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Staffing Challenges
Breakers lap Waikiki beach as surfers steer their boards toward shore and Diamond Head rises proudly in the distance. Wearing an aloha shirt and sipping a drink at a beachside table at one of Outrigger's hotels, White has a job that seems ideal. Yet being a CIO in paradise has its problems.
Hawaii ranks 47th in the U.S. in technology jobs. The state has 2% unemployment, although many people work more than one job to make ends meet in one of the most expensive places to live in the country.
White has to fly consultants back and forth from the mainland to augment his 28-person IT staff. When he arrived, Outrigger was a COBOL shop. No one on staff had any professional certifications.
"The talent just isn't here," he says. "We're halfway between America and a foreign country. We're 2,500 miles from the mainland, and it feels like it."
When White had five jobs to fill, it took eight months to find a qualified person. Two recruits from the mainland found Hawaii not to their liking and left. To get coding done, White sometimes has to outsource work to the mainland.
Sending his staff to training helped beef up their tech chops, but White also found that he needed to expose his team more directly to the business.
"One of the big changes was aligning ourselves more with the business," says JoAnn Okawa, Outrigger's director of IT. "We were like a lot of IT shops. Users didn't know who to speak to."
White put coders into the reservation center and gave them tours as desk night managers at hotels.
"I've been on both sides of the desk," he explains. "I had a lady hit me in the face with a purse because I had to explain that her room wasn't in the hotel. My guys on the help desk were scared to death of customers. All of a sudden, it becomes not these guys who call you when something breaks. They become customers. The only thing I haven't done yet is make them clean a room."
Michael Ybarra is a contributing writer for SearchCIO-Midmarket.com. Write to him at editor@ciodecisions.com.
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