The previous post suggests enterprises need outside as well as internal experts to address strategic and immediate incidents.
Expertise is a distilled result of experience, knowledge, and know-how. Problem-areas/examples can be:
a) Knowledge-intensive (computer-related security, biosafety, environmental hazards, energy, manufacturing),
b) Intricate to legal, regulatory, and standards, ([inter]national, state, local, industry)
c) Hard to grasp because of scale, rapid rate of change, or confusing data
The acquisition and deployment of outside talent to address an emergency is explored in our serialized story, “The Hunt for Talent”. It illustrates a situation where the organization chooses to bring in outside talent after detecting a security breach.
Management seeks outside talent when:
I) The in-house staff is not prepared (insufficiently broad knowledge, local scope too narrow for intricate problems, inexperienced to grasp the problem)
II) The volume of effort exceeds available in-house resources (lean in-house staffing at a site or in a group)
III) There is a need for political or legal “disposable talent” (to absorb blame, accept consequences, arbitrage the use of talent across multiple needs, or due to lack of trust)
IV) Multiple efforts are needed and outside paths to results have different risks and costs (including lack of faith in in-house capability or capacity)
V) The efforts are a one-time event (outside talent have done many times what will only be needed once at an enterprise like building a new factory)
VI) Elapsed time and conflicts don’t allow quickly building talent in-house (the relevant time to address a problem is too short to deploy or train in-house)
VII) Resources (mainly cash) are available where a pool of talent is not (minimize disruptions on ongoing production or work)
Management typically picks one or more of these reasons to justify their actions and then executes on the strategy to use the additional resources.
The next post explores strategies to deploy outside talent
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