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The IT industry has recently seen some interesting activity from global hyperscale cloud providers surrounding their cloud sovereignty ambitions, and their scrutiny by the regulators covering some basics compliance requirements, like the European Union’s (EU) General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

Firstly, AWS made a public pledge called the “AWS Digital Sovereignty Pledge”, consisting of a commitment to provide “the most advanced set of sovereignty controls and features available in the cloud”. After Google’s cooperation with T-Systems and the “Delos” offer from Microsoft, SAP, and Arvato, AWS now follows suit. These initiatives reinforce the growing potential of sovereign cloud services in a world increasingly dominated by questions of cloud choice and control, and complex compliance requirements.

So, what does a pledge mean? The dictionary defines this as a “solemn promise” – which would reasonably beg the question: isn’t this an admission there is little sovereignty in the offering today? Otherwise, why would it be a pledge? A pledge is forward-looking, something that has not been performed or delivered yet. Also, shouldn’t an announcement like this ideally be backed up with a roadmap? Where is the guarantee that items in this pledge will be fulfilled? Instead, AWS mentions what the pledge will generally cover: control over the location of your data, verifiable control over data access, the ability to encrypt everything everywhere, and the resilience of their cloud. The pledge sounds excellent, but does it meet the minimum standards of most data sovereignty requirements worldwide? It appears, from the general language, that none of it addresses the critical concerns around hyperscale usage, jurisdictional control, legal rights to access the data, and complying with sovereign data requirements that require protection from the US Cloud Act or Section 702 of the US Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).

Secondly, Microsoft has run aground in Germany with Office 365 reportedly not complying with GDPR. GDPR is 4+ years old and is a huge issue that most companies have joined in the rush not to be penalised by the EU. With Germany’s federal and state data protection authorities (DSK) raising concerns about the compatibility of 365 with data protection laws in Germany and the wider EU, it makes you wonder how other companies may also be falling short in their obligations to protect EU customers’ data.

Also, how many other regulatory requirements (such as data sovereignty requirements) that global public cloud providers believe they comply with are prone to be scrutinised by the regulators? This news, of course, is food for thought. Microsoft has denied that this is correct and issued a statement asking for more clarification regarding the view that DSK has. IT executives should therefore take this news as a noteworthy case study to fuel the decisions of their cloud choice, as regulatory requirements concerning data sovereignty are much more complex and niche to comply with than GDRP.

All these issues and many more are putting US and global hyperscale cloud providers in a precarious position when operating a sovereign cloud or other regulated cloud solution, in jurisdictions such the EU, where they must adhere to the EU’s GDPR and US legislation. Indeed, it puts the EU in a precarious position as well, given that 72% of the European cloud market spend was aligned with AWS, Microsoft, and Google in Q2 2022.

The EU wants a fair market and a protected European cloud without compromising cloud functionality. However, continued investment by customers in US hyperscale and continual investment in the region of $4bn in US hyperscale organisations into expansion means that no European cloud company will ever seriously challenge this market today. The EU certainly has a quandary: on the one hand, enforcing sovereignty would mean no foreign clouds could be used, which would severely damage the EU cloud market; and on the other hand, how to legislate enough to maintain a level of sovereignty that doesn’t exclude foreign providers with some level of external jurisdictional control? It seems that for the foreseeable future, there will be little answer to this quandary. The most prudent approach to compliance appears to be a national, purpose-built sovereign cloud, using external clouds when your data classification meets the needs of unregulated or non-sovereign environments – this seems to be cloud smart!

European cloud providers tend to be more specialised in their services, with nearly all providing managed services, something not found directly in the major US hyperscale cloud provider offerings. I believe this is a good thing. VMware has consistently stated that the future of a well-run cloud-smart IT strategy is multi-cloud and hybrid cloud and that being cloud-smart means we cannot ignore hyperscale offerings. We need them, especially as there are significant innovations and market-leading scalability in these clouds.

This is where VMware’s strategy is unique: VMware encourages multi-cloud and helps organisations maintain a cloud strategy that avoids lock-in and maintains quality and security while monitoring performance. The VMware Sovereign Cloud initiative provides national and local cloud provider partners the capability to build purpose-built sovereign clouds, including ones that deliver locally specific requirements in areas such as data sovereignty, including data residency and jurisdictional control, data access and integrity, data security and compliance, data independence and mobility, and data innovation and analytics.

The common misunderstanding when considering using a global hyperscale cloud provider as an option for workloads requiring data sovereignty is that there is compliance because the portfolio, data and applications will be limited to only what can be run in a region. This still doesn’t make it sovereign – it is simply a farce. To be clear, physical location (or data residency), while necessary for data sovereignty, does not constitute data sovereignty entirely for almost if not all data sovereignty requirements around the globe.

Data sovereignty requirements are unique to each jurisdiction, but all have many more needs than simple data residency. For example, they all also require jurisdictional control – which cannot be assumed to be met with a data resident cloud, particularly for US or global cloud providers subject to the Cloud Act and FISA ruling. It’s therefore essential to recognise that VMware sovereign cloud providers are independent third-party partners across the globe who also manage extensive portfolios of cloud capabilities. Based on VMware solutions and ecosystem vendors, with tools and competitive advantage (under the current regulatory climate) to be able to provide the highest levels of compliance comfort with data sovereignty requirements and/or other regulations such as GDPR.

getty

So, what is the answer here? VMware’s position has not changed; the usage of “trusted” hyperscale clouds denotes a level of trust whereby data that should be placed in a hyperscale cloud is not top secret or restricted, can be protected (using encryption, bring your own key, confidential computing, or privacy-enhancing compute (PEC)) and should be public—i.e., only low-risk data should be placed in any hyperscale cloud, whether trusted or native. Whilst the battles between the hyperscale clouds continue to attempt to achieve sovereign status in Europe. Across the globe, customers should not wait any longer for a magical one size fits all solution or ever trust that their due diligence of regulatory requirements can be delegated to any vendor. Instead, consider a strategy that utilises the best of all multi-cloud solutions and establishes cloud choices based on data classification, data operations, and risk.

VMware

As the diagram shows, there is increased risk associated with non-sovereign cloud solutions, as jurisdictional control is negated in a trusted or hyperscale public cloud. The volume of data applicable to non-sovereign services that should be considered may be lower when you have conducted a thorough data classification exercise. Remember that a sovereign cloud provider delivers services suited to your vertical, whether government, public sector, financial, or many other verticals, and managed services to help you with your cloud adoption strategy. Some also innovate solutions for secure data exchange to enable monetising your data, a critical component in the growing data market. In addition, VMware Sovereign Cloud Providers may be best suited to support you in managing locally tailored privacy, classifications, and risk analysis, ensuring compliance with the most stringent of standards. As data pertains to personal and non-personal data (think industrial and IoT), a classification exercise will help you understand your risks and how to protect them in alignment with regulatory requirements and mitigate future threats from new data classification standards that are indeed to come.
 
As data markets evolve and data exchange for supply chain and monetisation become a critical component of how we do business, it is essential that the right strategy is decided at day 0 and that the limitations of a cloud choice do not compromise the principles of sovereignty you encompass. Additionally, ensure that the cloud provider you select has the right technology capabilities, security infrastructure, and data governance processes to protect your data, meet compliance standards, and provide a secure platform for your business.

Find your closest VMware Sovereign Cloud provider today

Cloud Management, Cloud Security, Data Management, Data Privacy, VMware

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Diversity is critical to IT performance. Diverse teams perform better, hire better talent, have more engaged members, and retain workers better than those that do not focus on diversity and inclusion, according to a 2020 report from McKinsey. Despite this, women remain widely underrepresented in IT roles.

 And the numbers back up this assertion, often in stark ways. Lack of representation for women in the IT industry can be attributed to a wide array of often interrelated factors, and its persistence has follow-on effects in terms of compensation, opportunity, and safety in the workplace. Companies that emphasize equity and inclusion, however, are making inroads when it comes to promoting the careers of women — and retaining them.

Statistics from the following 11 facets of IT careers, from pursuing a degree to navigating the workplace environment, paint a clear picture of the challenges women face in finding equal footing in a career in IT.

The employment gap

Despite national conversations about the lack of diversity in tech, women are disproportionally missing out on the ongoing boom in IT jobs. While women make up 47% of all employed adults in the US, as of 2022, they hold only 28% of computing and mathematical roles, according to data from Zippia, with women identifying as Asian or Pacific Islander making up just 7% of the IT workforce and Black and Hispanic women accounting for 3% and 2%, respectively.

In fact, the ratio of women to men in tech roles has declined in the past 35 years, with half of women who go into tech dropping out by the age of 35, according to data from Accenture. The study attributes much of this decline to a lack of inclusivity for women in the industry. For women of color and lesbian, bisexual, and transgender (LBT) women, this lack of inclusivity plays an even larger factor. For example, 67% of women of color in less-inclusive college environments said they saw a “clear pathway from studying tech, engineering, or math to a related career,” compared to 79% of other women. When adjusted for more inclusive environments, that number jumps to 92%.

The promotion gap

Women also face more barriers to promotion and career growth. A 2022 report from McKinsey found that only 86 women are promoted to manager for every 100 men across every industry, but when isolated for tech, that number drops to 52 women for every 100 men. Women who work in more inclusive environments are 61% more likely to advance to management level, while that number jumps to 77% for women of color, according to data from Accenture. Men are even 15% more likely to get promoted to a management position when working in a more-inclusive environment.

The degree gap

According to data from the National Science Foundation, more women than ever are earning STEM degrees — and they are catching up to men in earning bachelor’s degrees in science and engineering (S&E) subjects. But isolated by field of study, women earned only 18% of computer science degrees at the bachelor level in 2021, having peaked at 37% in 1984, according to Zippia. Recent data from Accenture shows that as of 2022, only 25% of tech graduates are women, with a dropout rate of 37% for tech classes compared to just 30% for other programs.

Still, while women are less represented in undergrad CS departments, those who do pursue computer science degrees are more likely to pursue an advanced degree, with the percentage of master’s degrees in computer science earned by women rising to 31% in 2016, up from 28% in 1997.

The retention gap

Once a diploma is earned, the real work begins, and here the numbers for women in tech are even more troubling. Only 38% of women who majored in computer science are working in the field compared to 53% of men, according to data from the National Science Foundation. This is a consistent trend that has been dubbed a “leaky pipeline,” where it’s difficult to retain women in STEM jobs once they’ve graduated with a STEM degree.

Oftentimes, retention is a factor of workplace culture and inclusivity. It’s one thing to recruit women for IT roles, but organizations must be inclusive to get women to stay. Unfortunately, leaders and employees differing widely in how they perceive a company’s inclusivity, according to Accenture, which reported that 68% of leaders feel they have created “empowering environments where people have a sense of belonging,” while only 36% of employees agree. Accenture estimates that if every company were on par with the top 20% of companies in the study in terms of inclusivity, the annual attrition rate of women in tech could drop as much as 70%.

Workplace culture gap

Workplace culture also plays a role in women’s uphill battle in IT. According to a Pew Research Center report, 50% of women said they had experienced gender discrimination at work, while only 19% of men said the same. The numbers were even higher for women with a postgraduate degree (62%), working in computer jobs (74%), or in male-dominated workplaces (78%). When asked whether their gender made it harder to succeed at work, 20% of women said yes and 36% said sexual harassment is a problem in their workplace.

In addition to increasing the likelihood of gender-related discrimination against women, male-dominated workplaces pay less attention to gender diversity (43%) and cause women to feel a need to prove themselves all or some of the time (79%), according to Pew’s research. As a comparison, only 44% of women working in environments with a better gender-diversity balance said they experienced gender-related discrimination at work, 15% felt their organization paid “too little” attention to gender diversity, and 52% said they felt a need to prove themselves.

The representation gap

A lack of representation for women in tech can hinder a woman’s ability to succeed in the industry. It can put limits on their opportunities for mentorship and sponsorship and can foster “unconscious gender bias in company culture,” leaving many women “without a clear path forward,” according to a report from TrustRadius, which found that 72% of women in tech report being outnumbered by men in business meetings by a ratio of at least 2:1, while 26% report being outnumbered by 5:1 or more.   

Unfortunately, women in tech are accustomed to a lack of representation — 72% of whom said they have worked for a company where “bro culture” is “pervasive,” while only 41% of men said the same. TrustRadius defines “bro culture” broadly as anything from an “uncomfortable work environment to sexual harassment and assault.” This gap in reporting between genders may in part be due to a discrepancy in perception, according to the report, which notes that it “can be hard for those in power, or those not negatively affected, to recognize problems within the dominant culture.”

The equity gap

Women of color face more significant challenges in the tech industry — and they are greatly underrepresented. While a total of 27% of computing roles are held by women, only 3% and 2% are held by Black and Hispanic women, respectively, according to Accenture. Out of 390 women of color in tech surveyed, only 8% said it is “easy” for them to thrive, compared to 21% of all women. In less-inclusive company cultures, 62% of women of color say they’ve experienced “inappropriate remarks or comments,” a number that drops to 14% for inclusive cultures.

LBT women face similar barriers, with only 9% of LBT women IT workers reporting that it’s “easy” to thrive in tech, while 23% of non-LBT women say the same. LBT tech workers also face higher rates of experiencing public humiliation or embarrassment (24%) or bullying (20%) in the workplace. The survey found that 83% of LBT women working in more-inclusive cultures reported “loving” their jobs and 85% describe their workplace environment as “empowering,” compared to 35% and 20%, respectively, in less-inclusive environments. Similarly, LBT women in less-inclusive cultures were half as likely to say they experienced inappropriate remarks or comments, were made to feel that the job was not for “people like them.”

The founder gap

Startups are known for unconventional work environments, but women still struggle there — especially if they’re the founder. Only one in four startups have a female founder, 37% have at least one woman on the board of directors, and 53% have at least one woman in an executive position, according to a study from Silicon Valley Bank. And the founder’s gender has a direct impact on gender diversity, the study found. For startups with at least one female founder, 50% had a female CEO compared to just 5% for companies with no female founder.

Worse, startups with at least one female founder reported more difficulty finding funding, with 87% saying it was “somewhat or extremely challenging,” while only 78% of startups with no female founder said the same.

The pay gap

Women are not only underrepresented in tech, they are also underpaid. According to a report from Dice, 38% of women report being unsatisfied with their compensation compared to 33% of men. The average salary of a woman in tech who reports being satisfied with their compensation is $93,591, compared to an average $108,711 for men. On the opposite end, the average salary for women who report being dissatisfied with their compensation is $69,543, compared to $81,820 for men.

Women are also more concerned with compensation than most stereotypes would have you believe, according to a 2019 report on Women in Technology from IDC. There’s a myth that women are more preoccupied with benefits and flexibility, but 52% of women care about compensation and pay compared to 33% of men. Additionally, 75% of men believe their employer offers equal pay while only 42% of women say the same. Compensation is certainly a paramount concern for women in tech, who are often making less than their male colleagues.

The IT leadership gap

According to IDC, the percentage of women in senior leadership positions grew from 21% to 24% between 2018 and 2019. And that’s good news, because having women in senior leadership positions can positively impact female employee engagement and retention. In organizations where 50% or more senior leadership positions are held by women, they’re more likely to offer equal pay, and female employees are more likely to stay with the company longer than a year, report higher job satisfaction, and feel the company is trustworthy.

Although these statistics are trending upward, women still feel less enthusiastic about their senior leadership prospects than men. The report found that 54% of men said they felt it was likely that they’d be promoted to executive management in their company. Meanwhile, only 25% of women said the same, noting a lack of support, self-confidence, and mentorship, as well as feeling the need to “prove themselves more than men to get promoted.” 

McKinsey found that women leaders are stepping away from their roles in tech to find positions that offer better flexibility and opportunity. The report points to the fact that women find it harder to advance than men and that they’re more likely to experience microaggressions or to have their judgement questioned. Women leaders also reported carrying more responsibilities around supporting employee well-being and inclusion, but 40% say they go unrecognized for that work.

Black women leaders face even more barriers to leadership. They are more likely to have their competence questioned by colleagues (55%), or to be “subjected to demeaning behavior.” One in three Black women leaders report being denied or passed over for opportunities because of their race and gender.

The pandemic gap

Women in tech report facing more burnout than their male colleagues during the pandemic. According to TrustRadius, 57% of women surveyed said they experienced more burnout than normal during the pandemic, compared to 36% of men who said the same. That might be because 44% of women also report taking on extra responsibilities at work, compared to 33% of men. And a greater number of women (33%) report taking on more childcare responsibilities than men (19%) at home. Women in tech were also almost twice as likely to have lost their jobs or to have been furloughed during the pandemic than men (14% vs. 8%).

The pandemic has also left women less likely to ask for a raise or a promotion, compared to their male colleagues. In a report from Indeed, surveying 2,000 tech workers, 67% of male respondents said they would be comfortable asking for a raise in the next month and for a promotion. But only 52% of women said they’d be comfortable asking for a raise and 54% said they’d be comfortable asking for a promotion. Women were also less likely to say they felt comfortable asking for flexibility around work location, schedule, or hours than their male counterparts. As the study points out, if women feel discouraged from asking for a raise, while their male colleagues are comfortable doing so, that could lead to widening the gender pay gap in the tech industry even more.

This article was originally published on January 23, 2020, and updated on March 8, 2021.

More on Women in IT

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Careers, Diversity and Inclusion, IT Leadership, Technology Industry, Women in IT

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In the last few weeks, the IT industry has seen some very interesting activity from global hyperscale cloud providers surrounding their cloud sovereignty ambitions, and their scrutiny by the regulators covering some basics compliance requirements, like the European Union’s (EU) General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)

Firstly, AWS made a public pledge called the “AWS Digital Sovereignty Pledge”, consisting of a commitment to provide “the most advanced set of sovereignty controls and features available in the cloud”. After Google’s cooperation with T-Systems and the “Delos” offer from Microsoft, SAP, and Arvato, AWS now follows suit. These initiatives reinforce the growing potential of sovereign cloud services in a world increasingly dominated by questions of cloud choice and control, and complex compliance requirements.

So, what does a pledge mean? The dictionary defines this as a “solemn promise” – which would reasonably beg the question: isn’t this an admission that there is little sovereignty in the offering today? Otherwise, why would it be a pledge? A pledge is forward-looking, something that has not been performed or delivered yet. Also, shouldn’t an announcement like this ideally be backed up with a roadmap? Where is the guarantee that items in this pledge will be fulfilled? Instead, AWS mentions what the pledge will generally cover: control over the location of your data, verifiable control over data access, the ability to encrypt everything everywhere, and the resilience of their cloud. The pledge sounds excellent, but does it meet the minimum standards of most data sovereignty requirements worldwide? It appears, from the general language, that none of it addresses the critical concerns around hyperscale usage, jurisdictional control, legal rights to access the data, and complying with sovereign data requirements that require protection from the U.S. CLOUD Act or Section 702 of the US Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).

Secondly, Microsoft has run aground in Germany with Office 365 reportedly not complying with GDPR. GDPR is 4+ years old and is a huge issue that most companies have joined in the rush not to be penalized by the EU. With Germany’s federal and state data protection authorities (DSK) raising concerns about the compatibility of 365 with data protection laws in Germany and the wider EU, it makes you wonder how other companies may also be falling short in their obligations to protect EU customers’ data. Also, how many other regulatory requirements (such as data sovereignty requirements) that global public cloud providers believe they comply with are prone to be scrutinized by the regulators? This news, of course, is food for thought. Microsoft has denied that this is correct and issued a statement asking for more clarification regarding the view that DSK has. IT executives should therefore take this news as a noteworthy case study to fuel the decisions of their cloud choice, as regulatory requirements concerning data sovereignty are much more complex and niche to comply with than GDRP.

All these issues and many more are putting U.S. and global hyperscale cloud providers in a precarious position when operating a sovereign cloud or other regulated cloud solution, in jurisdictions such the EU, where they must adhere to the EU’s GDPR and U.S. legislation. Indeed, it puts the EU in a precarious position as well, given that 72% of the European cloud market spend was aligned with AWS, Microsoft, and Google in Q2 2022. The EU wants a fair market and a protected European cloud without compromising cloud functionality. However, continued investment by customers in U.S. hyperscale and continual investment in the region of $4b in U.S. hyperscale organizations into expansion means that no European cloud company will ever seriously challenge this market today. The EU certainly has a quandary; on the one hand, enforcing sovereignty would mean no foreign clouds could be used, which would severely damage the EU cloud market; and on the other hand, how to legislate enough to maintain a level of sovereignty that doesn’t exclude foreign providers with some level of external jurisdictional control? It seems that for the foreseeable future, there will be little answer to this quandary, and, in any event, the most prudent approach to compliance appears to be a national, purpose-built sovereign cloud, using external clouds when your data classification meets the needs of unregulated or non-sovereign environments— this seems to be cloud smart!

European cloud providers tend to be more specialized in their services, with nearly all providing managed services, something not found directly in the major U.S. hyperscale cloud provider offerings. I believe this is a good thing. VMware has consistently stated that the future of a well-run cloud-smart IT strategy is multi-cloud and hybrid cloud and that being cloud-smart means we cannot ignore hyperscale offerings. We need them, especially as there are significant innovations and market-leading scalability in these clouds. This is where VMware’s strategy is unique: VMware encourages multi-cloud and helps organizations maintain a cloud strategy that avoids lock-in and maintains quality and security while monitoring performance. The VMware Sovereign Cloud initiative provides national and local cloud provider partners the capability to build purpose-built sovereign clouds, including ones that deliver locally specific requirements in areas such as data sovereignty, including data residency and jurisdictional control, data access and integrity, data security and compliance, data independence and mobility, and data innovation and analytics.

The common misunderstanding when considering using a global hyperscale cloud provider as an option for workloads requiring data sovereignty is that there is compliance because the portfolio, data and applications will be limited to only what can be run in a region. This still doesn’t make it sovereign – it is simply a farce. To be clear, physical location (or data residency), while necessary for data sovereignty, does not constitute data sovereignty entirely for almost if not all data sovereignty requirements around the globe. Data sovereignty requirements are unique to each jurisdiction, but all have many more needs than simple data residency. For example, they all also require jurisdictional control, – which cannot be assumed to be met with a data resident cloud, particularly for U.S. or global cloud providers subject to the CLOUD Act and FISA ruling. It’s therefore essential to recognize that VMware sovereign cloud providers are independent third-party partners across the globe who also manage extensive portfolios of cloud capabilities. Based on VMware solutions and ecosystem vendors, with tools and competitive advantage (under the current regulatory climate) to be able to provide the highest levels of compliance comfort with data sovereignty requirements and/or other regulations such as GDPR.

VMware

So, what is the answer here? VMware’s position has not changed; the usage of “trusted” hyperscale clouds denotes a level of trust whereby data that should be placed in a hyperscale cloud is not top secret or restricted, can be protected (using encryption, bring your own key, confidential computing, or privacy-enhancing compute (PEC)) and should be public—i.e., only low-risk data should be placed in any hyperscale cloud, whether trusted or native. Whilst the battles between the hyperscale clouds continue to attempt to achieve sovereign status in Europe. Across the globe, customers should not wait any longer for a magical one size fits all solution or ever trust that their due diligence of regulatory requirements can be delegated to any vendor. Instead, consider a strategy that utilizes the best of all multi-cloud solutions and establishes cloud choices based on data classification, data operations, and risk.

VMware

As the diagram shows, there is increased risk associated with non-sovereign cloud solutions, as jurisdictional control is negated in a trusted or hyperscale public cloud. The volume of data applicable to non-sovereign services that should be considered may be lower when you have conducted a thorough data classification exercise. Remember that a sovereign cloud provider delivers services suited to your vertical, whether government, public sector, financial, or many other verticals, and managed services to help you with your cloud adoption strategy. Some also innovate solutions for secure data exchange to enable monetizing your data, a critical component in the growing data market. In addition, VMware Sovereign Cloud Providers may be best suited to support you in managing locally tailored privacy, classifications, and risk analysis, ensuring compliance with the most stringent of standards. As data pertains to personal and non-personal data (think industrial and IoT), a classification exercise will help you understand your risks and how to protect them in alignment with regulatory requirements and mitigate future threats from new data classification standards that are indeed to come.
 
As data markets evolve and data exchange for supply chain and monetization become a critical component of how we do business, it is essential that the right strategy is decided at day 0 and that the limitations of a cloud choice do not compromise the principles of sovereignty you encompass. Additionally, ensure that the cloud provider you select has the right technology capabilities, security infrastructure, and data governance processes to protect your data, meet compliance standards, and provide a secure platform for your business.

Find your closest VMware Sovereign Cloud provider today

Cloud Management, Compliance, IT Leadership

Posted on Posted in Digital transformation, General topics Tagged with , , , , , ,

It has been almost 25 years since McKinsey & Co. introduced the term “talent war” to the world. For almost a quarter of a century CIOs have been locked in a Sisyphean battle to attract and retain the IT talent necessary to create competitive advantage.

Every year, “talent” is one of the top challenges facing IT organizations. Every year, lack of critical IT skills is blamed for failure to deliver the full promise of IT investments. Is there something CIOs can do to transcend this endless cycle of lament?

Talent matters — but is ‘war’ the right metaphor?

In his 2001 best-seller, Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap and Others Don’t, author Jim Collins reminds us that “Great vision without great people is irrelevant.” In The Talent Delusion: Why Data, Not Intuition, Is the Key to Unlocking Human Potential, from 2017, Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic explains that “All organizations have problems and they nearly always concern people.” Having the right people, with the right skills, working on the right tasks is the key to future success.

A recent report from Korn Ferry Institute predicts that by 2030 the tech industry labor-skill shortage will reach 4.3 million (85 million worker short fall for all skills), costing the global economy $8.5 trillion in unrealized annual revenues. 

Yet, despite these projections, in today’s globalized and digitized environment, where talent can be sourced from almost anywhere, shouldn’t IT leaders be able to de-escalate the “War for Talent”?

I am not certain “war” is the appropriate metaphor for dealing with the massively complex human capital predicament CIOs are working through. While this point may seem pedantic on its surface, given that many IT leaders carry the metaphor through to their hiring and retention strategies, it is anything but.

War, for example, implies there are “enemies.” Who are the enemies in this “war”? Other companies? Demographic? Employees? A lack of financial resources? The traditional answer would be your hiring competitors, which, with every company becoming in some sense a technology company, is just about every business out there. How do you construct a campaign against that?

Unfortunately, the “war” metaphor, and its tendency toward dualities, is pervasive in hiring strategies and approaches. The we/they, manager/staff, company/employee dualism, for example, is dysfunctional. The concept of thinking of employees as “enemies” needing to be captured via pay packages and “employee experience” to labor toward some seemingly arbitrarily corporate financial objective is ludicrous and unsustainable. Partnership — finding a mutually agreeable path forward is a better way of thinking about the future of work.

Re-thinking work management and motivation

Right now, many employees and employers are not on the same page regarding productivity and performance measurement, pay, and commuting and remote work issues.

In a recent survey of more than 20,000 people, Microsoft found that 87% of employees say they are productive at work, while only 12% of leaders have confidence that their workers are being productive.

Moreover, the anecdotal evidence is overwhelming. Every executive I have spoken with has a friend who knows a colleague employed in technology enjoying a six-figure-plus salary while they essentially ski in Idaho, snorkel in Bali, or sip margaritas on the Yucatán Peninsula.

In a world of increasing pay transparency, employee outcome transparency — determining every employee’s contribution — is required as well. But this doesn’t mean going as far as one overzealous manager who required two meetings every day: one at the start of the day to decide what everyone should do and one at the end to determine what was actually accomplished. And we are seeing the downside of top-down exhortations to “work hard or else” unfold at Twitter.

Instead, CIOs need to implement a performance management system that prevents slackers from abusing the system while at the same time stimulating the better angels of an employee’s creativity and work ethic. 

This means creating a culture where people want to work and establishing systems for work that people want to do.

Building a workplace that works

Many years ago, some IT organizations embraced the mantra, “We suck less,” by which they meant: We may not be the very best in the world, but we certainly aren’t the worst.

The good news for IT hiring managers is that a lot of places that employed lots of talented IT professionals are starting to “suck more.” Tech giants in Silicon Valley are exfoliating staff at rates never seen before. More than 100,000 tech workers have been returned via layoffs to the talent pool.

I suggest CIOs commit themselves to making IT a great place to work for all employees paying particular attention to not just to being a good place for women to work but being the best place for them to work. This would include investments in childcare, for example, as well as better maternity leave policies and support for perimenopause and menopause counseling and support services, given that more than 1 million American women enter menopause each year, and one in ten women employed during menopause leave their job due to symptoms.

This also means improving employee experience by implementing hassle-free workplace technology, which will be a great way to attract and retain quality IT staff. According to the Virgin Media O2 Business and Censuswide Battle for Talent survey, 72% of workers are frustrated at least once a week by the poor quality or lack of business technology available to them, and 48% say that poor-quality business technology makes them more likely to resign from their jobs within the next six months.

A new metaphor for talent acquisition

Creating a workplace culture where candidates want to work and employees want to stay will assuredly give you an advantage in the talent market, but so too will embracing a new central metaphor for your talent acquisition strategy.

Higher-ed inadequacies and demographic realities — a million fewer college students enrolled in 2021 than in 2019 — have created a human capital pipeline unable to deliver a reliable stream of fit-for-purpose technology professionals.  

Rather than “battle-plan” how to “win” given this faltering human capital pipeline, the only rational alternative is to create your own talent supply chain. Partnering with organizations such as Year Up and NPower, working with universities, and establishing apprenticeships are just a few of the ways to take your IT organization out of the “battle theater” and into a better place — one less ruled by the mentality of war and instead guided by supply chain imperatives: integration and orchestration.

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