Scouting for geeks

The 20th century has been referred to as the ‘Age of Human Capital’. This is because one of the key factors in determining a country’s standard of living is how well it develops and utilises the skills, knowledge, health and habits of its population. Rough estimates suggest that education, health and on-the-job training collectively fuel 80% of capital, or wealth, in advanced countries.In the 21st Century, the increasing demand for IT skills is slanted ever more towards people who not only have the technical expertise, but know how to apply it effectively for the industry concerned.HEALTHY DATAJohan Vendrig, CIO of the Auckland District Health Board, heads the Information Management Technology Service group,  which employs more than 300 people delivering IT services to some 10,000 users. An integral part of his role is liaising with the board’s HR staff to determine not only the skill sets required, but also such issues as pay strategies, in order to attract the right people. But an even more important factor in recruitment is finding people who understand how the health sector works."Pure IT is really only a small part of my overall team,” Vendrig says. "Increasingly you want people who can think about information management end to end, and really understand how decisions at the coal face – in our case clinical services – impact funding streams for example; how they may affect patient risk.”The DHB these days employs specialists who understand its business and clinical processes; how clinical coding decisions translate into revenue decisions, and ultimately, where those decisions can result in wasted funds. This is crucial for the health sector, which has to spend its money very carefully. A smooth stream of patient data means better management of resources: patients spend less time in hospital or seeing consultants. Maybe a budget problem can be traced back to a form that wasn’t properly filled out because the patients didn’t understand it."You really need to understand what the impact of the information process itself is,” Vendrig says. "There’s no use in presenting information to a manager to show that things are going badly, unless you can present  that same information in a way that people at the coal face can actually make a change to what they do, to improve the situation.”Sometimes the analysis of clinical information presents some hard choices for the public health system: if a clinician only has funding for 20 operations of a certain type, they need to prioritise the patients, so that those who get the surgery are those most likely to benefit from it. But the accuracy of such analysis is vital, so that correct decisions are made.The DHB also employs plenty of traditional IT staff: desktop support, systems management, etc, but an emerging role with growing importance is what is known as ‘function application support’ – an IT administrator who liaises very closely with health system user groups, advising them on how the computer applications they use can be adapted to work better for them. This approach has also changed the DHB’s approach to training, taking it away from structured classroom sessions and into a more consultative process, where small groups of nurses or other medical personnel are taught in their workplace how best to use their computers. It’s a highly specialised role, requiring knowledge of a wide range of applications.Virtualisation and shared storage are being actively investigated by the DHB due to the economies of scale they can achieve, and it has already recruited specialists in those areas. However, some of that work has had to be outsourced to third parties, simply because the board’s own internal teams can’t handle the extra workload. Cloud offerings are also being investigated, but privacy issues surrounding medical records may lead to health services developing shared private clouds.Inevitably, the health sector finds itself competing with enterprise businesses for IT specialists. For this reason, it operates two pay scales: one for the health market and one for the general job market. IT comes under the latter heading, because the complexities of the job mean it needs to attract some top-end candidates. Vendig believes the pay rates the DHB offers are "very comparable”.However, one heartening aspect of recruiting for the health sector is the desire that some people have to work there, and the satisfaction they derive from making a difference to the standard of health care. "It’s quite surprising that in our staff satisfaction surveys, people always rate that as one of the reasons that they like to work here,” Vendrig says. "It has some extra value above just making your next dollar.”Meanwhile, big changes are under way in the management of health sector IT. The National Health IT Board is working on establishing, by 2014, a national electronic database of health information for patients and providers. As part of this strategy, the northern region’s four health boards: Auckland, Northland, Waitemata and Counties, will merge their information systems teams under the banner of healthAlliance (www.healthalliance.co.nz), the joint-venture services provider currently servicing the Waitemata and Counties-Manukau DHBs.The new service, dubbed the Northern Region Shared Services Organisation (NRSSO), is tentatively scheduled to begin its work next March. It will administer procurement and finance transaction services as well as IT, and will have its own board and CEO. Other regions are expected to establish similar organisations.The aim of the merger, Vendrig explains, is to use funds more efficiently by eliminating duplication of services. "With the ongoing growth of demand on the health sector, health funding just can’t keep growing at the rate it has been. So it’s mostly around trying to reduce duplication and then use the resources we free up to do some of the new stuff that we are needing to do.”TAKE IT TO THE BANKGiving new IT graduates a leg up into the workforce is becoming a source of pride for our unashamedly NZ-centric financial institution, Kiwibank. It’s a firm supporter of the Summer of Tech programme (www.summeroftech.co.nz), which has been running in Wellington for five years, and Kiwibank’s Application Delivery Manager, Tony Kennedy, is a member of the programme’s advisory board.It’s an industry-led partnership with universities to provide internship programmes to undergraduates and post-graduates coming out of institutions in the greater Wellington region. Its background has been in coding, but this year it’s expanded into design, engineering and business analysis. Companies participating in the programme take on interns for a four-month induction course that not only introduces them to the company’s business, but mentors them in employment strategy, such as writing a CV, handling a job interview and posting their profiles on business networks like LinkedIn. The participating companies post their internships on the SoT website, and the graduates can then sift out the prospects that appeal for a follow-up interview. About 60 graduates out of more than 300 applicants were placed in internships this year. Kiwibank took on one intern last year (she’s now working there fulltime) and has two this year. "We bring them on for specific projects that we don’t have the resources to do,” Kennedy says. "So as part of their introduction we give them the sort of project we have in the ideas bucket and not had a chance to execute.”One of the Kiwibank interns is working on an application for Windows Mobile 7 phones that will enable users to quickly locate Kiwibank and PostShop ATMs. The other is investigating ways of using operational management data to generate reports on the health of Kiwibank’s data systems. Kennedy wants to set up an internship programme for its hardware engineering section next year.Kennedy’s department employs more than 25 application architects, and when recruiting, he’s after application developers who are familiar with the .net stack, Microsoft’s development framework. The team is about half Kiwi, but its members also come from Brazil, Japan, India, South Africa and Europe. Kiwibank also employs web developers in a variety of roles building and maintaining its various online banking and support services. It recruits through its website (where it gains the bulk of its overseas applicants), as well as through employment agencies and social media. However, local contacts are also a major source of recruits."Wellington is quite small and it’s got a lot of contacts,” Kennedy says, "so when we’re looking for senior people we’ll actually tap into our network of colleagues – not just me; I encourage my staff to do this. We use the different user group communities around town – there’s a pretty active .net user community in Wellington which some of my key members attend.”Kiwibank has a low staff turnover and usually has little trouble recruiting good people. "If you give clever, driven people some autonomy and allow them to demonstrate what they’re good at, and give them a sense of purpose, they stay motivated and do good stuff,” says Kennedy. "I’m always looking for good talent and I’m prepared, within reason, to pay for it.”Virtualisation is driving a plan by Kiwibank to shift some of its infrastructure from Wellington to Auckland. A new data center is being built there, and within the next 12 months it will become the centre of a large part of the bank’s operations. A virtualisation specialist partner is currently running this development, but Kiwibank will be advertising positions there in the near future.Being recently established means Kiwibank isn’t locked into older, legacy computer systems, so its recruitment policies are aimed at finding keen, innovative people."One of the things I’m always looking for in any kind of recruitment is this concept of ‘learning is forever’,” Kennedy says. "We look for people who are investing in their own careers and want to stay current.”SELLING THE SIZZLEAdvertising isn’t always irritating. Any night on television, you’ll see advertisements that grab your attention because they’re different and often very entertaining. Chances are quite a few of them are the work of Saatchi & Saatchi, which has won its global reputation through employing clever people with original ideas. For CIO Peter Mangin, the task of finding those people is one he reserves for himself."I’m finding myself quite frequently being asked to look through someone’s CV, or in cases actually interview them directly, and make a judgement call on whether that person is technically suitable for the position,” he says. "When I hire directly, I rarely advertise – people just seem to like working for me, which is quite a good thing because it means less turnover, so I don’t have a need for my department to recruit very often.”But technical skills alone aren’t enough; Mangin looks for people with a creative spark. The digital age has brought a need for web developers and technologists with cool ideas and the ability to solve problems quickly, to satisfy very demanding clients."I don’t place such an emphasis on specific skills because anyone can learn a specific skill – I look more for a person with an attitude, because you can skill them up if they need a little bit of help, but they need to have that attitude.”When it comes to the recruitment process, Mangin bluntly asserts that traditional HR recruiters have "almost made themselves redundant”. A technical qualification on a CV is meaningless if a person can’t fit into that high-pressure environment and produce the goods on a tight deadline. Mangin keeps his own "internal rolodex” of potential recruits. "I’ve all but foregone using the recruiters per se; I just throw it out there. The last guy I recruited, I put something on Geekzone and just said ‘this is what it is, do you want to have a chat and get in contact with me?’ and I got much more response out of that than I would have got through a recruiter.”As well as web developers, Saatchi & Saatchi employs systems administrators and quality assurance testers. The skills it seeks are "very, very broad”, Mangin says. They need to understand how the internet works, from browsers to search engines, mobile technologies and social media ("It’s like a cornucopia of skills, really.”). Some staff are also brought in on contract for specific jobs."We’re not going to carry developers when we don’t need them, so we tend to scale up and scale down a little bit. There’s always a core group that is always static, and they tend to be more broad technologists: a broader skill set and more senior level, where they can help develop a plan and work out, do we need to bring in another developer for a few months, do we need someone who’s excellent at MarkUp for an extra month, and so on.”  As for the availability of such people, Saatchi’s tends only to look abroad when trying to fill very senior positions. But Mangin laments the shortage of local talent nonetheless. "The thing that really annoys me is, there’s a very narrow band of diversity in skills in New Zealand, and there isn’t a depth of knowledge, possibly due to the lack of an actual scale of projects. Really good web developers are hard to find; there’s a huge gap in people who are really good delivery system architects."You’ve got a lot of systems administrators and IT managers in that lower strata, and realistically these guys just know how to follow dialogue boxes on a screen and click boxes – that’s it. And that really disheartens me.”Mangin has noticed a rising number of job applicants from abroad, seeking a better lifestyle. England and Europe have provided a "constant trickle”, especially people with young families, but recently there’s been a surge of jobseekers from the US ("They’ve just had enough with America and they want to get out.”). But for some, this country will never be able to offer sufficient reward. Mangin knows of one data storage expert based in Finland who could earn no better than 30% of his current salary if he came here.Demand for skills in the digital advertising field means plenty of firms are looking to poach those with a reputation and a strong portfolio. But Mangin points out that the ad game fluctuates; clients come and clients go, and media budgets have been hit hard by the recession.HOW DO YOU KEEP THEM?Retention of talented employees is a top priority. Google recently gave its staff a 10% basic salary increase, as well as a $1000 tax-paid bonus, just to help stem the exodus to Facebook and other Silicon Valley rivals. Not every organisation can manage to wave such a carrot under the noses of employees, and a robust recruitment process needs to be in place in order to identify and retain high performers. Matt O’Mara, General Manager, Knowledge Management and Technology at Career Services, advises that young and emerging talent, particularly those wanting to do their overseas experience (OE), needs to be targeted and groomed to take on more responsibility within organisations."CIOs need to ask themselves: if I got run over by a bus tomorrow, who would take over my role? Who have I prepared and developed to a level that is sufficient?”More than 20,000 Kiwis migrate on an annual basis and the IT salary gap between Australia and New Zealand is getting wider."There is no point trying to compete against Australia in salary,” says Annabelle Klap, ICT Director at New Zealand HR consultancy Hudson. "We need to find other ways of retaining people in New Zealand and work out ways to encourage people back here after their OEs.”Principal and Leader of the Human Capital Consultancy at Mercer, Sharon Spence, agrees: "This is not just about pay packets; there are other elements of the value proposition to consider, such as skills development, career development, job design and flexibility.”