MBF Australia's answer to the shortage of skilled IT professionals is to headhunt specialists from other large organisations.

The health insurer has poached four business intelligence specialists from other organisations in recent months, and several more before the latest drive to work on the continued development of its enterprise data warehouse.

The warehouse -- also known as the enterprise decision support competency centre -- is a major business intelligence system providing predictive analytics on a range of data throughout the business. Ongoing now for two years, the system analyses competitor and customer, customer and supplier data from which the business makes forward-thinking decisions.

Paul Ormonde-James, MBF Australia group intelligence executive manager, was himself headhunted to run the data warehouse. Ormonde-James is also president of the Australian chapter of The Data Warehousing Institute.

He said it had been imperative the data warehousing project had the best people working on it.

"Initially we did place extensive ads, but they didn't attract the calibre of people we were looking for."

While MBF's system is based on SAS software, SAS skills were not a requirement of all candidates. Rather the prized recruits were business intelligence specialists.

"The people we were looking for are fairly unique," he said. "They need a good understanding of IT and business. You don't often find that diversity.

"They have to be able to relate business requirements technically. It's hard to find people who think that way."

Only the best will do
Ormonde-James said he contacted a recruitment agency he had used before and gave them a list of organisations he knew had strong processes in business intelligence. He also examined the conference circuit for talent.

The recruitment agency made "hundreds and hundreds" of calls before finding MBF's recuits, he said.

"You get the best people, your job becomes easy. We had to headhunt from major organisations so we got a team of exceptional people that make my life a lot easier."

The organisation has around 10 staff in its data warehousing division, another 10 as part of its core business intelligence team, as well as 20 to 30 data analysts, according to Ormonde-James.

The role of analysts was increasingly important in business intelligence, he said.

"They're the people that should be doing the work to help you make the right decisions, be asking the right questions.

"So in terms for our organisation it's really looking at people who can do the modelling, that really understand things as they need to be and [can do] predictive modelling -- the way that trends will work, things that could come up."

Despite being a vital cog within an organisation, business intelligence professionals are hard to find, according to Ormonde-Jones.

"There's a real shortage in BI skills at the moment," he said.

The situation was the same in the US, he said, where he recently presented at a data warehousing conference.