IT departments and their employees reap the benefits of job-rotation programs
Scott Manuel had a lot to learn when he arrived at Thomson Corp. two years ago. After all, the newly minted MBA graduate began his professional career in 2000 with two years at Enron, just as the company was crescendoing financially, then infamously collapsed.
Manuel joined Thomson through its technology associates program, under which the company recruits MBA graduates with technology backgrounds to do a series of six-month rotations through different Thomson business units before they accept a permanent position. Not only does the program help educate IT recruits about the breadth of Thomson’s businesses; it also helps those recruits evaluate different businesses and functions in search of a good fit for their careers.
“What this program allowed me to do is to see three different parts of the business,” Manuel says. “Because we have grown through acquisition, and we do have these six strategic business units, there are a lot of different cultures . . . [and] management styles out there.”
In January Manuel began a permanent assignment as director of operations at Thomson Healthcare, the division where he began the rotation program in 2005. There he worked on software development and redesign projects that included evaluating third-party business-intelligence tools for integration into the company’s MedStat decision-support product. He was one of four to graduate this year from the program, which has expanded steadily since 2003, when it was launched as an offshoot of a successful two-year rotation program for Thomson finance recruits.
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Proponents of programs that rotate IT professionals into temporary assignments handling an organization’s different technology or business functions say they offer mutual benefits: They significantly boost advancement opportunities for individual employees who participate and gain valuable business acumen, and they provide double-barreled benefits to the companies that implement them: infusing IT departments with stronger understanding of the business challenges of the organization and instilling greater technology savvy throughout the business.
“Part of our value-add in IT is integrating stuff together,” says Tim Stanley, CIO of Harrah’s Entertainment, which rotates about 20% of its nearly 900 IT employees annually, within the IT department and throughout its global casino-gaming business.
Harrah’s began its IT job-rotation program about five years ago, initially circulating staff for 18 to 24 months at a time among the IT group responsible for infrastructure and support and the IT group that develops new applications and enhancements. “Part of the goal was to swap people back and forth and have them walk a mile in your shoes,” he says. “You worked on three big projects, how go eat your own dog food and support them.”
Soon Harrah’s began rotating program, project and network managers between the two sides of the IT operation, Stanley says. Then it started rotating IT personnel among its individual properties — which have dedicated IT departments of 15 to 20 people — and the central IT operation in Las Vegas.
“We’ve got some really strong folks who are in regional roles now who have had the walk-a-mile-in-corporate-shoes experience,” he says. Now the company is rotating IT staff into business departments throughout the company, including relationship marketing, responsible gaming, customer service and satisfaction, and strategic sourcing. “And conversely we’ve actually had people migrate from business functions into IT, which has been great,” Stanley says.
Harrah’s rotation program “has exponential value to the company, and frankly, to your career,” Stanley says, noting that one of his IT managers has gone on to head a team responsible for the business integration of newly acquired properties.
Like Thomson, Harrah’s growth in recent years has been fueled in part by acquisitions, which now take a fraction of the time to integrate, thanks largely to blending of technology and gaming-business expertise the rotation program has generated.
“Because of the integration of all these different systems and business [processes] is so integral to our company, and because we’ve also been a pretty aggressive acquirer in over the last five to six years — six major acquisitions over that time — that became another impetus of all this,” Stanley says of his rotation program.
“Five-plus years ago, it would take us up to two years to [integrate] a single property that we would buy,” he says. “Last year, closing out Caesar’s, we did 13 in nine months, and we changed out almost everything.”
Despite their reported benefits, IT job-rotation programs are still relatively uncommon. A recent Forrester Research survey of 281 IT decision makers found that fewer than a quarter of the respondents’ organizations offered job rotation even within their IT departments, though such programs are the easiest to maintain, says Forrester analyst Sam Bright, the author of the study “IT Job Rotation — Still a Long Way to Go,” released earlier this month.
Companies that rotate IT staff into business functions are even rarer — 12% of the organizations surveyed by Forrester. And those that, like Thomson and Harrah’s, also rotate business professionals into the IT department are the smallest minority, at only 7%.
“Business-to-IT rotation is even more challenging for IT organizations to implement, because it’s not just up to them,” Bright says, “but the payoff is immense.”
Garretson is a freelance writer in Gaithersburg, Md. He can be reached at rgarreston@gmail.com.
