In-Depth
ICL: Performance-Plus
Like your job? Here's your chance to compare your company with eight of the best—at least in how they treat their Microsoft Certified Professionals.
- By Dian Schaffhauser
- September 01, 2000
ICL, a European-based systems and services company, views
its MCSEs as so core to its success that it quotes an
MCSE in its 1999 annual report and brags about how it
expects to have 4,000 premium title-holders on staff within
the next two years. The person who nominated the firm,
Hannu Ylioja, Senior Developer/Systems Engineer, holds
MCSE, MCSD, MCDBA, and MCP+1 titles from Microsoft. He’s
in a position to gauge how well the company treats its
IT staff—he’s worked there for 22 years.
| This
Year’s Best Companies! |
ICL
European-based systems and services
company; 22,500 employees
Nominated:
Slough, Berkshire UK office
www.icl.com
+44 (0) 1753 532323 |
|
|
In the last year, Ylioja’s projects have involved ISDN
networking and roll-outs for Total Oil, as well as deploying
new applications for Shell. He’s currently pursuing his
MCSE+Internet and preparing for Windows 2000 MCSE re-certification.
Ron McLaren, ICL’s Manager, Engineering Professional
Com munity, estimates that ICL, which is in 40 countries,
has about 22,000 employees. The company is organized into
15 different communities based on functional endeavors:
sales, commercial managers, and so on. Engineering, the
largest community, has 12,500 technical professionals;
MCPs fall into this category. The group consists of jobs
with descriptions ranging from “tech support on a help
desk” to somebody “designing the most complex type of
rocket-science solution for a customer.”
McLaren explains that the company has developed a “Performance-Plus”
system for evaluating people’s skills, setting their objectives,
assessing salaries, and “setting their whole cycle of
development.” Certification is a major factor in determining
pay and assignments, though not the only one. Like the
other companies profiled here, ICL covers all costs of
technical training, study, and test-taking.
“We have written objectives for people as to what they
should be achieving-in terms of assignments they’re working
on, but also in terms of their personal development,”
McLaren says. “‘By the end of this year you should be
an expert this...’ Those are all written down. The definitions
of the roles are also written down. Around spring each
year, we start the process of salary reviews, where we
evaluate the market conditions. That’s how we come up
with the salary.”
Over the next three years ICL will be training 10,000
people in e-business solutions, based on Microsoft technologies
and revolving around Site Server. About half of that will
be additional training for people inside the company;
the other half will focus on new recruits. The initiatives
will help the company address its four sets of service
offerings: customer relationship management (such as a
“loyalty system” for Safeway, USA); e-business (a set
of Web sites for Northcliffe Newspapers); enterprise applications
(the implementation of REI’s in-store system); and IT
services (outsourced service in 1,100 branches of Swedbank).
Concludes Ylioja, “The future will be interesting. ICL
is preparing to float on the London Stock Exchange and
the company is re-aligning itself to the e-business model.”
About the Author
Dian L. Schaffhauser is a freelance writer based in Northern California.