The Marathon of Digitization: How flexibility - in hiring and technologies - will fuel enterprises

Like most executives I travel quite a bit as part of my work. This past month found me in Beijing and Seoul to keynote several events, including LinuxCon ContainerCon and OpenInfra Days, as well as meet with local members and users.

What I heard throughout my conversations was a driving interest to expand from their regional markets to competing on a global scale. You can read more about my thoughts on how the technology landscape is evolving in China in my recent Medium post.

Today, I’d like to broaden the discussion, as the conversations that are fueling expansion in China and Korea, are also applicable to all companies that are working to digitize their organizations, and move to deliver more software-centric offerings globally. 

So, let’s talk about where we are, and where we’re going.

Mile marker 8

If you’re a runner, you’ll know that 26.2 miles marks the length of a marathon. That’s one way to look at the much talked about process of digitizing a business. It’s long, intense, often times as difficult and painful as it is rewarding and euphoric.

 But where are enterprise companies in this process?

 In my estimation, for the companies at the forefront of the “digitization marathon,” we’re at mile marker 8, -- a third of the way there. I don’t say this to be discouraging, but to highlight how we’re in a time of enormous change, and there’s still a ways to go.

At the end of this marathon companies will be more efficient, more responsive to the needs of their customers, and poised to take advantage of new technology solutions like AI and machine learning.

 Meanwhile, we do know some of the essentials for ensuring the process will set us up for a strong finish, just like pacing, hydration, and smart choices are crucial to the marathon runner as they clock past those mile markers.

 Flexibility is key

 Recently, we published a report on global cloud-native trends.

 One of our key findings was that today, more than ever before, multiple technologies are being used side-by-side. IT Decision Makers report 77 percent are using or evaluating Platforms-as-a-Service (PaaS), 72 percent are using or evaluating containers and 46 percent are using or evaluating serverless computing. More than a third (39 percent) are using a combination of all three technologies together.

 In short, it’s all about flexibility, which means a multi-platform world.

If you’re a tech company, you have to embrace that your customers want flexibility. And that means both meeting their current needs, as well as the agility to continue evolving to support those needs in the future. Because, trust me, those needs will evolve - the technology is changing quickly, as well as the needs of the organizations using the technology.

Workforce, work future

What I often hear from enterprise companies around the world is, “I want to hire a thousand developers this year.” Multiply that sentiment across 20,000 companies, and we’re talking two million open jobs for workers. Include the additional desire that those workers also have cloud native skills, and it becomes even more difficult. Technology is evolving so quickly that training must evolve right alongside it.

 That’s why we need to change a model that’s dominated for the past several decades - rounds of layoffs followed by hiring and/or outsourcing, to try to get to the “ideal workforce configuration”. While a company might see short-term gains, in the long-term this is unsustainable, as the technology needs are going to continue to evolve, and evolve quickly.

The future model will need to embrace a rescaling and retraining strategy. For a company to take its existing workforce and retrain them is a way to retain those who have historical knowledge. People who’ve been with you a long time and really know your business. By retraining existing talent you won’t need to spend the first year getting them up to speed on the essential nuances of your business and your customers.

To be sure, not everyone will be able to make the shift, but it’s smart business to think of reskilling your current workforce as the first line of defense.

 Open source, as a innovation and hiring driver

 In the past few years, open source has really come into its own. For companies that either currently or want to compete in the global arena, open source is a way to jumpstart their own initiatives and bring their ideas to the table.

It’s a key driver of innovation in companies, providing an opportunity to create a shared R&D that can drive development at a much faster rate than a company could do on its own. Open source collaboration gives companies a way both to contribute and to be a generative source of rapidly developing technology.

And, as found in the Open Source Jobs Report, recently published by the Linux Foundation, “hiring open source talent is a priority of 83% of hiring managers, an increase from 76% in 2017.”

While it’s taken four years to get to mile marker 8, we can be sure that -- like technology itself -- the rate of change will only increase over time. Where will we be four years from now? Let’s grab some orange slices and keep running a smart course, so we can stay limber enough to find out!