Invest in Your Team
While finding new talent is an important part of maintaining a strong workforce, the best investment is almost always realized when developing the talent you already have. Instead of hiring experts on a particular new technology (such as cloud computing), CIOs will need to retain people with general technical backgrounds — a "blueprint of technical knowledge" — and provide them with the tools they need to become experts in the latest enterprise technology.
Departments should set aside an annual budget for employee training that balances the financial realities of the department with the need to keep an employee's skills up to date. Large organizations may benefit from a formal internal training program, while IT departments with tighter budgets may devise lower-cost creative options, such as peer trainings in which employees share their knowledge with one another. Whatever your training budget, make sure every dollar spent on professional development addresses skills your organization needs now or will likely need in the future.