Dawn of a new age of opportunity in IT services
Australia’s unemployment rate shot up to 7.1% in July 2020. Some sectors were worse affected than others, with travel, retail and hospitality feeling the brunt of it.
The IT sector got off lightly with less than 15,000 redundancies and around 20,000 furloughed staff out a total number of 250,000 working in the industry nationally, when you add full time and self-employed.
The ABS statistics only tell part of the story. The more significant revelation from COVID has been a realisation that the way organisations adopt and operationalise technology needs to change. Put bluntly, most organisations are paying too much for resources they don’t need — at least not full time — and when they do need them, they can’t manage them effectively to deliver business outcomes.
Why is this so? Well the experience of many organisations during COVID has been their IT has run perfectly well with either contracted in resource, shifting them to work remotely or a mix of offshore services to onshore — mainly those services involving IT support and end customer technical support. The same goes for innovation and systems development. The gig economy and rapid growth of IT services platforms like UpWork, Equal Experts and Digital Village has made it easy for businesses to pick resources they need off-the-shelf, with clearly defined outcomes at a competitive price.
The big takeaway for those who were employed during the lockdown was that remote working is both productive and often preferred. Provided there is a dedicated space at home and decent WiFi bandwidth, the overall work-life balance equation improved and the sense of being in control of one’s life also ticks up.
Many people felt stressed and unsure, to begin with, but by the time lockdown came to an end and they were able to make choices about whether to work from home or return to the office, the vast majority wanted to continue homeworking to some degree. Atlassian, Australia’s largest locally owned IT company, tells us 76% of their staff prefer to avoid their office altogether when they need to concentrate on a project. This stat, along with 40 others gathered by Hubspot, underlines remote working is here to stay and has profound implications for the IT services sector in particular.
Any organisation seeking to optimise its IT resources post-COVID has the opportunity to make some changes which both improve their capability to develop and support systems. It’s also going to be a relatively easy sell to people if they chose to move to a remote working or semi outsourced model, as most have now come to terms with the benefits and ways to make it work for them.
But there is a word of warning: “Most anyone can learn to be a great virtual employee. The top skills to learn are setting healthy boundaries between your work life and personal life and building relationships virtually.”
― Larry English, Office Optional: How to Build a Connected Culture with Virtual Teams
