Greg James of Fonterra says retention of ICT talent remains a critical concern, with Generation X employees holding one of the most coveted skills set in the networked enterprise.

Asked what he thinks ICT leaders will focus on in the next 12 months, Greg James says,”the skills shortage”. 

There was no pause or hesitation from Fonterra’s director procurement, IS and business processes.

James travels overseas regularly and says the lack of trained IT staff is a global trend, not just in New Zealand and Australia.

“The worldwide demand for the types of services within an ICT type of environment will greatly outstrip supply. As a result we are seeing more of a concentration of a pure outsourcing type market such as in India.”

For Fonterra,”effectively the largest company in New Zealand” as James puts it, to be experiencing the same woes as all other enterprises across the country when it comes to staff recruitment and retention, simply underscores the urgency and the extent of the ICT skills shortage. (See sidebar “If you snooze, you lose”.)

Thus, says James, staff retention and development strategies will be a”big focus” at Fonterra.”The overall cost base if you have to reskill or retrain… assuming you can get the relevant skills in the market, has proven to be quite difficult.”

The shortage, he says, is felt in key areas such as the business analyst sector and what he calls”the enterprise type strategy” skills.

The second group consists of those”who will probably come out of the business, understand business processes, work within strategic functions within the business outside IT, but then have had sufficient involvement in delivery programmes of work with IT as a focus. They also have a bit of a bent towards technology, but are not pure tech types”, says James.”You are probably talking about the sort of 30 to 40-year-old, the Gen X as opposed to the Gen Y.”

Working towards having this combination of business skills with an understanding of technology is a very good skill path, he says.”Those that are smart and go down that path will have lifetime roles, absolutely wonderful career experiences.”

He explains the demand for this type of business skill is not going to slow down. And for those who possess these skills, he says there are positive signs for long-term employment in the sector.

So for those who are known more for their technology than business skills, James’ advice is simple:”Start to move more and more out of what I call a pure commodity play, the pure specialist play into the more adaptive space whether it would be SOA type of technologies, process layers, process architectures, those sorts of areas. That, to me, is where it is all going to be.”

He says training programmes for these types of skills may not be readily available locally. He cites some universities in the United States that have created a management degree in running what he calls multi-source or multi-partner organisations.

Succession planning
This year, says James, one of the key HR focuses on Fonterra across the business is”ensuring we are developing our skills, our resources, our people, that we are making sure we are providing and have succession planning in place”.

Career development is critical. Fonterra has a graduate programme where the graduates undergo a”rotational programme” where they are assigned to various areas.

You have to keep the job varied, says James.”It is an area we will focus more and more, putting our teams into the laboratory type situations for some of the bigger technology companies,” says James.

He says such a programme will be in place in the next 18 months, where Fonterra’s ICT staff will be sent to training courses run by companies like Microsoft and Oracle in the United States.

“The policy is work hard, play hard, have fun,” says James.

“It is actually a fun environment to work in. We try to build on to it so that people are challenged and they are challenged because it is a dynamic environment. They have the ability to work with new technologies, to be part of the wide organisation in helping draw the strategy of Fonterra.”

James took on his current post in the middle of 2007.”I now look at the global procurement as well as the IS function, the global process and change and training team and our enterprise programme office,” explains James whose previous title was chief information officer and general manager global business processes. Fonterra appointed Chris Barendregt as chief information officer, as part of this move.