We Need More IT Graduates and Now!

I read with dismay in the Irish Independent lately of Intel's decision to move a project apparently earmarked for Ireland to Romania because of a lack of IT graduates in Ireland. Apparently this is not the only case of this happening. It is also reflective of what I have been seeing during our latest graduate recruitment drive in Deloitte.



A constant supply of quality IT graduates is a necessity for businesses generally but most especially for software development companies and IT services organisations. Graduates are the lifeblood of these organisations in terms of expanding, getting the work done and developing the next generation of senior IT professionals. There is no doubt that their long term growth and the development of the smart economy is inhibited by a lack of these graduates.



In an era of such high unemployment it seems crazy to be complaining about a lack of staff but that is the actual situation that companies are grappling with at the moment. Unfortunately there is no quick fix to the problem as it takes three to four years to educate an IT graduate. Nevertheless there are actions that we can start to take now:



1. Immediately establish a working group consisting of individuals from the IT industry, academia and any relevant government agencies to tackle the problem. The members of the group must be chosen carefully and it must be an active, outcome driven group with an ability to make things happen. It should not waste any time producing reports or fancy strategy documents but should instead focus on outcomes and what actions need to be taken to achieve them.



2. Actively Promote IT as a career. For too long IT has been suffering from poor PR. We need to actively promote IT as a career in secondary schools, highlighting the benefits and rewards of a career in the sector. The industry needs to support this by attending and hosting career events, supporting work experience initiatives etc.



3. Encourage Post graduate qualifications in IT. The third level sector is producing a large number of graduates with non IT degrees who are finding it impossible to find jobs. We need to encourage a greater number of these to do post graduate degrees or diplomas in IT. The third level sector may need to consider increasing capacity in this regard.



I don't pretend to have to have all the answers. However I believe that the steps above will serve as a good starting point to addressing what is becoming a critical problem and a lost opportunity.

Software Testing is easy and Other Myths

A colleague of mine recently published a paper Software Testing is Easy and Other Myths (http://tinyurl.com/28aymok) which makes for a great read.

This caused me to reflect on a recent assignment I completed for a client where I assisted them in developing an operating model, business case and implementation roadmap for a testing center of excellence. The engagement was challenging and ultimately successful and for me once again proved that some of the often repeated critical success factors for consulting projects such as these are true:

1. Executive sponsorship. We had great executive sponsorship which allowed us to cut through a lot of the 'noise' associated with projects such as these quickly. I can contrast this with similar engagement I undertook a couple of years ago in the same sector where this wasn't the case and the project was consequently less successful.

2. Staff buy-in. The creation of the CoE is going to mean a lot of change for existing testing (and non testing) staff. We recognised this early on and decided that we needed to make testing a recognised and supported career path and make people feel that they were part of a team/community. Some of the things we did in this regard included making communications a key component of the rollout plan and defining a testing career model with associated training and external certification. The idea was to make testing an attractive and valued career path in the organisation. Without this why would staff engage with the programme at all?

3. Understand the as-is situation. Ultimately the Testing Center of Excellence was being created for two reasons - to improve efficiency and quality. However to measure the success of the CoE it is important to understand and measure the current situation so that progress can be objectively assessed. This is often easier said than done as many of the metrics or KPIs that you would like to track often do not exist today and need to be created or estimated. We certainly had to do this on this engagement but clearly called out where we had extrapolated and committed to start building more accurate as-is metrics as the CoE was rolled out.

While there were many other critical elements to the success of this engagement the three above once again proved the most critical. We are just about to start the first phase of the rollout of the center of excellence which no doubt will prove just as challenging, interesting and successful. In either case I'll let you know!

Productivity in the Cloud - A Practical Example

I have blogged previously on cloud computing and its benefits. Consequently I thought it would be worth sharing a real world example of its benefits.

I work for Deloitte in Ireland where I am a director in our technology consulting practice. Recently we have been undertaking more and more projects for clients based on software as a service. One project in particular serves as a great example of how much more efficient software development in the cloud is to more traditional methods. The goal of the project was to automate a sales and fulfilment process for a major commercial client and thus significantly reduce the time it took to both take and fulfil a customer order. Some of the members of the current team had built a key part of the existing solution over 10 years ago. At the time the design phase alone of that project took somewhere between 3 and 4 months. Using a SaaS based solution combined with agile techniques we managed to build and deploy into production the new solution in just over 10 weeks and that included functionality (such as mobile) not available in the current solution and was undertaken by a smaller team. This is a truly huge saving in IT time and effort, let alone the time to market gains made by the client. Internally we have reflected on what a win this is for our client and ultimately for us but you can't help but ponder on what this ultimately means for the systems integration business model.