Views from Around the World

I serve as a Board member for the Information Technology Association of Canada.  At last week’s quarterly board meeting we heard from three sectors on what’s happening in IT in their markets.  Senior executives from Oil and Gas, Healthcare and Education shared their perspectives and the realities they are facing.  To say that the presentations were a bit saddening is understatement but they all highlight opportunities for Novell.  I was also in Ottawa early in the week with the Federal team to speak with senior leaders in our intelligence community about improving how people work together.  I kept hearing the same messages.

To an industry, the speakers made three consistent points:

1.  They are finding it very difficult to attract younger people into IT

2.  Budgets are not being used because there are not enough talented IT people to make the projects happen in a reasonable amount of time.

3.  Innovation is stalled or stalling because their current communications and collaboration models are at a point where they hurt as much as they help.

So how does knowing this help Novell?

When we drill down into the issues we learn something we should have been listening for.  The Gen Y folks who will make up IT in the future are not getting engaged.  It’s not hard to find out why not.  Fundamentally they are not interested in what they see as boring or stagnant careers.  They are not interested in a generic Windows desktop with generic apps, death by email and being required to be in a particular place to do work.  They aren’t enrolling in traditional post-secondary programs because these programs are focused on past requirements and look tedious and boring, particularly if all the work is done in a classroom.  In a traditional class based school, enrollment in the IT program dropped from over 350 full time students to 32.  Yet at Athabaska University where the classes are online, enrollment is increasing.  

The speaker from Health Care echoed the hiring problems and further stated that Health environments were becoming more and more heterogeneous, despite significant advances by the healthcare software providers to do “everything”  He said the costs of homogeneity were very high, limited flexibility and created vendor lock-in.  Unfortunately they have difficulty hiring people who can work in mixed environments and specifically so when the mix includes open source.  The speaker made some pointed remarks about being able to understand all the OSS licensing models as well.  These all combine to stall their ability to innovate, and in public health care where there is less money, stalled projects often vanish entirely.

Oil and Gas is booming, just look at the profits being reported, yet as the industry looks to leveraging new finds such as those in Canada’s north and the recently discovered heavy deposits in Utah, Wyoming and neighbouring states, finding people is a real problem and so projects run late or don’t get done and not because of lack of budget.  The challenges in getting projects for using catalysts in Steam Assisted Gravity Drainage or the establishment of the “greener” Toe to Heel Air Injection oil recovery models off the ground are that they consume enormous amounts of processing power and need the people capable of operating and supporting these systems to be in place.

In the intelligence space, these leaders are all to aware of what happens when information bottlenecks occur and are very concerned about artificial information filtration.  As Richard A. Clarke, former Special Advisor to the US National Security Council has stated in many talks, overly structured communications finds things that aren’t there and misses key information.

Each speaker also cited the challenges in letting people work together and to share knowledge.  I grew frustrated hearing this, because in individual conversations with the speakers I had already learned that they had tried “social” software but found it cumbersome and management intense.  Obviously they had implemented something other than what we do.  Every speaker understood that traditional hierarchical communications models are impediments not assets and in private conversations each said that email was killing them.

Novell brings to bear the right pieces to alleviate these business challenges.  Our software allows work to be an activity not a place.  We don’t force a particular desktop or a desktop at all in some scenarios.  Our identity frameworks easily ensure that users have access to the right services in the right way.  Our Linux frameworks provide the high performance and highly secure backends for line of business applications and easily integrate into proprietary virtual and physical environments.  Our management tools enable both the data center and the end user computing spaces to alleviate the need for every user to be an IT expert and to make working from where you are a reality.  Lastly, but most important to the next generation of IT professionals, our business social networking fabric provides the file management, new media and real time collaboration tools that new hires look for prior to accepting a job.

More than any other software provider, Novell brings the right mix of tools to help the businesses represented by the conference speakers and most all others to achieve their goals.  Our real challenge is that the partners of those organizations don’t know us that well and we still have work to do with those businesses to establish who Novell is, and that we are not what we were.  That’s not a secret to anyone I hope, but the path to change starts with a conversation.  With all the other major software providers present, I did not hear a more compelling story from any of them, than the story we can tell ourselves.

Let’s go talk to people about how we make a difference.  I’m happy to help.

Until next time, peace.