Like Clockwork: Orange

Since gracing the cover of CIO magazine in October 1998, Michael Young has undergone title, role and responsibility changes, followed by a change in company and industry. However, while Young's 10-year career at CIO level has been synonymous with change, his forthright views, especially on the relationship between IT and business, remain constant.

"IT doesn't partner [with] the business, we are part of the business," says Young. "So don't make any apologies for that, we should be proud of the fact. We don't need to justify our existence, as IT deserves to be in the middle of the business. But we do need to justify what we're doing and we do need to be very critical of our own deliverables and our cost."

Currently director IT and billing, Hutchison Telecommunications, Young's first CIO role was as IT director for Nortel, where he was initially responsible for Australasia before assuming broader Asia Pacific responsibilities for IT. He moved from Nortel to Galaxy Pay TV and then in October 1996 he was appointed to the newly-created position of chief information officer at brewing group Lion Nathan. Here, he was responsible for the overall IT strategy of the company across Australia, New Zealand and China.

Another regional role followed when Young joined Arnott's and Campbell's Soup in February 1998. When he first featured in CIO later that year he was group IT director, Asia Pacific. Previously, Arnott's and Campbell's had each had its own IT manager in Australia and Young's mandate was to leverage the synergies between the two companies in terms of both IT and business processes. For whereas Arnott's was a well established business, Campbell's was still a green fields operation in the region at the time.

Back then, Young said: "I've worked for some pretty good companies, but Arnott's is very different from most. The management structure is very flat and it's probably the least bureaucratic company I've known for getting decisions made and being open. I felt the culture would serve my style and allow me to drive forward some of the philosophies I have for IT." Much has happened since, but Young says his sentiments towards Arnott's have not changed (although he is noticeably more candid these days about his time at Lion Nathan).

"Arnott's was - and is - a great company," he says. "It's very modern and fast paced and many of the technologies we put in place were really enabling Arnott's to drive the success that it has today. We worked together as an executive team on a strategy that was all about innovative new product design, reducing cost, maximising the Arnott's and Campbell's sales, marketing, manufacturing and distribution networks and bringing the soup and biscuit sides of the business together under an umbrella and making it one company."

In addition, what started out at Arnott's as a fairly stock standard senior IT role, as Young describes it, broadened as he took on non IT-based strategic responsibilities in the Asia Pacific region. His title also changed to vice president for IT, Asia Pacific.

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"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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"When I joined Hutchison, I conducted one-on-ones with all of the staff and invested a lot of time in talking and listening to them to try to find out what issues they had and how we could improve things. I did the same with the business. We have a lot of challenges in front of us and we do still make mistakes. But I think the level of service we're providing the company today has improved and therefore the service going out to the end consumer who has an Orange mobile, or who we see as a potential consumer on the 3G network, has improved," Young says.based in Hong Kong and while most of Young's previous CIO roles have been regional ones, his current one is essentially domestic. However, shortly after joining Hutchison, the company decided to drive a global approach to IT development (including the 3G network project) in order to maximise the intellect in the company as well as reduce costs and speed up the delivery of systems. Young was consequently appointed to a global IT board comprising six directors, so he still averages one international trip each month, typically to Italy or the UK, where the bulk of development takes place.

The chief difference between his role at Hutchison and previous ones, Young says, is the pace and the uncertainty, which he has never before experienced to the same degree.

"I think that as we mature we tend to know the shortcuts and hopefully have learnt from our mistakes," he reflects. "Having said and applied all of that, this is still the fastest paced [company] I've ever worked in, again because we're running two businesses in a sense - building one and maintaining another. Then the uncertainty comes in to what we're building because there's a lot of innovation involved and in some cases we're not quite sure what's coming up. Alongside that, though, is the satisfaction. The motivation and the passion of people working for this company is unbelievable. I've never come across it before."

Whe CIO ws launched five years ago, the CIO position, in both name and concept, was still relatively new in Australia. Young doesn't think the role itself has fundamentally changed in that time, but that those in it have become more experienced at it. He also thinks businesses have become more aware of IT and what IT can deliver, and that a number of things that five years ago were viewed as discretionary are now seen as critical. He cites Hutchison as an example of where networks and IT are normally first or second on the agenda of any major meeting.

In 1998, Young made the statement: "It really is Â'career is over' for CIOs who don't possess business skills" - and he thinks it still applies, in that being a successful CIO is all about relationships, communication and human rather than technical attributes. In fact, Young sums up the lessons he has learned throughout his career - and life - in one word: listen.

"We all have good ideas throughout our career and we have staff who have good ideas. But if you think about all of the stories that keep coming up about the disconnect between business and IT and unfulfilled expectations, for me [the problem] comes back to basic communication, which comes back to listening. It's about listening to understand what the business wants, what your staff need and what the community's looking for," he says.

However, Young still believes that technical skills are important. He accepts that in the right organisation someone without a technical background or with just a semi-technical background can be a successful CIO. In his experience, though, there is more risk of that not working as well as an IT professional who has made the transition to management. In the case of non-technical CIOs, he has encountered flaws in design and cost, which normally need to be rectified. This in turn has also created a disconnect with the business, he says, because promises were made that could not be kept.

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Young also thinks that politics, and its part in a CIO's job, is often misinterpreted.

"One has to recognise that political things go on in any organisation, but there can be both negative and positive politics," he says. "There is a lot of very negative and destructive politics that goes through e-mail, for example, in the way people Â'copy in' managers and those types of things that undermine and play people off against one another. But you must also politick what the business needs. If politics is about maintaining good relationships and about understanding and then fighting the wars you want to win but leaving the others alone, then it's not necessarily negative if it's done in the right way with the right principles."

Nor does he agree that CIOs have to check their ethics at the door in order to survive. On the contrary, you're not going to survive if you do, he believes, as what goes around comes around. And the more you can deal transparently and honestly with people the better off you're going to be.

"I've been through some very tenuous discussions and tense times with major suppliers over the years. However, we have maintained relationships because in all instances we've been transparent and honest. This is a very small industry in this country and whether you're in supply land or customer land, I'm sure you'd very quickly get a reputation if you didn't behave ethically," he says.

Young does concede, though, that there are situations where you can bang your head against a wall and get to the point where you realise you cannot change others and you're not willing to change yourself. You should never compromise your integrity, he advises, because at the end of the day you have to live with yourself, and in such situations your only option may be to bite the bullet and take a hike.

Young is finding his views on business and IT are becoming more and more typical among his peers, but thinks there are still a number of frustrated CIOs who are not able to connect. In many cases, though, he says this comes back to the business, and in particular the chief executives and chief financial officers with whom CIOs have to be able to communicate. He's only had one such disconnect in his own career - at Lion Nathan.

"We didn't fit culturally," says Young. "I don't think Lion Nathan as an organisation was quite ready for me and I wasn't suited to it. We mutually agreed that it would be better if I weren't there and I think that's going to happen sometimes. You can be the best CIO in the world, but if you're in the wrong business you're going to be ineffective and you just have to recognise that and move on to a more progressive way of doing things."

Despite all the challenges of being a CIO, Young readily admits he loves the job, which is the principal reason he has stuck at it. His advice to others aspiring to such a role is that it's not as easy as it looks, but it's a lot more fun that it looks as well. "I wouldn't have traded the last 10 years for anything," he says. "I think it's a great industry to be in and I thank my lucky stars I had a mentor way back who brought me into IT.

"A lot of IT organisations have been seen as the poor cousins in companies. They have tended to feel as though they're on the bottom rung, but part of the joy for me has always been to take teams, open them up, get them working together and delivering into the business and having the business appreciate the IT organisation [for that].

"If you're the type of individual who really wants to be at the cutting edge of making critical decisions, and you're doing it not for personal glory but so that you can develop your team and service your business, then you'll succeed and the satisfaction will come from the results. But rest assured, you'll lose your spare time, the demands will be many and varied and all aspects of your communication skills will need to be first class before you get there. I have seen senior IT people move into a CIO role and fail because they can't communicate well enough to understand what everyone's looking for from them."

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