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The Challenges with IT departments in small to medium Organisations

Majestic CEO Tal Evans discusses the challenges faced by small to medium organisations, as they attempt to balance the diverse needs their IT team must cater to, with the resources available.

The ABS estimated that over one million Australians changed employers or the business they ran in the year leading up to Feb 2020. That represents 8% of the workforce. The IT industry came in slightly below the average, with 7.1% but that’s still a very significant figure.
What (if any) measures does your organisation take to try and stay below the average?

Given the pace and breadth of innovation, IT skills gaps are now an inevitability in internal departments within mid-sized organisations.
Regardless of how well intentioned the existing staff members are, expecting them to have the full range of required skills is no longer operationally realistic.

“Almost 50% of medium sized businesses reported a growing skills gap within their IT departments.”

Small and medium healthcare organisations with internal IT are faced with the constant challenge of a lack of IT skill.

There are over 200 different types of IT skills that an organisation might need to have from a technology perspective in order to deliver the full range of required services to the organisation.

Not only is it not realistic to expect that any small IT team could encompass that full body of knowledge, it’s also the case that not all of them are required all of the time.

Internal teams are, out of operational necessity, normally comprised of generalists. They don’t have highly specialised skills in certain areas and consequently, they aren’t able to meet the full range of their organisation’s technology requirements.

Absence due to leave, illness or turnover due to a team member leaving the organisation is also a constant operational risk in small internal departments. Not only can it leave a small department dangerously under-resourced, when team members leave it often creates what’s commonly referred to as ‘knowledge bleed’ out of the organisation as the information that ‘only they know’ goes out the door with them.

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