How Digital Partners Create Competitive Advantage

It's no secret that we are in the midst of a tech talent drought . As IT departments continue to be burdened with increasing demands organisations have focused on insourcing development for core business processes or strategic differentiators. While outsourcing has become common for less business-critical operations such as ERP maintenance among others.

However, owning the tech talent roadmap is no easy task. As Forbes points out, there is a talent war going on in the tech industry currently and it shows no signs of abating in the near future. As a matter of fact, further exacerbating the challenge of finding qualified talent, Microsoft found that up to 40% of workers are considering switching jobs.

High turnover rates can result in team disruption and deter the original goal of delivering internal differentiated innovation. Further compounding the challenge to retain staff, organisations often struggle with keeping developer skills up to date.

Because of the ever-increasing difficulty associated with finding highly skilled tech talent, it is plain to see that insourcing alone is not a sustainable model for a successful digital strategy.

Effective collaboration is crucial to high employee engagement and is one of the key indicators of a successful, agile business. However, internal collaboration is just one piece of the puzzle; successful, digital-first organisations also understand and excel at collaborating outside of their own borders.

Successful external collaboration means strategically selecting digital partners that augment organisational capabilities. These digital partners are often selected because they have particular expertise in niche areas and understand how to work together with internal teams to build capability and accelerate the development and delivery of particular solutions.

Combining a digital partner's unique technical expertise with an organisation's domain knowledge often results in differentiated offerings and speed-to-market that outpaces what even the most experienced internal teams could feasibly deliver.

To sum up, your choices around sourcing tech talent can depend on your specific organisational needs at a point in time, but choosing to build a co-sourced partnership in tandem with your in-house team can help guarantee business continuity, as well as innovation and speed-to-market. When entering into such a collaborative arrangement, the ultimate goal is to create a competitive advantage through the relationship, one where both parties have a shared vision of long-term success.

Many factors go into developing a successful digital strategy, but choosing a digital partner can help guarantee business continuity, spark innovation and improve speed-to-market. Finding the right digital partner with the desired expertise and cultural fit requires diligence. When selecting a digital partner, organisations should search for a partner that shares the same vision of long-term success and gives the organisation a competitive advantage.