CIOs: Ignore IT maturity and your upskilling will fail

IT maturity centers on how effectively a company uses its IT ecosystem to support organizational goals. Assessing IT maturity involves examining all facets of IT within an organization, including governance, processes, tool adoption and culture.

"As an IT organization grows in maturity, its skills need to evolve. If you upskill too early—before foundational maturity—you risk instability and wasted investment," said Brian Spanswick, CIO at Cohesity. He added that IT organizations in the early stages of their maturity require both tactical and technical skills to deliver and maintain IT services. "If an IT organization doesn't have a solid 'run' foundation, any additional maturity is wasted," he said.

The level of high IT maturity can vary depending on an organization's mission and objectives. IT maturity enables an organization to use its IT capabilities efficiently and cost-effectively while remaining flexible enough to adapt to changing business needs without disruption.

IT maturity also hinges on the organization's culture and readiness to adapt. "Any maturing process comes with a cultural mindset, both from a leader standpoint, like a CIO, who needs to create an environment where learning, failing and embracing change is encouraged," says Amit Modi, chief technology officer at Movius. "If you don't allow people to be comfortable in that environment, either the change process will be slow, they'll be resistant or that company is going to miss out."

An immature IT environment – one that is bogged down by inefficient processes, incongruent with the larger organizational culture and unable to adapt to changing needs or integrate with new tools – can be detrimental to upskilling efforts. "The risk of not reaching IT maturity before upskilling is that IT services won't meet and maintain the service levels that the enterprise requires to execute business operations," said Spanswick.

The consequences of upskilling in an immature environment can be far-reaching, including:

• Underused skills. Upskilling efforts may be misaligned with job roles or organizational goals, or the organization may lack the necessary supporting infrastructure to nurture these skills.
• Wasted time and resources. Inefficient or ineffective upskilling leads to wasted time and effort for the employee and wasted costs and resources for the organization
• Employee attrition. Disorganized and inefficient upskilling can lead to employees feeling stagnant and burned out, culminating in attrition and competitors poaching top talent.

To ensure that upskilling efforts are effective, initiatives should be aligned with maturity milestones, ensuring that upskilling is timely and relevant to the organization's current capabilities. For example, a low-maturity IT environment may train employees in foundational skills, such as digital literacy. When IT maturity is reached, an organization may introduce more high-level skills.

Effective upskilling hinges on identifying the essential skills that the organization currently needs, as well as future IT skills that will help maintain a competitive edge.

"CIOs should focus less on teaching teams specific programming languages or tools, and more on building system-level thinking and human oversight," said Agustín Huerta, senior vice president of digital innovation for enterprise core studio at Globant. "The future of IT will depend on whether IT teams can design scalable and secure systems that can use AI effectively, not based on whether someone codes in Python or JavaScript."

Here are some of the skills that CIOs should prioritize now to stay agile in a changing world:

• AI and automation fluency. Skills related to AI and automation – including AI for IT operations, prompt engineering, and workflow automation – are becoming increasingly important as AI adoption continues to impact work operations, particularly within the IT sector. Fifty-one percent of IT leaders report suffering from an AI skills shortage, according to a report from Harvey Nash.  
• Cybersecurity resilience. Security measures, such as cloud security, identity and access management and threat intelligence, have always been essential but are increasingly important as cyberattacks and hacking become more common and sophisticated.
• Cloud and hybrid infrastructure. Understanding cloud and hybrid environments is essential as IT moves away from traditional infrastructure toward a more agile and scalable model. Employees must be able to navigate this change by developing skills such as multi-cloud management, including microservices and serverless computing, as well as cloud-native architecture and financial operations. 
• Data and analytics literacy. Data and analytics literacy enable IT teams to make informed, strategic decisions, keeping the organization agile and future-ready. Knowing how to use skills like visualization, data governance, and how to provide decision-making support are all core parts of data literacy that IT teams must keep top of mind.
• Soft skills for transformation. Soft skills are just as important as technical skills – but are sometimes overlooked in upskilling. Learning essential soft skills, such as change management, cross-functional collaboration and leadership agility, can help employees adapt to changing needs when the time comes. IT organizations should place an emphasis on soft skills, such as critical thinking, according to Spanswick. "The ability to formulate a hypothesis, test it against real-world scenarios, assess the findings and update the hypothesis is critical to mature the IT services effectively and efficiently," said Spanswick.