One of the challenges of the economic downturn for the IT department is ensuring that access to the right skills remains even after cutting the personnel cloth to suit these demanding times. Work doesn’t stop just because the climate is difficult and technological developments mean that gaps in the core team’s skills can quickly appear. It’s never easy to keep up with the demands of the work and the technology.

Traditionally this issue would have been solved by contractors; individuals coming in to particular projects or to solve particular short-term problems. However this still causes management issues and can often lead to the creation of silos of information. Crucial knowledge gets tied-up in one person, who then becomes irreplaceable. What started as a short-term solution has become a long-term and increasingly expensive problem.

It’s at this point that a company needs flexible resourcing, which enables it to run a core team of employees within the IT department and buy in skills from elsewhere as they are needed. Operating as a managed service, flexible resourcing involves a third-party supplier managing a pool of skilled IT workers, from which the most suitable can be selected to fulfil the exact skills an abilities required for each project.

Knowledge transfer is also an important element of flexible resourcing. Rather than a contractor being the only person who understands the system, flexible resourcing workers tend to be better integrated with the in-house team and able to share and transfer knowledge within the business. As a managed service, flexible resourcing can also handle change resolution, ensuring that a project or team is supported despite inevitable personnel changes and developments within a project.

Nor is flexible resourcing limited to individuals. The nature of the pool or database means that whole teams of onsite or offshore workers can be quickly identified and established; moving on once the project is complete. For example during a key phase of a development project, specialist onsite workers could be supported by an offshore team.

Flexible resourcing can therefore be a long term solution to keeping headcount stable, whilst also responding to the changing demands of financial institutions. It’s a way of reducing the impact of new technology and the economic lifecycle on a business. It helps CIOs to augment their internal teams and respond in a managed and controlled way to developments within the business and external pressures such as compliance and consolidation.

Outsourcing this issue gives a company access to a wider talent pool than they might be able to manage themselves; a European database or global talent management facilities. The ability therefore, to solve skill shortage issues at both local and international levels; to find the right people, at the right price, in the right place.