You: Roundtable - Staffing

Staffing and advice to vendors

Network World, 7/26/99

Note: Click on highlighted words to bring up a definition of them and links to additional resources.

Note: Click on highlighted words to bring up a definition of them and links to additional resources.

The participants:
Russ Davis
Ass't. director, network services, Ernst & Young in New York

Mike Hinkle-Morrison
Former CIO at Pier One Imports and CTO at TGI Friday's restaurant chain

Gene Rindels
CIO of Respironics, Inc., Pittsburgh

Brook Smith
Mgr., network engineering, Forum Financial Group, Portland, Maine

George Sullivan
Sr. network architect,Northrup Grumman, Bethpage, NY

George Yeager
Mgr., architecture and design, Columbia Energy Group Service, Columbus, Ohio
Most people would agree that there's a shortage of good, qualified technical people. What are your secrets for dealing with this issue? How do you keep your best people and make sure you hire good people?

Davis: In terms of hiring, we try to look for individuals who can grow, in addition to seasoned network professionals, and who fit within our culture. In the area of staff retention, I think it's important that everyone in the group understand the vision and the strategic direction we are moving towards. The network is really a very important part of the firm, and it's instrumental to Ernst & Young's continued growth. Our people understand that. And they understand that their job is very important and is really shaping the firm's future, which is a big factor in staff retention.

Yeager: We try to reduce our vulnerability by essentially outsourcing; manage the vendor instead of the technology. For example, we've outsourced our Internet firewall management process. We try to use ATM and frame relay as much as we can, so many of those management issues just move into the carrier domain. We try to hire folks who we think can do the job and will fit into our culture. We do a lot of training. And we try to let our people work in self-directed work teams as autonomously as we can.

As far as salary goes, we're probably not at the top, but we pay a reasonable salary. And we try to advance our people as quickly as we can where they demonstrate skill and dedication. And we apparently haven't done too bad, because I think in the last 12 months, we've only lost one out of a dozen core engineers. So that's not too bad.

Rindels: It's restating the obvious to say that our people are the most valuable resource we have, but we behave in a way that recognizes that. We also understanding that, unfortunately, we probably all spend more of our daily lives in the office with our associates and colleagues than we're able to with our families. You need to recognize that and to place the same value on that [work] time that I'm sure we all do when we have time with our families. It clearly has to be more than a job or you're never going to succeed at attracting and retaining some of the best people in the industry.

Brook, any thoughts on the staffing question from the smaller company perspective?
Smith: It sort of mirrors what everybody else has already said. You have to enable the people that are doing a lot of the work to have ownership for what they're doing. They have to know what the task is and be allowed the leeway to get it done in a way they think is right, as long as it meets the models that you've set up for them, and to work with the business managers along the way so they understand the vision and the purpose [behind projects]. We haven't had any turnover here in about two years. A big reason for it is that we give a project to an engineer and say, "Here you go. Here's the business manager. Here's our goals. And here's your time line. Just check back with me regularly and let me know how you're doing. And if you have issues, of course, come see me."

Here's where you get to give some advice to your vendors. If you could give the CEO of one network-related vendor one bit of advice that they would be forced to take, which CEO would you choose and what advice would you give?
Davis: I would choose John Chambers, the CEO of Cisco Systems. The advice would be what others had touched on a few minutes ago, to provide simplicity in terms of intelligent networking. Today, really, the problem that we all face is the onus is on us to do much of the best of breed system integration of products from Cisco and other leading network providers. And if you take a look at the staffing, the support costs, the technical skill set required to keep large enterprise networks running at peak performance, these costs are absolutely huge and they're growing very, very rapidly.

Hinkle-Morrison: I don't know if I would pick on any particular CEO. But one of the things that I would force them to do has to do with all the acquisitions. They have really complicated our lives and, in some cases, taken the vendor's eye off the ball. Sometimes vendors are basically saturated with all the takeovers and they just lose sight of [customer requirements]. And, as customers, sometimes we lose sight of what the vendor strategies are. I'll go back to the previous point: keep it simple and make networks easy to maintain and manage.

Rindels: I'd have to say Piyush Patel of Cabletron. Although innovation and advances in technology are oftentimes the path to reaching the top of your particular industry, service and quality are the things that help you stay there. I would say that Cabletron needs to remain cognizant of that.

Sullivan: It's interesting that people are talking about their hardware suppliers mostly. If there's a message for suppliers that I deal with, I would say it's on the carrier side of the house much more so than the hardware vendors, who generally have a direct relationship with us and have been very responsive. And I would include all the major networking vendors in that.

Where I would like to see more cooperation is from the carrier side of the house. All too often, some circuits fail someplace; failures are a fact of life. But we would like to see more cooperation between and among the different carriers, especially the wide area network people and the local exchange carriers. And secondly, I'd like to see more respect for our enterprise technicians on the part of the carriers.

Yeager: I agree. I picked all the interexchange carrier CEOs. And I basically have four or five things I would tell them. And that is, one, listen to your customers. Two, don't promise what you can't deliver. Three, deliver what you say you can when you say you will. And solve problems quickly and creatively; 30 to 45 days doesn't work in today's business environment. And when you've done that, render me a bill that I can read and use to bill my own internal customers. We have a lot of problems with that.

Smith: From a smaller company's perspective, and this is something I don't think anybody else here probably has to deal with, it's just access to information. It sounds like a lot of other people on the call have direct relationships with a lot of the manufacturers due to their size and their profile. Forum being a much smaller company, we're a nobody to Microsoft, Cisco, Novell, or any of the other big companies. So very seldom do we get timely information on fixes for products or solutions directly from the company. We end up going to outside sources and trying to find it through news groups and so on. But that's very time-consuming to do that type of research.

Any particular vendor you want to pick on there, Brook?
Smith: Off the top of my head, we're implementing a new Cisco network. And until we purchased some product, we weren't able to get into their Web site and get any of the good nuggets to help us do some design - white papers and such. You have to be a customer in order to become a customer, which I found rather frustrating.

Other sections of the roundtable:

Intro
Putting this discussion into context.

The press and e-commerce
What happens when non-technical execs read about the latest technology in the general media? And what impact has e-commerce had on your company in general and the network group in particular?

Convergence
If you could only focus on one network initiative for the next year, and Y2K is off the table, which one would it be?

A look ahead
What would you say are the most important steps you can take today to prepare your network for the years ahead?

Stress
I think anyone would agree that your jobs are fairly stressful. What would you say are the keys to handling that stress, and keeping your head?

The whole thing
The entire roundtable transcript.

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