Technology should create a better business outcome to make the world a better place to live, work and play. No enterprise organisation invests in technology without a purpose, i.e. it needs to perform a function. But to use technology as intended, IT teams need the right skills to install, configure, manage and support. Much like planes, IT hardware and software from different vendors work differently and need different skills to get the most out of them. Plus as the technology evolves, IT teams need to refresh their skills.
There is no way you would take a plane up in the air unless you had the right training and knew you were going to be able to land it again without any problems. Introducing new technology into the heart of a data centre carries similar risks. Do it wrong and you could find the business grinding to a halt whilst you pray that the back-ups can restore missing data. Development environments obviously help and take out some of the risk. But even then, it’s not all that efficient to ‘play’ with the technology. It is far more effective to know how to get the most out of the technology in the first instance. This is where good quality training and education has an important role to play. You should have the option to customise the training to your team’s requirements. There is no point putting a team through hours of tutorial on things they already know. Plus people have different learning styles. Sometimes people learn better at their own pace, or they find it difficult to travel and want to learn from their office or home. Training should also be credible. If the vendor has appointed the training provider, this is usually a good sign that the course content is going to be of decent quality. The fact is, organisations spend large sums of money on technology to give them a competitive advantage. They need to invest their training budget wisely to leverage this investment to have maximum impact.
I have been working recently on a new brochure for our IBM focused partners to help them offer their customers IBM authorised training, which you can see by clicking here. For more than 25 years Avnet has provided product, skills and services for the complete range of IBM hardware and software solutions for Cloud, Big Data & Analytics, Security, Social & Mobility, and Systems & Systems Software. Plus as IBM’s appointed Authorised Global Training Provider, it should come as no surprise to you that we are passionate about training and education. In the same way no one wants to see a plane crash because of pilot error, we hate to see down time or wasted investment because the IT teams in charge of managing the IT infrastructure we sold, didn’t have the right skills. Our success is directly related to helping ensure the best business outcome. And whilst technology is becoming more intuitive, at the enterprise level, artificial intelligence has not yet replaced the need for skilled IT teams.
