Top 5 Challenges of IT Staff Augmentation Faced by Businesses

The IT Staff Augmentation model of recruiting skilled and talented IT professionals is becoming more and more popular among companies (both big and small) that do not want to go through the hassle of permanently recruiting and burdening the company with any sort of long-term liability. The demand of recruiting IT professionals for short-term project based duration is on the rise and experts predict this to grow multi-fold in the coming years.

In this article you will learn about the following:

• Why is the need for IT professionals is on the rise?
• What is IT staff augmentation?
• Top 5 challenges of IT staff augmentation?
• Why is the need for IT professionals is on the rise?

The world of technology is also evolving, in fact experts believe that the speed at which technology has advanced in the past one decade is unmatched as compared to any other industry or sector in the world. Rewind back to 2008 where only the richest had a cell phone, and let me repeat – a cell phone not a smartphone. And now fast forward to today, there are 6.64 billion smartphone users in the world, and to much of your surprise – the world population is 7.98 billion in the world. These numbers are huge and it is predicted that every person on earth will own a smartphone very soon.

Technology is seeping into every aspect of human life very seamlessly, whether it is the healthcare sector, government sector, socializing etc., technology has elevated and simplified a lot of our living needs and requirements.

A few examples –

• Social media apps allow you to stay connected with your friends and family and the happenings in their life even if you do not talk to them often.
• You can now order food from the restaurant of choice on your fingertips, without even speaking to anybody to place your order.
• You can call your far off relative withing seconds, without having to go through the hassle of finding their number from a phone diary.
• People from all around the world can carry out real-time audio and video interactions with one another.
• You can get diabetes tests done at home with a technologically powered device and get instant and accurate results.

These are just a few examples of how technology has advanced towards giving us humans a better and simpler way of leading our lives.

Since technological advancements are always happening and are on the rise, the need for technology professionals is always on the rise. Every business wants to stay at par with their competitors and want to serve their customers in the best manner possible, and this is only possible by staying technologically sound and stable. The need for IT professionals is never going to decline, specially given the transition we are going through from Web 2.0 to Web 3.0. it is the new evolution of internet and it bring with it immense employment opportunities for IT professionals.

Now that we understand why the demand for IT professionals is rising, let’s understand what is IT staff augmentation.

IT staff augmentation is considered to be one of the most helpful tool in recruiting top notch IT talent on a project based model. This means that the resource is not hired as a full-time employee for the company, but instead hired on a short-term project requirement duration.

Businesses from around the world are excelling at a rapid speed, and the pressure of surviving and succeeding is increasing by the day, these advanced are majorly powered by technology and internal IT teams are getting over consumed because of the same reason. This is where IT staff augmentation comes into the picture – Companies can hire the best talent in the industry without burdening themselves with any liability of managing the responsibility of full-time employment perks.

Many companies from all over the world are getting magnetically drawn towards this method of hiring resources because of the ample of benefits it brings along, however there are always pros and cons of everything – IT staff augmentation is no different.

This too comes with its own set of challenges, below mentioned are the top 5 challenges of IT staff augmentation:

1. Location barrier

In this recruitment model, companies can hire their staff from different parts of the world. They get access to a pool of talent beyond their demographic barriers. The advantage of this is that companies are not limited to a specific location to find top talent, instead they can find best talent in the IT industry from anywhere in the world. This however is surfacing a major set back for this recruitment model because location diversification results in difference of cultural and regional background, and limitation of physical presence in office which could hamper the working flow of the project at stake.

2. Security and data privacy concern

Because the resource working on the project is not an in-house permanent employee of the organization, the credibility of their ethics is often questioned. It becomes difficult to fully trust the augmented staff personnel with critical and important data of the project, which could be tampered with or leaked. Maintaining data privacy is considered to be one of the top challenges of IT staff augmentation by recruiters from all around the world.

3. Poor communication and coordination

People from different demographics can be hired for short-term project based employment opportunities, which means that the time zone where the company is located may not be the same as the time zone of the IT professional augmented for the job. This gives rise to a lot of complaints regarding communication and coordination of the project, resulting in conflicts and poor quality outcomes in some cases.

4. Troublesome knowledge transfer

The right way of transferring knowledge and briefing the resource about the project may be a little tedious for the in-house employee as the augmented resource does not belong to company, and is just hired for a short-term basis. This could lead to frustrations among in-house employees, hamper the overall project.

5. Consistency and availability of resource

Since resources are hired on a short term basis for specific projects, it is very difficult to retain or extend the contract of good resources for further projects. Resources have their schedules and commitments which makes it very challenging for companies to be able to get a hold of the same resource for other projects.

In conclusion..

IT staff augmentation is trending amongst big and small businesses and it carries a lot of potential to become mainstream min the near future. It also brings along with it challenges which if handled correctly, can be controlled and minimized to get extent, allowing companies to make maximum benefit from the trending IT recruitment model – IT Staff Augmentation.

 

Written by

Jay Anthony,

Marketing Head, TECHVED Consulting