Stage 2 case study

2

Maryland Technology Consulting IT Solution

Student’s Name

Institution Affiliation

Course

Instructor

Date

Maryland Technology Consulting IT Solution

Introduction

Maryland Technology Consultants has for several years addressed the consulting needs of its customers by providing highly skilled consultants to guide them in their IT developing and actualizing their IT strategies, conducting marketing research and providing recommendations to inform decision-making. The company's target customer base has been growing and is expected to continue growing thanks to the successes in bidding, referrals and returning customers. This widening customer base, coupled with the company's aspirations to grow by 7% every year over the next five years, creates a need to widen its pool of workers and train more consultants to equip them with the necessary skills to be ready when the opportunity arises. MTC relies on manual processes of recruitment and hiring, which are raising doubts over how well they respond to the demands of future needs and address the increasing hiring requirements. In response to this challenge, the director of HR proposed automating the hiring process to reduce the time it takes to hire staff and to make it possible to hire from other countries. This report seeks to analyze the company's current state, develop specific requirements to improve the situation, evaluate the proposed automation solution and develop an implementation plan for the application and hiring system to improve the talent acquisition process at MTC.

Strategic Use of Technology

Business strategy

Maryland Technology Consultants' business strategy is to provide its customers with highly skilled technology professionals with the necessary training to provide expertise and technical skills that address their IT and business challenges. The company's consultants are up to date with new business and technology trends and work collaboratively to develop new methods and practices to address its internal needs. The company hires new staff members, trains them on the different areas of customer needs it addresses, and retains them as workers waiting to be delegated to new or existing customers who require its services. It serves the need of its customers in three key areas. The first is in business process consulting, where the in-house consultants guide customers and advise them on strategies for redesigning business processes, improving their business processes, and incorporating industry-proven best practices to realize higher output.

The second is information technology consulting, where the consultant advises MTC's customers on issues like their IT strategy, the beginning-to-end process of implementing IT solutions, and their network support. Lastly, MTC outsources consultants to work in their customer's organizations on a contractual basis to conduct due diligence, evaluate their vendors, and guide them in coming up with service-level agreements. Realizing the opportunity presented by the growing customer base, MTC has established new satellite locations, three locations from the headquarters to be close to their existing customers. The company is also looking outside the country to identify other areas where it can recruit workers to work remotely and on location when its customers are in the workers' country.

The current hiring system presents several issues that hinder the full achievement of MTC’s entire business strategy. First, the current manual recruitment and hiring process is prolonged, impairing the speed at which the company responds to an emerging need for new staff members. Under that current system, when MTC needs to hire new staff, it has to use the traditional means of sourcing for talent to attract applications. Now that the company operates by just-in-time hiring, it gauges the possibility of winning a contract and prepares a skilled team of consultants to delegate the job to within 60 days after the contract is signed. This manual human resource management mode means that getting an appropriately skilled team ready within 60 days is often challenging.

The second challenge the manual hiring mode presents is the barrier to hiring people from distant locations, including those in different countries. MTC's strategy is to serve customers all around the country and in the international market within other countries. The manual hiring mode limits the hiring process to focus locally and within the company's specific areas. Eliminating this barrier will mean it can invite applications from people in different countries and even specify the countries depending on where a new client is based (Flood, 2019). The hired team can work remotely and on location attending to the client within their country. To address these two barriers, the company can improve its hiring process by acquiring the needed staff members to equip and train so that they are ready in 60 days after a contract is signed. Improving the process would also help MTC to source talent from the international market to attend to international customers as it plans to expand its operations globally.

Competitive Advantage

Maryland Technology Consultants is a mid-size business operating in a highly competitive environment where both small and large competitors vie for the same opportunities. With a total workforce of 450 employees, MTC competes with Hewlett-Packard, Booz Allen Hamilton and other smaller consulting firms focused on specific market niches and established loyal client bases. Companies such as HP have an established presence on boast of annual revenues magnitudes over $60 billion (Alsop, 2023). To compete with such firms and stand a chance to win the contracts that MTC and its competitors bid on, the company can use a new hiring system that helps them identify the best fit of talent for the opportunities they have locally and internationally using artificial intelligence (Lee & Kim, 2021). By hiring highly skilled and experienced workers, they will be able to serve their customers in better ways and increase customer satisfaction. Skilled workers will also get the job done in less time, which to the customer, will create room for more objectives to be realized. Shifting to a new hiring system will also help the company identify workers who require less training to be ready within the shortest time. MTC will also be able to use the data in the hiring system to identify the area where many applicants have skills to direct its marketing to such aspects and take advantage of the ready skills available to them affordably.

Strategic Objectives

MTCS's strategic goals illustrate a way forward for the company to direct its efforts towards achieving its vision and mission in the short and long term.

Strategic Goal (from case study)	Objective (clear, measurable and time-bound)	Explanation (2-3 sentences)
Increase MTC Business Development by winning new contracts in IT Consulting.	Increase the contact won in IT consulting by six contracts in 18 months.	The new hiring system will make it possible to recruit workers with better skills relevant to IT consulting, making MTC more appealing to customers who need services in this area. It will also improve workers' work quality, translating to higher customer satisfaction and more referrals.
Build a cadre of consultants internationally to provide remote research and analysis support to MTC’s onsite teams in the U. S.	Increase international recruiting efforts and employ five research analysts in the next 12 months.	The new hiring system would allow applicants worldwide to apply online, increasing the number of international applicants. It would enable the recruiters to carefully monitor the applications for these positions, identify the necessary research and analysis skills, and screen resumes for these critical skills. Recruiters could quickly view the number of applicants and identify when additional recruiting efforts are needed to meet the objective.
Continue to increase MTC's ability to quickly provide high-quality consultants to awarded contracts to serve the client's needs best.	Reduce the time to source new workers by 30 days once the system is implemented.	The new hiring system will make it possible to publicize the open opportunity within the company and attract many applicants quickly, reducing the time it takes to gather applications. The system will also make evaluating the applicants' skillset easy so that those who will need the least training are shortlisted.
Increase MTC's competitive advantage in the IT consulting marketplace by increasing its reputation for having IT consultants who are highly skilled in leading-edge technologies and innovative solutions for its clients.	To have 20% of customers served in the IT consulting aspect of the business return or refer at least one other customer to MTC once the new system is implemented.	The new system will help the firm to identify skilled workers who can focus on IT consulting and improve the quality of service in this area. It will also make it possible to track workers' performance to attribute returning customers in the IT consulting business to IT-specific workers.

Decision Making

MTC's leadership can realize the objectives and goals through strategic decision-making at various levels of the organization's leadership.

Role	Level as defined in Course Content Reading	Example of Possible Decision Supported by Hiring System	Example of Information, the Hiring System, Could Provide to Support Your Example Decision
Senior/Executive Managers (Decisions made by the CEO and the CFO at MTC supported by the hiring system.)	Administrative	CEO decides to introduce the consultation services of artificial intelligence	The number of applicants with qualifications to offer consultation services in the area of artificial intelligence
Middle Managers (Decisions made by the Director of HR and the Manager of Recruiting supported by the hiring system.)	Executive	The HR director decides to manage the company's global workforce from the system.	The information about all employees, their qualifications, locations, project commitment, and salaries, among others.
Operational Managers (Decisions made by the line managers in the organization who are hiring for their projects supported by the hiring system.)	Supervisory	The managers create a pool of potential consultants for future consideration from applicants who are not shortlisted.	The number of qualified applicants in specific areas left out in hiring without being shortlisted.

References

Alsop, T. (2023, April 11). HP Inc’s net revenue 1998-2022. Statista. https://www.statista.com/statistics/265001/hewlett-packards-net-revenue-since-1998/

Flood, F. (2019). Leadership in the remote, freelance, and virtual workforce era. Global Encyclopedia of Public Administration, Public Policy, and Governance, pp. 1–5.

Lee, B. C., & Kim, B. Y. (2021). Development of an AI-based interview system for remote hiring. International. J. Adv. Res. Eng. Technol, pp. 12, 654–663.