Guest Post by Gerry Docherty, Chair, Conscia Enterprise Systems
You may not have noticed, but we’re currently sowing the seeds of the death of the Scottish ICT industry. Every year, we hasten its rate of decline. Every year, the systemic failures of the Scottish ICT community bring closer its increasingly-inevitable demise.
Hold on – isn’t the ICT industry one of Scotland’s few success stories? Comparatively, it’s faring particularly well in the teeth of the recession. Many of our indigenous companies are recruiting, and reporting growth. There’s a steady flow of sparky start-ups. All of which is encouraging, but it only masks the insidious threat – that we have allowed the image of our industry to become so poor and so distorted that it threatens the long-term viability of the industry itself, and the economic health of Scotland as a whole.
To be competitive internationally, our key industries (like energy, food&drink, financial services) invest substantially in technology to reduce costs, improve productivity, and trade globally. Almost all of that investment in hardware, communications and packages goes directly to Far East and US-owned corporations. Add in government spending and consumer spending on ICT, and you can see that the Scottish economy already runs an unhealthy balance of payments deficit – certainly more than a billion pounds per annum - simply in order to be a technologically-advanced nation. It’s a high price to pay just to be a part of the global game.
So if Scotland’s economy is to be healthy in future, it needs a vibrant, competitive ICT supply side which can minimise that balance of payments deficit, by providing for more of Scotland’s ICT needs from a local base, and by earning export dollars through selling our technology overseas. That supply side needs high-end capability in innovation, technology, and business management if it is to be truly competitive with the ICT industries in India, China and the USA.
But high-end capability needs talent, and the simple truth is that we are not attracting a sufficiently high quality of individual to the industry, and we haven’t been doing so for some years now. If you have any doubt, let’s look at the facts surrounding the major flow of talent into our industry – our university graduates.
Scotland’s major universities are justifiably lauded as centres of excellence for ICT research and teaching. Their figures clearly demonstrate that they are magnets for the brightest overseas students. And yet, between 2001 and 2006, the numbers of native Scots studying ICT-related courses in Scotland declined by 50%, at a time that the undergraduate population was on the increase to meet government targets. The decline is continuing, anecdotally by as much as 10% per annum.
At the same time, the female representation in ICT-related courses in now comfortably less than 10% in every major university, so we have a gender imbalance looming – never healthy for any industry.
And it’s not as if ICT courses are tough to get in to – entrance qualifications for many ICT-related courses around the country have been relaxed in the hope of attracting more students, without success so far. As any university lecturer will tell you, the consequence of relaxing entry qualifications is that those courses immediately become less attractive to high-achieving native students.
Of course, there will continue to be star Scottish students in every course, but the summary has to be that the Scottish ICT industry’s upcoming talent base is reducing in quantity, reducing in quality, and gender-imbalanced. These aren’t interesting statistics – these are frightening statistics.
If we can’t attract high-achieving talent, we can’t compete internationally. And if we can’t compete internationally, the future for the Scottish ICT industry can only be one of gradual decline. And if the Scottish ICT declines, the wider Scottish economy suffers even more.
But is our image really to blame for this state of affairs?
You bet.
20 years ago, ICT was the place to be if you wanted to change the world. The overwhelming image was of an industry full of excitement, invention and discovery – certainly attractive to high achievers. But, primarily as a result of the hype and disappointment of the dotcom boom-bust, the backlash kicked in with a vengeance. Over the past 10 years, our cultural image as an industry has flipped – the world at large now sees us as geeks, or guys who can’t get girlfriends, or socially-inept pasty-faced youths with their faces in laptops, or the creators and consumers of disturbing shoot-em-up games. It’s all been fuelled by lazy stereotyping in the media, but mud sticks, and it’s going to be hard to shift. Granted, our image may be not as bad as your average banker right now, but it’s deeply unflattering. We might laugh along with the stereotype, and indulge ourselves in some self-deprecation sometimes, but the consequences have been serious.
At school level, the new industry stereotype means that girls simply don’t take up ICT – it’s not at all unusual to find Higher classes of boys only. At University choices time, Mr and Mrs Newton Mearns are not at all keen for little Johnny with his 5As to study for a profession with such a poor image.
Now, insiders like you and I know that the industry isn’t stuffed full of geeks, and that it is still a hotbed of excitement, invention and discovery. For all the reasons outlined above, we owe it to ourselves, and to the economy as a whole, to fight back against the prevailing stereotype, so that we can again attract the highest-achieving talent into the industry.
Work undertaken in the past year by the ICT Forum for Scotland, supported by organisations such as ScotlandIS, has identified this culture change as an essential contribution to improving Scotland’s economic prospects. It’s one of a number of ambitious targets adopted by the Forum, but hopefully it will attract government and media support.
In the meantime, we can all make our contribution at a personal level. Don’t blush when you tell people that you work in ICT. Don’t laugh when they hit you with the geek jokes.
Instead, remind them that their world is built on what you produce. Tell them that your industry has created modern society. Our systems get oil out of the ground, run power stations, keep planes in the sky, support communications and broadcast, underpin retail, provide logistics for transport and distribution, and make business and government more efficient. Our technologies support the disabled, and are powerful weapons for social inclusion. Our industry is the heart of renewable energies, and green car technology. In the future, what we produce will be essential to the revised regulation of the international banking system, and in the fight to combat global warming.
Persuade your children, nephews and nieces that if they want to change the world, then they need to be the creators of technology, not just consumers.
The fight back starts here.
Gerry Docherty is Chair of Conscia Enterprise Systems, and nmp. He also chairs Scottish Enterprise's ICT Markets Industry Advisory Group and is a member of the ICT Forum for Scotland. He served as inaugural Chair of ScotlandIS and was a board member until 2007.
I hesitated to even consider commenting on Gerry Docherty’s Post. I then waited several days to see if the Comments count would increase from zero. When I saw that the count hadn’t moved, I hesitated once more before pushing the Submit button since the absence of even one Comment is itself a statement of the current state of the Scottish ICT industry.
Why the hesitation?
Several reasons: the first is that I am not part of the Scottish ICT industry; the second is that I do not live in Scotland – in truth, for over 4 decades. But the primary reason is that I have been down this road before as both a member of GlobalScot (a founding member if I am not mistaken) and as a member “in good standing” of ScotlandIS [note: I originally wrote “as a fully paid-up member of ScotlandIS” but for the past 2 years, ScotlandIS felt that it was inappropriate to take my money as I couldn’t enjoy the full benefits of membership, being the only member of ScotlandIS based in the US – or so I understand].
A little background is in order: ex-pat Scot from the pre-computer era; professional career in the world of IT (that’s the terminology I am accustomed to here on this side of the big pond) spanning 4 decades spread across 3 countries in more or less equal measure – UK, US and Israel. Academically, MS degree in Mathematics from U. of Illinois and MS degree in Computer Science from Technion (the MIT of Israel). Professionally have been involved exclusively with SMEs, either startups or early stage ventures, whose technologies have been software products targeted at the B2B community. With a mixture of modesty and reality, I proudly point to more failures than successes since any other claim involving multiple ventures would not be credible. As of the late 1990s, I have been working as an independent consultant based in the US offering my services to Israeli and Scottish ventures interested in taking their first steps in entering the brutal US market (and, less so, to US ventures interested in entering the UK market). As of the time of writing, the score is Israel 9, Scotland 0. In other words, 9 ventures in Israel recognized that notwithstanding all the wonders of modern technology and internet/viral marketing, there is no substitute for “feet on the street” and “human chemistry”. Having great technology that never gets sold may provide emotional satisfaction but it doesn’t feed families. A more striking observation is that there are more Israeli ventures listed on NASDAQ than from any other country outside the US [note: Canada used to be number 2]. And the final observation is that the populations of Scotland and Israel are comparable – 5 million and 7 million respectively. The primary asset of both countries is the educational system. Both countries are generally recognized as delivering relatively high quality education appropriate for the 21st century. So, why the striking difference in results after high school, college and university? I don’t know the answer – I never claimed to know the answer – but I did suggest on more than one occasion in the years 2000, 2001 and 2002 to several “senior” players in the Scottish firmament that the way to find out is to get on a plane and travel to Israel and meet the various counterparts in the government and trade associations – and also meet with ex-pat Scots. I subsequently threw in the towel since any and all suggestions seemed to fall on polite – but deaf – ears. The easiest way to find out what works is to ask someone who has already been down the road of failure – several times – but finally found a formula that worked. It took many failed attempts for Israel as a country and Israelis as entrepreneurs to get it right – and what works for them may not – indeed, probably won’t – work for Scotland, but there’s always something to be gained through dialogue provided it is done with an open mind.
Hence, the hesitation – but in the end I pushed the Submit button in the hope that at least one person – you, Gerry – will read it.
Gerry, although your points and your pitch may be different from mine, the goal is the same – to get Scotland onto the world stage in ICT. It will take leadership from someone in Scotland. Can we anoint you?
Posted by: Alex Hill | April 21, 2009 at 02:09 AM