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How Digital Partners Create Competitive Advantage

Digital Partners can be an Integral Piece of a Successful Digital Strategy

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.

A Strong Digital Partner can Deliver Sustainable Innovation

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.

Advantages of Working with a Digital Partner

  • Organisations that have critical business goals to be implemented can develop solutions quicker with a digital partner than it would take to recruit and integrate a new high-quality team. Many CIOs who have worked together with NearForm have expressed that digital partners can be especially helpful for prototype work which may or may not turn into long-term investments.
  • Longevity in the IT space is measured in months rather than years and it is not getting any easier to replace expert technical staff. A strong digital partner embraces client business goals and understands how to manage the ebb and flow of specialist staff while delivering high-quality results.
  • The speed at which technology is progressing means new frameworks, technologies and methodologies are popping up seemingly on a daily basis. Strong digital partners stay on top of the ever-changing development landscape and can bring not only knowledge about new methods and innovation from different verticals but, more importantly, real-world experience related to putting these methods into practice. Avoiding potential pitfalls is vital to successfully leveraging emerging technologies.
  • Digital partners bring their experience from a wide array of projects and industries and share this knowledge with in-house teams. Increasing devs' exposure to new approaches, technologies and skills is a great way to help in the retention of an organisation's existing talent.

Identify the Right Digital Partner for your Organisation

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.

Insight, imagination and expertly engineered solutions to accelerate and sustain progress.

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