What’s holding Ireland back?

It is often trotted out from various quarters that Ireland lags advanced markets such as the US, the UK and the Nordics by anything from six to 12 months when it comes to adopting new IT.

There are many reasons cited for this, but most often is the size of the market, lack of investment and innate conservatism. Other contributing factors are a lack of sophistication in the market, a wait and see attitude and lack of interest/inertia.

The picture painted by all of this is at odds with the broader picture of technology in Ireland. As we portray ourselves as having a young, educated, enthusiastic population, ready to be immersed in the latest the world has to offer and thus contribute to the intellectual wealth of some of the leading technology companies in the world, it seems to be anachronistic then to maintain the former position.

If it is true then, that we are a nation that can contribute to the best technology companies in the world, what happens to the people who work for companies outside of Irish Silicon Valley enclosures? The factories, the manufacturing plants, the food industry and all of the other areas where IT is so heavily used, do the IT people who work there undergo some transformation that stops them from innovating in technology for their respective employers?

The facts are that we have a huge advantage in this country when it comes to technology. We not only have many of the major technology vendors here, but we also have research and development bases too, staffed in many instances by Irish researchers at the forefront of discovery.

When this is coupled with the Irish traits of entrepreneurial endeavour and the homing tendency, you get the phenomenon of the Irish person who has served their time in some major tech company, combining a wish to return the ‘Ould Sod’ with a desire to start their own business based on some niche need they have identified through their career.

This has led to many small, sophisticated companies, working to very high standards, both operationally and in what they produce, being founded and working away to form an indigenous landscape of advanced technology users. Indeed, it could well be argued that this phenomenon has been overtaken in the last decade or so by those people who have not even needed to go off to Cupertino, Palo Alto, Redmond or Mountain View to experience that career path, but may well have had it in Ovens, Ballycoolin or Sandyford.

So, again we must return to the vexing question of why the IT departments of indigenous companies seem to unwilling to be at the forefront of IT, whether it be virtualisation and private cloud, or the use of outsourced and managed services?

To be perfectly honest, I don’t know the answer, but it is a situation which fascinates me.

It would seem we are moving, as an economy, toward a situation where fewer and fewer Irish companies can have an argument for managing their own IT at all. The range of services now available from Software as a Service, to Platform as a Service and Infrastructure as a Service, and the multitude of other business services that can be delivered as a result, when tempered by the hunger of providers to have people take up these services and increasingly redundant objections over reliability and security, all provide a nexus of need, availability and price that can’t be resisted for long.

In one recent conversation with the CEO of an Irish service provider, it was suggested that many indigenous businesses still see IT as a utility rather than a strategic business support or enabler and so are neither driven nor informed by it.

On that basis, it would appear as if the fault of the IT professionals in Irish companies is not one of conservatism or lack of drive to be at the bleeding edge, but rather a lack of engagement with the business to inform it of what IT can do. Despite years now of various groups talking about what technology can do for business, it seems as if many Irish companies are still not receiving that message.

It would appear as if there is a dual aspect to the problem that needs to be addressed. First of all, Irish business culture needs to change to become more open to what technology can do, led by the business, to transform all aspects of operation. Secondly, Irish IT professionals need to find their voice, and a soapbox from which to use it, to inform the business of what is not only possible with technology, but necessary to ensure survival let alone growth.

I must confess to being dismayed that this situation persists as it is a more recurrent theme in the IT world than Moore’s Law at this stage. However, I am also reminded of the sagely words of that great curmudgeon Samuel Beckett which have been adopted by so many technology companies and seems particularly apt in the current context:

"Ever tried, ever failed-no matter. Try again, fail again. Fail better."

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