The recent Tech Excellence Awards 2015 presentation and dinner was the fifteenth and largest event and, according to gossip on the night, the largest attendance of any seated event in the Ballsbridge Hotel. As always the convivial networking was the real highlight for most people, with business cards and pints being exchanged with equal enthusiasm. That was the most visible, because of course it is still a microcosm of the sector and therefore still male dominated. But women were better represented than ever, notably at a senior level, and exchanging business cards over generally smaller volume measures. There was also a modest representation of teetotallers and abstainers on the night. In short, a classic Irish business gathering.
So far, so good. What was really perceptible was the universal air of optimism. The chat was all about rising business levels, customers opening the purse strings and service businesses looking to recruit and finding the key skills in short enough supply. Recent surveys have suggested that 20% or more of businesses generally are actively recruiting. In ICT it stands to reason that the percentage should be higher because it is by definition a sector that must anticipate growth rather than simply going along with it.
“The ICT service sector is searching for experienced professionals with enough experience to put credibly in front of clients, even where their actual roles are highly specialist and not in client relations or project management”
There is actually a sort of skills shortage dichotomy arising in the ICT sector. The FDI multinationals and larger enterprises are open to and indeed largely recruiting at graduate level and a few years beyond. The ICT service sector is searching for experienced professionals with enough experience to put credibly in front of clients, even where their actual roles are highly specialist and not in client relations or project management. There is still plenty of opportunity in ICT for backroom boffins (geeks are younger). But Ireland is a small market and our business culture is one of trust largely based on personal relations.
Forecasts
This column is not qualified to make economic forecasts, but there is now thankfully no question as to where the market is going, barring disasters. But, by how much? That’s a key curiosity but again the gossip from the real market pulse takers is somewhere between 15% and 20% plus in the next year to 18 months. The stirrings are everywhere: in state sector spending, in data centres and broadband roll-out (and new trans-Atlantic connections) and straightforward investment in better systems by business from micro to multinational.
Cloud figures everywhere, of course, lagging its hype by the traditional couple of years. It has predictably broken into smaller and more importantly specialised segments. Public cloud is really now about consumer services. Business grade has more choices of services and delineations from virtual private cloud to other important security and governance elements like geography and automatic encryption. A venture into the cloud today can be as tightly and individually spec’ed for the client’s requirements as a server farm or data centre of a previous generation.
More importantly, no choices are really absolute. So hybrid environments are now mainstream and one of the early hype factors that was quietly difficult in practice has come to pass — it really is easier to pass on from one provider or technology to another in today’s ICT world. Databases and applications and workloads generally can be moved with minimal penalty in business continuity or cost. The traditional life cycle of hardware investments, say three years in good times, is largely a thing of the past other than in ‘the tin’ itself. That hardware investment is gradually moving on to data centres and service providers, which can front end the latest and greatest while migrating less demanding virtual workloads down the stack.
This is something of a new picture for most Irish CIOs — or indeed IT directors or whatever happens to be the lead title in the organisation. A number of significant elements are coming together. The cloud thing, naturally enough, the increasingly strategic importance of service partnerships, the extended talent requirements and the rising tide that may lift all boats but presents navigational dilemmas in narrow waterways. However fast or big the craft you have to catch the tide, and in rough conditions, there is no substitute for experience at the helm. That’s possibly a more attractive and versatile metaphor than cloud for this industry. But while busy traffic may mean more sales and customers it also means more competition or constriction in every space: customers, resources and services, skills and, for the CIO, your own job.
CIO favoured
That rising economic tide should favour the CIO, surely? Probably. The awkward fact is that a high proportion of CIOs hired in the last half decade or so were chosen in order to solve particular problem sets in ICT and organisations, often to leapfrog incumbent senior IT managers seen by their boards as just a bit old-fashioned. But if you have not earned a reputation in the C-suite for strategic thinking, far-sightedness and, more importantly, being right more often than wrong, you may be in trouble — the younger may appear brighter.
There is undoubtedly an urban myth in business that to understand this generation and its behaviour you have to be part of it. Alas, regular and successful problem-solving and change management while coping with budgets does not necessarily generate the kind of high-visibility track record that boards and recruitment panels acknowledge with decisions in your favour. Once constituted into an interview committee, even the most hard-headed and pragmatic business people tend to re-invoke their idealistic and visionary side, looking for, or at least often favouring, the notional ideal rather than the proven and practical. The fact that the job description was sexed-up for the recruitment adverts all too often fools its own authors.
Which leads to the rather melancholy conclusion that every CIO’s job today is in fact slightly more under threat in this improving economy or, more accurately, the optimistic mind-set, that is taking over our boardrooms and C-suites again. With a few bob in the pocket or in the offing, human psychology looks for the novel and the aspirational. That is going to be true of all recruitment, to some extent, and the concern is simply to keep it in check. Usually it will be the relevant line manager the experienced HR pro who will keep the focus on the core skills and personality type required.
The CIO, however, is usually hired by non-ICT people with or without the assistance of consultants, also non-technical for the most part. That always carries the danger that the articulate and well-presented will win out over the knowledgeable and technically skilled, although CIOs are of course expected to have strengths on both fronts. But spoofers do prevail, sometimes, and more often in the good times.
Rare phenomenon
One of the underlying problems is the question of an accurate, well thought through and viable job specification for the organisation. Bluntly, that is something of a rare phenomenon in Irish business. There is a sample on a US web site for HR professionals that lists 18 Primary Responsibilities plus the traditional and legalistic “Such other duties as may be from time to time assigned…” That one should probably have 19+1 because it lists “Recruit, train, supervise and evaluate department staff” under Additional Responsibilities. This column’s view is that building as good a team as possible should be way up there in both the duties and the priorities of any CIO.
Any CIO job will have practical priorities reflecting the organisation’s current state and strategic business ambitions. Sometimes it is terrific a opportunity to be a forward looking leader. Sometimes it’s really a repair job. Often it is about care and maintenance with minimal actual change encouraged.
The current climate gives hope for rather more future focussed roles. We’re emerging from the gloom of tight budgets and just keeping the lights on. The job of the CIO has not in fact altered by much but its character and emphasis is subtly but definitely changing. That is where incumbents and ICT pros with long experience (and a screwdriver in the desk drawer) face the challenge from new conditions and new faces. It is a combined tech and business role, as always. But the better sales person may well be the winner.
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