(see this link for more detail on the Tech People Architecture and Agile compensation framework)
As leaders of technology groups are increasingly being held accountable for higher levels of information and tech management, their performance is being more closely scrutinized. Examples include advanced analytics (for making more informed decisions), greater security (against cyber attacks), and capitalizing on fast moving trends such as AI/Machine Learning, Blockchain, Robotics, Automation, Internet of Everything, Advanced Data Analytices, Cloud Computing, and a variety of digital innovation solutions. Meanwhile for the CIO the imperative to streamline operations, reduce costs in every possible manner, and ensure compliance with countless regulations must still be met.
The Tech People Architecture framework for restructuring a tech workforce is similar in principle to traditional technology and business architecture initiatives but applied instead to tech workforce management and human capital. There are strategy and capability roadmaps, phase gate blueprints, job alignment, benchmarks, performance metrics, and stakeholder management. Governance issues need careful attention and business strategy drives it all. We've assisted in bringing TPA services to many employers who are rethinking and restructuring their tech workforces to be add capabilities required to act on disruptive technology and evolving business strategies.
Agile Compensation is Foote Partners' solution to the chaos in paying tech professionals that has been created by the proliferation of technology related job titles and lack of consistency in job definitions and pay practices across the enterprise for the same work performed.
With Agile Compensation and Tech People Architecture it is about how key human capital management (HCM) elements such as job definition and design, skills demand and acquisition, compensation, incentives and recognition, professional development, and work/life balance plug into an overall optimized operational model. The model is tuned to new technologies, shifting business strategy and organizational imperatives, culture, and performance philosophies. Together they propel flexibility and scalability, like any disciplined architecture approach. This is exactly what has been missing for decades in the HR functions at many employers, creating constant labor gaps, skills deficits, and failure to execute consistently
For employers, Agile Compensation and Tech People Architecture have solved these problems:
- Reducing the number of tech related job titles necessary to plan and administer pay by 50% to 70%;
- Significantly increases retention rates;
- Narrowed or altogether eliminated persistent technology skills gaps;
- Improved individual and team performance and more predictable execution,
- Increased consistent availability and quality of skills and workers
- Higher utilization rates,
- Mapping out how workers can move more effectively through promotions/career paths
Employers tell us that the Tech People Architecture practices our firm has introduced into their companies have corrected their lack of technology-related job title standardization across the enterprise and substantially reduced the number of tech job titles administratively without the workforce disruption of changing a single employees official job title. With so many dimensions and variability in tech jobs, people architecture has provided a solution for employers progressively unable to cope with the complexity of defining, determining pay, and laying out career paths for tech jobs.
Tech workforce management has had difficulty finding and retaining people that can perform at a high caliber on increasingly more difficult tasks and at the same time they're feeling immense performance pressure. Tech People Architecture and Agile Compensation helps employers cope with a ech workforce spread throughout the enterprise performing multidimensional jobs that are hard to categorize, price and manage.
"Clean sheeting" HR systems isn't realistic no matter how broken they may be. Employers desperately need a straight forward, inclusive architecture approach that can be built underneath the current HR systems, strengthening and rebuilding foundational systems over time. We've observed people architecture practices enabling just this kind of incremental change at dozens of our research partners. Tech People Architecture and Agile Compensation have been endorsed as perhaps the only viable approach to managing a workforce tasked with Blockchain, AI, Machine Language, Automation, IoT, Cloud Computing, and digital innovation urgencies.