Warren Kudman explains how his organization prepares employees to meet the myriad challenges coming in 2011.

Warren Kudman, CIO of Sealed Air, sees plenty of challenges ahead for IT leaders. Like many CIOs, he’s looking to drive value in various areas, including customer-facing portals and mobile strategy, but he’s also cautious about cost management and staffing.

Kudman joined the $4.2 billion global packaging company more than 14 years ago, and has served as its CIO since spring 2009. Previously he worked for McKinsey & Company, where he advised clients on IT strategy and management, as well as operations improvement and market strategy.

Kudman spoke recently with Workforce News Editor Brian P. Watson about his staffing and organizational priorities for 2011. This is an edited, condensed version of their conversation.

WORKFORCE NEWS: What are your biggest priorities heading into 2011?

KUDMAN: As we look forward, the most important things we’re focused on are driving more value in the customer-facing activities of Sealed Air. Whether it’s customer portals, collaboration, new sales force technologies and mobility opportunities—those are all going to get a lot of our attention in the next few years. We’re also pursuing various cloud computing opportunities.

What about your people strategy?

Just because of natural turnover, we are always hiring some people. At any given time historically, we probably have had at least 10 open positions around the world in total. Also, we continually ask ourselves what we should no longer be doing in-house (if an outside provider can take it on for us at a lower cost) or how we can drive productivity through automation. Managing the “people side” of our business and growing and challenging the right team is a priority across all of our business areas at Sealed Air. We have several programs in place, including in IS, to help understand and develop employee skill sets, including programs focused on developing leadership skills and more closely aligning individual goals with our business objectives.

So many CIOs are saying they just don’t have enough people today. Do you feel that way?

I’m not sure you can ever have “enough.” The demand on IT will more than take up any available capacity you can provide. If people find out you have more capacity, they’ll just come at you with more demand. I can overwhelm that in a short period of time—but probably to a point of being irrational. Even if we could grow a lot, the demand would follow quickly. So no matter how big you are, you have to choose the best things to work on and consider the company’s ability to fund IT versus everything else that needs to get done.

What’s the biggest challenge you face in staffing?

It’s finding people who can balance being comfortable engaging with both their business partners and their technology peers. Most people would describe it as having strong business analyst-type skills—having a reasonably good appreciation for how business processes work and how individual functions are pieced together, and can easily engage in dialogue on the business partners’ terms, but then go back and envision and implement a technological solution. We can find a lot of great technologists, but I can’t as easily find people who can strike that balance.

How do you help your workers boost their skills in those areas?

You have to start with people who appear, at least, to have good communication and relationship skills, and have demonstrated an ability to not define themselves too narrowly. Ultimately, a lot of people have the capacity to learn and demonstrate these skills—if they just have interest in them. The caution signs go up when you see people who just haven’t shown an interest in having a broader perspective.

Once you find people with good communication and relationship skills, then it becomes a question of the processes we put them in and how we work to develop their experience. We have delivery methodologies and project management methodologies that force people to consider the broader perspective. Also, you consider someone’s experience level so you can match them with someone who can help them learn more about a particular project or process.

More than any other way, people learn by doing. So we have to be deliberate about the kinds of experiences we want people to have over time. We have to recognize the skills and areas where we’ll have high demand, and make sure we’re building a well-rounded team to deal with that. We can send people to technical training, but people learn about a company’s business process by getting close to it.

We have training provided by the company that we call “Business Acumen”—they are one-week courses that teach people about financial statements, balance sheets, some of our supply-chain concepts around variances and yields, etc. We also support some people in pursuing degrees, part-time. We have other training courses on team-building, team management and leadership development—more oriented toward developing someone as a manager. Still, the most important development and education happens on the job.

You talked about the types of skills you look for in hiring new employees. What about pedigrees—do you look for people with different types of education and experience?

We are open to different disciplines. After all, not everyone is a programmer. We’re open to people with experience in project management, operations, vendor management, call center management, engineering, etc. Those are all certainly viable. And we have people who lead fairly technical organizations that didn’t necessarily come up through that technical career path.

When we think about entry-level hiring, our challenge is that we simply haven’t done a lot of it for a few years. When we think about fresh college hires, we haven’t had many. So we need to think about how to bring in raw talent and leverage them.

When it comes to IT leadership and concerns for CIOs, what do you think will be the big challenges for 2011?

I don’t know when the cost management pressure ever goes away. There might be some industries that are fat and happy and don’t have to worry about it, but it’s really a given these days.

Putting that aside, the biggest challenge for us is maintaining some degree of control—but delivering quickly—around everything happening with smart devices and related cloud solutions. We’re all going to be faced with a tidal wave of smartphone/smart tablet devices that end users will be screaming for, as well as the next generation of applications that people will want on those tools. So with that comes speed of delivery challenges, development challenges, security and governance challenges. We see this come in cycles. In this cycle, providers want to go straight to the end user. Those applications might be the right answer for our business problem, but unless we can still put it all together with some degree of control, it’ll be the next generation of mess.

We have to be able to do it at a pace that’s faster than we’ve done it before. That’s a ubiquitous challenge for IT leaders, no matter what industry you’re in.

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