of Openness

Most IT employees have developed a mind-set that supports
standardized, regimented technology delivery. Digitization will
demand a mind-set that is collaborative, open to new ways of
working, and risk tolerant.
Why Must IT Foster a Climate of Openness?

After years of centralization and standardization, 94% of IT employees exhibit a mind-

set that is process-centric, risk averse, or siloed. To support digitization, IT leaders
[3]
must invest in changing their organizational climate to ensure that IT employees
are open to change, experimentation, and new ways of collaborating and that they
learn from failure. IT organizations that have already invested in establishing a strong
climate of openness have found that they are over three times more likely to deliver
business value than organizations whose climate of openness is average.

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What Should a Climate of Openness in IT Look Like in 2020?

IT leaders must dedicate resources to establishing a climate of openness, which has

several distinctive characteristics (Figure 10):

■ Openness to collaboration outside immediate teams: IT employees are receptive

to and seek out opportunities to work with colleagues outside their day-to-day
work group.
■ Openness to new ways of working: IT employees support experimentation with
technology in all parts of the enterprise and challenge conventional wisdom.
■ Openness to appropriate risk and uncertainty: IT employees are willing to take
on reasonable risk and are able to learn from failure.

Figure 10: Measuring IT's Climate of Openness

Take Action

Although efforts to change an organization’s culture—or the values and beliefs

employees share—can only happen over a long period of time and are often difficult
to control, influencing an organization’s climate is easier. Climate, or employees’
perceptions, are much easier to change and can gradually reshape the deeply rooted
values and beliefs that underpin organizational culture. For business leaders, this
means that creating the right climate can generate more immediate changes to
employees’ behaviors and mind-sets, while also contributing to long-term cultural

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change. Progressive organizations have found several ways to establish an open
climate in IT:

■ Update IT’s scorecard for digitization. Scorecards and dashboards that focus
on on-time, on-budget, and operational performance discourage employees from
experimentation and seeking out new ways of working. To combat this, IT leaders
are unbalancing their scorecards to emphasize metrics that matter most to
digitization, such as:

■ Time to market for new digital capabilities,

■ Percentage of projects aligned with corporate digital goals
■ Percentage of innovative digital experiments evolving into full projects.

■ Share lessons learned from failure. Many IT employees avoid innovation projects
because they worry that the possibility of a negative outcome will limit their
compensation, career advancement, or their standing in the organization. For
example, in an effort to encourage employees to learn from failure, DirectTV
encouraged IT employees to share and learn from their experiences of the right
kind of failure (e.g., through experimentation, not policy violation). This initiative
—which used gamification, internal social media platforms, and sentiment analysis
—was so effective that it grew to include employees throughout the organization.
■ Create opportunities for collaborative interactions. Only 30% of IT employees
have regular contact with employees in other parts of the business. As more IT
employees are intermingled with employees from other parts of the business,
the most progressive IT and business leaders are taking steps to expose all
IT employees to their colleagues who sit outside IT in a way that creates
deep understanding of business problems. For example, Webster Bank organizes
“workflow” shadowing. Unlike job shadowing, which exposes employees to the
day-to-day tasks of one person in the organization, workflow shadowing invites
employees to observe how a process flows from employee to employee across
the organization. Employees gain insight into the priorities, challenges, and
interdependences that inform the day-to-day work of many of their peers in the
organization. Many IT organizations have also organized master classes led by
business partners and “hackathons” during which IT employees are invited to
analyze and develop solutions to real business problems.

6. Invest in Diversity
IT organizations struggle to attract and retain underrepresented and
nontraditional talent. Digitization will demand a greater diversity of
skills, perspectives, and experiences and will require the investment,
policies, and behaviors needed to attract new pools of candidates.

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Why Must IT Invest in Diversity?

IT groups tend to source from homogenous talent pools, and they have traditionally
rewarded a narrow set of highly technical skills and process-centric behaviors.
Because digitization demands IT employees with more exposure to the business,
with versatile skillsets, and who are open to new ways of working, IT leaders will
seek out and cultivate staff with backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives that
are currently underrepresented in IT. And as companies find that they must create
more digital products for broader swaths of their customer base, IT leaders such as
Capital One Global CIO Rob Alexander are finding that they need more representative
staffs. In a conversation with the publication CIO US, Alexander explained, "[W]e
serve customers across every demographic, and so it's really important that we have
a base of associates who represent each and understand the needs of all of those
[4]
consumers." Finally, a tightening labor market will compel IT leaders to explore
talent outside existing IT talent pools and pipelines to “fish where others do not.”

What Should Diversity in IT Look Like in 2020?

Diversity and inclusion in IT must transition from an ad hoc, side of the desk project to
a segment of IT’s overall strategy. Best-in-class IT leaders will devote more resources
to creating a diverse IT organization:

■ Leading IT executives will invest in hiring and retaining employees from

underrepresented groups. CIOs will focus on increasing the number of women,
underrepresented ethnic and racial minorities, employees with disabilities, and
other groups.
■ Leading IT executives will focus on growing the share of IT employees who
have nontraditional backgrounds. IT leaders will also expand the definition of
diversity to include different mind-sets and experiences. In addition to seeking
employees who are demographically underrepresented in IT, IT leaders will actively
look for employees who add to IT’s “cognitive diversity” or blend of backgrounds,
experiences, and perspectives. To achieve this, they will focus on recruiting and
developing employees with nontraditional training (e.g., coding boot camps,
apprenticeship programs, military training). They will also drive recruitment efforts
focused on employees with professional backgrounds that are rare in IT today (e.g.,
marketers, sales specialists, visual designers).

Take Action

Efforts to improve diversity and inclusion in IT are frequently deprioritized or

abandoned after a short period of time. Success in diversity and inclusion requires a
long-term commitment and tolerance for slow progress. That said, IT organizations
that cultivate diverse and inclusive staff have found a few simple near-term steps to
take:

■ Make internal recruitment more diverse. When filling internal positions, IT often
relies on word-of-mouth recruiting, employee referrals, and selection committees
that are not diverse. These approaches create an unintentional bias against

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 candidates who are not already well represented in IT. To counteract this, IT leaders
should communicate openings to all employees across the company, include
underrepresented and nontraditional candidates in the final candidate pool, and
ensure that selection teams mirror IT’s desired level of diversity.
■ Close the gap between formal and informal policies. Many organizations have
implemented formal policies to improve diversity and inclusion but find that
employees perceive that they will be penalized for taking advantage of them.
Progressive organizations invest in closing the gap between formal policies and
actual practices and behaviors.

Case in Point
All Roles Flex

Flexible schedules are most helpful for aspiring women leaders, yet Telstra found
that employees were hesitant to use them because the formal policies were
perceived to be “special benefits” and career limiting. To counteract these informal
perceptions and ensure that policies implemented to improve diversity were not
blocked, Telstra implemented a new approach to flexibility.

Under the new approach, employees are expected to determine what working
arrangement works best for them. While managers may veto an employee’s
preferred flexible arrangement for business reasons, they must also work with the
employee to find a viable alternative. To accommodate this, managers are trained to
effectively manage teams of flexible workers. At the leadership level, senior leaders
are expected to model effective flexible working arrangements for all employees.

Conclusion
In 2020, high-performing IT organizations will differentiate themselves based on their
ability to respond to the ways digitization has changed the talent landscape. IT leaders
should take action now to ensure that their teams are prepared to support broad-
based digitization.

Digitization will demand fundamentally different skills, competencies, and mind-sets

from IT staff. As IT leaders overhaul their approach to managing IT talent, they should
act on the six talent priorities that will distinguish IT talent in 2020 from IT talent
today. IT organizations that incorporate these changes into their talent management
strategy will be better positioned to contribute to enterprise-wide digital goals.

HRBPs can use this research to understand their CIOs’ top priorities and the talent
implications of the changing IT function.

© 2018 Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates. All Rights Reserved. 23 gartner.com/ceb
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[1]
Our IT Budget Benchmark Survey found that spending on outsourcing dropped
from 17% in 2013 to 11% in 2016. At the same time, IT staff as a percentage of total
employees increased.

[2]
Competencies are defined as the mix of skills, knowledge, and abilities required to
deliver a desired objective.

[3]
Climate is defined as a group’s perceptions about the nature of their work.

[4]
“Diversity crucial to digital transformation, says Capital One Global CIO Rob
Alexander,” 1 November 2016. CIO US.

About This Research

To understand what will really contribute to effective IT talent management in 2020,
we surveyed over 2,400 business leaders and over 500 IT employees and spoke with
over 100 CIOs and other IT leaders. We also drew on interviews with thousands of HR
leaders conducted by our HR practice, insights from the TalentNeuron’s™ database of
more than 2 billion worldwide job postings, and aggregate findings from more than
35 million talent assessments delivered by our Talent Measurement Solutions.

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