Are you hiring for technology roles of the past?  Below are three roles that your business needs to evaluate and consider outsourcing based on today’s technology landscape.  This is not an easy process, as there are PEOPLE in these roles that typically have reached the end of their careers or cannot obtain a similarly compensated role elsewhere.

We do not envy the business leaders in this position, but encourage them to proactively address this for the greater good of the business.  Focus on the ROLE and your business needs.  At a minimum give your business a chance to evolve as retirement and natural attrition occurs.

IT Director

This role was created based on two different scenarios.  Scenario one is a business leader needs to “check the box” that someone is managing technology, especially once there are more than 20 employees or multiple locations.  No one wants to manage a single helpdesk person, so instead we are going to hire that role, call it an IT Director, and then hope for the best.  Fast forward 3 years and the business has 100 people with a single IT Director and helpdesk tech supporting it all.

Scenario two is when there is someone internally handling technology informally who wants to do it full time.  The IT Director role is created to justify an increase in pay along with the promise of letting them “build a team” in the future.  This is a tough one because most IT Directors started with the company years ago and have “progressed” to this role.  It puts the business in the position of choosing between what’s best for the business and keeping a role that is no longer needed.

Helpdesk

A helpdesk is a reactive, tactical function required for all businesses.  There is no gain to having this in-house until you are well past 1,000 end users.  Even then, most business chose to continue outsourcing.

Today’s IT providers can handle your helpdesk needs with an efficiency and speed that is not possible to build in-house.  There also are limited training opportunities and upward mobility in these roles, which leads to high turnover and title inflation (see IT Director above).

The helpdesk roles are also used as justification for an IT Director/Manager position.  Once this is in place it is difficult for the business to reset and undo this.  Unfortunately this comes to light during a security breach that should not have happened, and the business realizes the risk of having in-house IT roles that now are causing the very issues they are supposed to stop.

System and Network Admins

The idea that servers and networks need to be “administered” is not valid in today’s cloud based world.  These roles are a holdover from on-premise applications and servers along with outdated network access methods.  Obviously this will be completely rejected by the internal people in these roles, especially if they have not evolved with the advent of cloud services.  The red flag here is, “I don’t trust the cloud” or “I want to be able to touch my servers”.

Allowing these roles to “evolve” leads to lower productivity and security for your business.  Not that people in these roles do not want to learn and succeed, they do, but they do so using the business as a training and experimentation lab.  From a risk perspective this is not acceptable anymore.

Finding an experienced technology partner to handle the roles above will increase the security and productivity of your business.  Another unexpected benefit of re-aligning these roles is giving the PEOPLE in them the opportunity to work in another part of the business or having them move to working in a technology company that provides them with the training and upward mobility they deserve!