While the world is growing more digital by the day, companies are struggling to keep up, citing a lack of digitally-savvy workers. And according to a new study, 38% of respondents also blame the lack of skilled talent for their digital transformation failures.
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According to the State of Intelligent Process Automation Study, 71% of businesses plan to hire additional staff for their digital transformation efforts. While more than half (57%) say they have hired 25 or more digital transformation-specific personnel in the last year, their ability to successfully build and deploy plans is still derailed by lack of necessary talent.
To address the talent gap, decision makers are specifically prioritizing hiring IT specialist (67%), project manager (50%), and consulting (46%) roles. IT specialists are in greatest demand likely due to the pressure to address notable IT bottlenecks, while project managers and consultants help manage transformation projects and support internal communication about digital transformation efforts.
“Our latest research shows businesses are struggling to realize the vision of digitally transformed workplaces because of a shortage of skilled talent,” said Nintex Chief Marketing and Strategy Officer Dustin Grosse. “While decision makers are counting on their digital transformation initiatives to deliver value to the organization, these initiatives require the right staffing, technologies and resources to deliver big results.”
When limited IT resources are consumed by basic tasks like tech troubleshooting and password resets, there is little time and few resources to focus on more strategic initiatives. Staff focused on digital transformation must be empowered with the know-how and process automation and management tools to make process improvements.
Nintex Chief Evangelist Ryan Duguid added, “Given the talent shortage, organizations would benefit from re-imagining how they’ll address digital transformation. There’s no better time than now to invest in in-house talent and provide internal IT teams with the necessary training and tools to make them more effective and efficient in doing what they do best. For example, a no-code platform like Nintex gives IT professionals a set of powerful and easy-to-use process automation capabilities to quickly and securely digitize time-consuming manual processes and paper-based forms – which is a significant benefit for everyone within a business.”
Nintex’s research also reveals that while 71% of IT departments have employed process automation, 34% of employees still want to see more automation in IT—more than in any other department.
Most companies are only a few years into a formalized digital transformation plan. Yet the majority of plans are notably mature, incorporating process automation, intelligent solutions, and transformation-specific hires. To fully realize an organization’s transformation strategies, IT departments need to focus investments on those that empower line of business users to rely on support from IT as needed rather than full dependence on IT.