Do organisations do this, set their employees up to fail in their day-to-day roles?
If that question were to be asked, I am sure the resounding response would be no, of course not! But by not providing employees the tools and knowledge they need to effectively communicate their needs and ideas and do their day job successfully, organisations are setting their employees up for failure.
That’s what is happening in the Data Centre industry right now and business analysts and research companies are shouting about it.
According to Gartner at their Las Vagas Summit in Oct 2012 ‘Big Data’ is well and truly here to stay, ‘what will we do with this data? Data centre people still need to manage the stuff’. Their message is clear and simple; companies should incentivise employees to learn a broader set of skills that can be deployed into their work environment.
David Cappuccio, Managing VP and Chief of Research at Gartner said ‘we spend all our time keeping the lights on; only a small percentage of the budget is for innovation’. And given the prediction that by 2015 there will be 4.4 million jobs in the industry worldwide, however filling these positions with the anticipated skills shortages will be problematic and only a third of those jobs will be filled. Great news that jobs will be created, but not great news they can’t be filled due to skills shortages. It almost seems absurd doesn’t it?
Data centre staff have a huge responsibility, working in a high pressure environment, whereby if it goes wrong, i.e. data failure or breach for a major bank, government, social networking platform or Telecommunications Company causes customer downtime and instant loss of revenue, not to mention the bad press and serious consequences if the staff are at fault. Wouldn’t any organisation want to ensure their staff are trained, up-skilled and empowered with the right tools and knowledge to do their job?
The return will be competent, skilled staff that can run data centres and deliver returns to the business. The cost of not doing it could be lost business, bad press and embarrassing security failures.
