To achieve digital transformation, capable talent can be hard to find

This is part of a series highlighting key takeaways from our latest report Investing in Digital Transformation and Product Development. (<– Download the full report for free!)

The biggest challenge for technology organizations today is not the tech stack; it’s finding capable talent to manage the technology, according to new research. Here’s an eye-opening statistic: 90% of product development decision-makers agree that finding and hiring the right talent is a major pain point.

Given recent concerns about the global labor crisis, we are not shocked by this data about the challenge of finding digital talent. What is surprising is that organizations do not list improving human capital as a top priority. In fact, hiring the right people came in last (20%) on the list of top priorities organizations plan to focus on in 2024.

“Securing and retaining quality human capital is one of the top challenges we see at enterprise companies today. Even with all of the best technology in the world, people are truly the most important part of digital transformation.” Andrew Dennis, VP, Consulting, Modus Create

Improving developer experience to attract digital talent

In the technology sector, it is more important than ever to take care of digital talent. While organizations may not necessarily be prioritizing finding talent this year, given all the other challenges they are facing, we are seeing a growing interest in improving developer experience, which includes the culture, technology, and processes surrounding your software development team. This is encouraging because we know that when companies focus on digital transformation, we find the developer experience is elevated as a result.

As our CEO Pat Sheridan explains in his article “Digital transformation is more than AI: you still need a customer-focused strategy”:

“If you really want to measure the success of your digital transformation, measure the satisfaction of your knowledge workers. Building a culture of innovation and improving the customer experience stems from a successful developer experience and, by extension, the experience of your product and platform teams.”

Finding the right partner

Another way to improve human capital is to find the right partners. Working with trustworthy and knowledgeable partners to help execute digital programs is of utmost importance for most organizations. 94% of decision-makers surveyed in the report feel that finding an experienced and adequate partner to work with on new product development is important.

83% of organizations are using consultants for the development, deployment, and management of digital products, and 25% of organizations recently outsourced more than half of their latest customer-facing digital product overhaul. Interestingly, those who outsourced more than half of their overhaul were significantly more likely to have had an extremely positive experience than those who outsourced less than half.

When it comes to outsourcing, decision-makers surveyed in the report feel that it would be most helpful to outsource cloud infrastructure or migration, application security, and application modernization to a capable partner. Those areas are perfectly suited to a partner, as digital consultants have playbooks in place to perform complicated tasks.

This confirms what we already sensed: For many organizations, it is more economical to work on digital transformation with a partner than to find capable talent and orchestrate large-scale initiatives in-house.

For more insights, access our research report on Digital Transformation and Product Development.