"I was fortunate enough to report to the regional president at the time who allowed me to work in a strategic context in Japan [through a joint venture Campbell's had with a Japanese company], while at the same time maintain the IT role here in Australia. That gave me a lot of exposure on how to work both in a joint venture environment and also on how to run a business in a different country, particularly in a country like Japan," he says.
In fact, Young says the highlights of his career to date have been the opportunity to work with different cultures and people and the learning that entails. "Having the opportunity to be in countries that I've seen develop over the last 10 years, such as China, and to learn from those experiences, certainly helps you with a perspective of the world," he says.
However, the point came when the strategic side of Young's job had run its full course for the immediate future and the IT side was well under control. So he felt it was time to move on, and in May 2001 the role at Hutchison came along.
With 180 IT staff and the critical impact IT has on business decisions at Hutchison, Young says his new job has a much bigger level of responsibility than his previous one. Similar to Arnott's and Campbell's Soup, though, there are two areas of business. One is the existing Orange mobile telephone business that Young says needed some reshaping from top to bottom, and the other is a new brand Hutchison will be announcing later this year for the third-generation (3G) high-speed wireless network it is building for voice, video and text messaging.
Young is responsible for the IT and billing organisations across both groups and reports to Kevin Russell, the chief executive officer for Australia. He says he was attracted to Hutchison by the talent of the executive and the staff and the challenges once again of supporting an existing business while being involved in the launch of a green fields operation.
"I think the launch of our 3G network is going to be the major achievement of the next year," Young says. "It's something no one has yet done in this part of the world. It has 20 major IT systems behind it and I'd suggest it's one of the largest, if not the largest infrastructure project in Australia today. While others have been putting projects on hold and not spending over the past nine months, we have been driving ahead."
Furthermore, according to Young, the company has taken an innovative approach to the network development and rollout. Rather than undertaking individual application development, he says the systems are designed to support a total business process and not a single transaction or user. This way the end user can complete whatever the transaction may be without the need to go into multiple systems.
Young also believes his teams are now closer to and are delivering more into the business than they were 12 months ago. And while it's been "hard yards for everybody", and despite the restructuring and layoffs they've seen in the telecommunications industry, he's convinced that the passion in the IT group at Hutchison is undiminished.
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