We Need an IT Talent Strategy for Ireland's Smart Economy

The ‘Smart Economy’ is at the core of the government’s strategy for Ireland’s economic recovery and for our long term growth. A key element of this strategy is to invest heavily in research and development and incentivise multi-nationals to locate more R&D capacity in Ireland. A workforce with the right skills and in sufficient quantity are key to achieving this. Indeed the government’s paper ‘Building Ireland’s Smart Economy: A Framework for Sustainable Economical Renewal’ recognises this and states that ‘A key feature of this approach is building the innovation or ‘ideas’ component of the economy through the utilisation of human capital – the knowledge, skills and creativity of people - and its ability and effectiveness in translating ideas into valuable processes, products and services.’.

What then are the skills that will be key to incentivising multinationals to locate more R&D here? A recent report by Deloitte and CIO – ‘Mind the Talent Gap – Key Findings from a global executive survey on IT Talent’ provides some valuable insights in to the type of IT Skills that are required by multi-nationals and in particular those that are in short supply. The report highlights the fact that for many organisations a lack of IT skills was hampering their ability to innovate and was having a material impact on their key measures of success including quality, time to market, customer relationships and growth. The IT skills that they cited as being in particular shortage were of a strategic nature and included Enterprise Architects, IT Architects, Risk managers and project managers. These were also seen as key roles that had a disproportionately high impact on the organisations’ overall performance as well as representing the key leadership required during good and bad economic times.

Ireland has an opportunity to differentiate itself from the competition for the R&D dollars of multi-nationals by ensuring that we can fill this IT talent gap. After all, what better incentive can we offer than to show multi-nationals that we have a ready supply of strategic IT talent that will have a disproportionally positive impact on their company’s performance?

The report authors call for companies to develop an IT Talent Strategy. Ireland Inc. needs to do the same in order to make sure that we are a part of these talent strategies. The Smart economy depends on it.

The full report ‘Mind the Talent Gap – Key Findings from a global executive survey on IT Talent’ can be found here.

Contactless Payments On a Sticker

I have been working on a couple of projects over the last year where contactless payment devices have been a current or future requirement. Therefore a headline caught my eye today on Finextra regarding CitiBank's rollout of a sticker based contactless payment device. The idea is that CitiBank customers attach the sticker to the back of their mobile phone and tap it at any MasterCard PayPass terminal. The sticker uses RFID technology to transmit card information to the PayPass terminal and the customer completes the transaction by tapping on the PayPass terminal. The sticker is tied to a prepaid account, presumably with a relatively low top up amount.

The sticker technology was developed by a company called BlazeMobile(http://www.blazemobile.com/). Various versions of contactless payment technology have existed for years, but this sticker based version is a simple but very smart innovation. It will be interesting to see if it takes off and with 50 million Mastercard PayPass devices in use worldwide (not to mention the competing alternative from Visa) hopefully we will see it soon in Ireland too.

The original Fixextra article can be found at: http://www.finextra.com/News/Fullstory.aspx?newsitemid=21481

SOA - So What?

In conversation with a client of mine recently I was reminded of the need to always look deeper before embracing technology change. My client's IT architecture consists of a number of packaged applications, with one core ERP style application at its heart. Interfacing between these applications is currently achieved using a number of ETL style interfaces. Not necessarily pretty, but it works.

The vendor of this core application has recently announced that it is effectively rebuilding the application and in a SOA style. Sounds good on the face of it. My client and I were having a conversation as to what this would mean to him and his business users. We talked about all the nice things SOA would bring around loose coupling, agility etc. and agreed that these were good things. However, when we asked ourselves why this would be a good thing for the business users we came up short - there were very few reasons we could come up with regarding why they would (as opposed to should) care. It was a classic example of why it is so difficult to make a business case for SOA. We instinctively knew it made sense but couldn't assign any monetary value to any of it. Sure it might bring benefits in the future, but not now.

My client will migrate towards a SOA, at least in the context of this core application, but it will be driven by a need to stay in support as opposed to any great desire to go through the large migration project and all the headaches that the upgrade will inevitably bring.

We are both big advocates of SOA, but in this instance and in the current budgetary climate we were left saying SOA - So What?