ICT Infrastructure Environment: Skill Source by Provisioning Type

Abstract

Local government organisations all over the world are moving to cloud and outsource providers. While there are many frameworks available to assist IT Managers with managing cloud and outsource providers, there are no guidelines for the workforce planning and organisational change involved in changing sourcing arrangements.

This study partially fills this gap by profiling the changing requirements for skill sourcing across different provisioning scenarios – in-house, outsourced and cloud providing for an ‘apples to apples’ comparison and study of staffing levels and organisational change impacts.

The general trend emerging is that the optimal source of:

• Soft skills (relationship management and governance) is the organisation • Specialist skills such as network, database, technical, etc is the platform provider

The services, roles and skills necessary for effective infrastructure management in small to medium sized local government organisations were defined and verified with a perceived move from ‘guru’ to ‘relationship manager’ as the platforms were moved to external provisioning.

All skills rated highly to an organisation regardless of the platform provisioning type with methods of keeping the in-house skills current including training, certifications, forums, conferences, third party/vendor engagement. Skill currency guidelines, in the form of challenge mitigations, are provided.