The breadth of technology knowledge that service providers now require has increased exponentially, as the number of employees is stable or in decline in most service providers, and the pool of needed specialist digital talent hasn’t been able to keep pace.

With a more diverse and collaborative ecosystem than ever before, choices are available – but what’s the right balance of making the most of your own talent versus looking externally? Here are several considerations when deciding how, when, and with whom to partner.

1. Focus on your core business

For most companies, success comes from the core business. You have to closely examine your business and ask what your core business can provide that no one else can.

It’s easy to look at other companies and be tempted to duplicate the way they do things as a template for your own business. However, you need to recognise what’s good about your business, and focus on maximizing those aspects with innovation, rather than trying to replicate what others are doing.

When you know your core business, you can make informed decisions on what to build yourself, where to use external people to solve a problem, and what areas need third party software to do the job.

2. Diversify to STEAM ahead

With a growing shortfall of specialized digital skills, we need to encourage people to enter emerging technology from outside of the expected STEM fields (science, technology, engineering and maths). Hence the A for ‘arts’ in the emerging term STEAM. We must be open to diverse types of skills and perspectives coming into the industry; they can help us understand the diverse customer base we all have.

In a recent internal meeting, I did a quick straw poll of how many people were engineers – less than half had an engineering background. I myself have an economics degree and ended up as a software product manager. You don’t need an engineering degree to use software, and you don’t need one to understand how to build software. I encourage you to look at your business as a whole, and what different perspectives can bring, when developing software. This applies to hiring as well as team building and partnering.