OHRMCon: Future Challenges for Leadership and HR

Future vision is essential to address todays’ rapidly changing world.  For this series, we have had the opportunity to speak at length with Lee Congdon, Chief Information Officer at Red Hat, and an upcoming speaker at OHRM Con, in New York in October. The only current certainties are technological and market flux. Mr. Congdon offered his thoughts on the challenges ahead for IT, enterprise, and HR leadership. Toward transparency—what’s ahead for IT Earlier Mr. Congdon talked about the alignment of enterprise leadership , culture, and incentives to move people and processes in the right direction.  What direction? Toward an agile, flexible, business ecosystem able to rapidly respond to business and market opportunities. When an IT organization is able to serve its constituent domains, what is next? Mr. Congdon suggests development of technology-driven leadership opportunities for the enterprise including:

• Pushing into new technologies
• Leadership in Clouds
• Providing better data and analytic capabilities for the organization
• Offering better collaborative opportunities
• Embracing consumer tools for the organization

As noted earlier, in the push to be more effective, agile, and collaborative, IT organizations need to better speak the language of their business partners—plus get the right people to lead the business.  Part of that enhanced role for IT includes:

• Recognizing new business and revenue opportunities
• Building and gaining the trust and confidence of business partners as an internal consultant
• Delivering solutions and collaboratively participating across the enterprise

Two-speed IT transition? Along with the need for speed  comes the need for a competitive model for IT.  Grappling with demand from business units to identify and embrace new capabilities, leverage mobile engagement, cut costs, define new revenue sources and so on, IT must transition from slow and stable to fast and flexible.  In addition to the open organization , bimodal or two-speed IT is proposed as a dual service IT context.  The model retains some traditional IT processes and services, while allowing organizations to make the jump to digital speed, development, agility, and delivery. Remarks Congdon, “I am not really a believer in what is being called bimodal or two-speed IT.  I think it may be a useful transition for some organizations.  You can’t necessarily get the entire organization to pivot immediately, but I think the expectation for the people in the organization, for the culture, needs to be yes we are in this together, [and] yes we all need to work in the same direction.” HR Challenge: Find and retain the right talent When asked about the key future issue for HR management, Mr. Congdon was unequivocal—“global war for talent.” Expanding on that, Congdon noted the challenges ahead in building and maintaining a creative, responsive workforce:

• Finding the right people and getting them on board
• Managing the long-term pipeline of skills
• Giving people a voice in the organization
• Creating a mission, and investing talent in the mission
• Developing a default culture of transparency where people see information, and see decision making occur
• Offering rewards and incentives, monetary and otherwise, aligned with expectations

Talking about OrangeHRM and open source HR technology, Mr. Congdon notes “…open source enables [key transitions] to occur across enterprises and creates the opportunity and the challenge for collaboration, partnering, [and] competition in a[n] open and more transparent environment.” Stepping out of the open organization context to discuss the current state of traditional business models, Congdon commented, “…[M]any traditional firms in the technology industry that classically held their intellectual property very close and were very reluctant to participate in open source are in fact increasingly announcing open source initiatives. Whether it be Microsoft, Apple or others,…I think that is a fascinating trend that may be relevant to this conversation as well.” Hear more from Mr. Congdon at OHRMCon in October. Network, learn and share best practices as you discuss the challenges facing the Open community, open organizations and innovations in open source HR technology. See you in October!