Bridging the innovation skills gap

Chris Baynham Hughes at Red Hat offers three ways to address skills and innovation demand in your organisation

We know that continuous innovation is what keeps businesses competitive. It provides value to users, enables new routes to market and improves customer loyalty. Crucially, innovation paves the way for organisations to adopt new technology paradigms that present subsequent benefits and growth opportunities.

Yet we also know it’s not easy to keep up with the skills needed to harness the latest technologies to their fullest. 

Recent research from Red Hat found that 73% of IT managers surveyed called out strategic thinking and the ability to tackle business-level issues as the most urgent skills gap. This reflects the shift we are seeing from teams being measured on the output they ship (like the number of new features) to a focus on the value of outcomes to the business.

In close second place was the AI skills shortage, named by 72% of respondents. This encompasses a wide range of expertise, from coding, data science and analytics, through to data bias, ethics and model explainability, which are vital to ensure business outcomes are as fair as possible and deliver against goals.

Other gaps the survey identified were cyber-security skills (69%), the use of modern development practices (69%) and people and human skills (69%). 

Looking at the survey responses and what we see our customers facing daily, three major areas emerge that are limiting innovation:

• The slow adoption of new processes and technologies (36% of respondents)
• Lack of budget for training, upskilling and recruitment (35% of respondents)
• Even when the right systems are in place, many IT teams (33% of respondents) lack the right skill sets to maximise their potential.

To address these challenges and compensate for resource constraints, we see three areas of opportunity for organisations.

1. Emphasise collaboration and outcomes

Innovation needs to occur across the business – in the products and applications, in the way they are delivered, and in the ways people work. This last is more important than ever given the rapid rate of technology evolution. 

Creating the right environment for people to do their best work often requires a culture shift from the top. Organisations need to move away from a focus on implementing processes and managing tasks, to place greater emphasis on clarifying the problem and why we need to solve it before diving into the solution.

Establishing mutual understanding of the target outcomes, why they are important and what success looks like, right across the team, forms the foundation for effective ongoing collaboration. It sounds simple but it’s something we often see missing when we work with customer teams. 

2. Give room for adoption 

While new technologies can be a catalyst for change, many organisations are still using old methods and so are not optimising their investment. It’s like buying a Porsche, only to pull it with horses rather than turn on the engine! Leaders must create slack in teams’ delivery schedules to allow adoption of new technology and working practices. This is not happening enough, with 44% of respondents to our survey saying that high workloads are preventing teams from finding time to upskill. 

As well as time, another barrier to adopting new practices and technologies is confidence. A smart approach here is to use ‘enabling teams’: groups that trial technology first to understand its usage and provide a blueprint that can be rolled out more widely. These enabling teams can act as coaches to fast track adoption, minimise disruption to delivery schedules and support consistent growth.

Lean on your partners here too – see where their expertise can supplement your internal knowledge. In many cases it’s not just about doing more training, but doing it better. 

3. Build what matters to customers and users

Not everything delivered adds value. It is critical to connect strategy to execution by validating what does constitute value with customers and users at the outset, before anything is built. You can then measure and focus on the right deliverables. This doesn’t have to be a high tech process; you can use screen sketches, clickable slide decks or wire frames. Techniques to achieve this can be found in the Open Practice Library.

Time spent shortening feedback loops and ensuring you’re building the right thing is always worth it. By avoiding developing or over-engineering things that add little value, you save time and costs that can be put into adopting new technology, without needing to find new budget.

Technology is always changing and organisations that accelerate the adoption of new technologies will differentiate themselves from the rest. Ultimately, to speed up the process and flow of innovation, you need to foster a culture of experimentation and review existing processes after adopting new technology to see if they can be streamlined or removed. 

Businesses that are successful with long-term innovation are those that take an adaptive and iterative approach and empower teams to deliver value for their customers through new technology. Start by removing anything without a clear link to the business outcome or customer value and use the savings to provide time and funding to adopt enterprise technology in the way it is intended to be used.

Chris Baynham Hughes is Head of Open Innovation Labs, EMEA at Red Hat

Main image courtesy of iStockPhoto.com