The Elastic IT Staff

Computerworld - Elasticity has become a much-sought-after trait for IT organizations. With technology priorities driven more than ever by business demands, a CIO must be able to direct resources -- including employees -- wherever they are needed. This has to happen quickly and smoothly, with staff feather-ruffling kept to a minimum.
The elastic IT organization combines the ideas behind just-in-time inventory planning and portfolio management. CIOs attempt to have just the right quantity of human IT resources, deployed precisely when and where they're needed most. And they treat IT projects not as discrete efforts, but rather as components of an overall service-delivery organization.
According to pioneering IT managers and other experts, it's these factors that differentiate genuine elasticity from the age-old tactic of rounding up contractors or inking an agreement with a systems integrator.
The good news is that CIOs today have a wealth of staffing options: full-time employees, part-timers, contractors and outsourcers -- both on- and offshore. The trick is to leverage these elements to create a sort of human on-demand IT organization that satisfies business and budget requirements while providing career growth for workers. It's a challenge, but one that smart IT leaders are meeting.
The business realities that have created this need for elasticity are familiar to IT managers. The tight budgets that have prevailed for several years pared down IT staffs and increased the demand for less-expensive alternatives such as contract help and offshoring. Meanwhile, day-to-day business operations and IT have grown so tightly intertwined that they must be treated as one and the same.

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"What I'm hearing from hiring managers is, 'We want options,' " says Katherine Spencer Lee, an executive director at Robert Half Technology. She says that CIOs and IT managers who come to the staffing firm, a division of Menlo Park, Calif.-based Robert Half International Inc., seek to maintain a bedrock staff of full-timers, contractors who can "flex strategically" from project to project and an offshore outsourcing company for a small number of commodity projects.
There are many ways to meet the need for flexibility in staffing. Harrah's Entertainment Inc., for example, created a sort of IT SWAT team that rotates quickly from project to project, depending on what the Las Vegas-based gambling and entertainment company needs to accomplish.
In a 2002 reorganization, Harrah's divided its IT organization into groups devoted to application development, operations and support. A fourth group -- the "solutions management group" -- serves as a liaison between IT and business. This setup made IT more