Why stickiness to a domain and mastering the same along with your technical knowledge will be the most sought after skill in future?

There is one school of thought which emphasizes on ITIL processes to bring in the required efficiency in the Application support engagements. There is another school of thought which finds the need for in-depth experience in supporting critical applications. Both the thought processes exists today.

I believe that in the current scheme of things, the model that will really sustain for long will be the one that hires relevant people with right mix of technical skills supported by very good understanding of the business. This requires stickiness to the domain for the techies. An inclination to continuously work in a given domain gives you enough understanding of that domain to be called as specialist and be hired and retained for the job.

Some of the attributes that will necessitate the stickiness to the domain in the current and future environment are as follows:    

• Production Support (AMS) landscape is changing – from non-critical processes to core processes, from back office work to client facing jobs, from in-house applications to COTS products, from one area in business to entire landscape, from staff augmentation jobs to managed services 

• Changes in US laws for work visas will create a need for specialist and quality resources – driven by difficulty in getting visas and the higher base salary structure 

• Managed Services model requiring the vendor to completely own the services provided

• Increasing emphasis on improving the productivity within the engagements

• Rise in attrition due to requirement of high pressure work in business critical front office areas, especially financial product trading domain

• Reducing transition time due to cost pressure

• Rising cost of resources and the need to cross skill and run the engagement with minimum resources 

• Misalignment in understanding of a process by a Business Analyst to a technical resource working on the same application in the AMS engagement

Being from the financial trading background, I have seen this in multiple cases where the outsourcing becomes extremely difficult due to lack of this appropriate mix in the resources deployed in these projects. Issues such as lack of the quality, delayed responses and fix, very high attrition rate and difficulty in managing the basic daily operations in these projects to achieve a normal BAU become norm.

The only thing that will bring value in these accounts in terms of sustainability, improved efficiency, better productivity and bandwidth for experimenting with new effective operating models will be hiring people with this right mix of knowledge. The resources will be the key as ITIL will become the norm for processes but there is no alternative for knowledge and the passion of an employee to work in such domains under stressful environment.

 

A win-win situation for the outsourcing company and for people being recruited as specialist to run this newly outsourced business. As the outsourcing vendor can boast of the knowledge and experience it has in that field to leverage new business, so will the resource gain in terms of higher remuneration and sustained job prospects.

That’s why I believe that stickiness to domain along with a mix of relevant technology skill will be the need going forward and will redefine the on-boarding in large outsourcing engagements.