Much has been said about St. Louis
becoming the biotech center of the Midwest. But the Gateway City
also has the potential to achieve yet another distinction; that of an IT HUB
In an interview with St. Louis Commerce Magazine last year, Tim Nitti, KLG Principal and author of the report “Responding to the Technology Talent Shortage: The Balanced Portfolio Approach,” indicated that
“St. Louis is a particularly strong IT employment market currently under-utilized.” Commerce Magazine posed three often asked, but essential questions to five of the region’s top information technology executives to get their views. Most responded via e-mail, resulting in a “virtual roundtable” on the subject.
Participants:
Joe Caro
CIO, Brown Shoe
Vinny Ferrari
CIO, Edward Jones
Steve Hassell
Vice President and CIO, Emerson
Bryan Doer
CTO, Savvis
Brigadier General Daniel R. Dinkins Jr.
Director, Command, Control, Communications and Computer Systems, US Transportation Command, US Air Force
Why is IT such a strong segment for St. Louis?
Bryan Doer, Savvis
Doer: I think the technology base that we have in companies like Boeing is one reason. You get a big draw of engineering and IT professionals to a company like that. As a result, you develop niche engineering competencies like those in IT, or those related to IT like embedded systems. And I think these deep levels of engineering expertise naturally spawn people capable of expanding their involvement in related fields like information systems for business.
Joe Caro, Brown Shoe
Caro: From an IT perspective, I think there are 5 things that make St. Louis strong, particularly for a city its size. First, there are a lot of common technologies that we use, SAP being one of them. There are over 40 companies in St. Louis using SAP. When you think about that as a technology of the future, you’ve got a great base of professionals already familiar with it. Second, St. Louis is a great financial services hub with companies like MasterCard, Edward Jones, Wachovia Securities and Reuters. This means we also have an incredible workforce proficient in keeping systems running 24 x 7 in addition to an abundance of state-of-the-art data centers. Finally, there is the ability to supplement your workforce with very low-cost labor unlike any other city I’ve ever seen. We have contracting firms with a higher availability of great talent charging much less than the larger corporations of the world and at greater value than in other cities. This base of contract to hire professionals enables St. Louis companies to scale up and down our technology workforce as project needs dictate.
Steve Hassell, Emerson
Hassell: St. Louis has several aspects that make it attractive from an IT standpoint, especially in the area of IT operations. The area is served by several universities with excellent IT programs, wages tend to be much better than on the coasts, and the Midwest culture—combined with the family-friendly nature of St. Louis—creates an environment that favors a more stable, long-term workforce. All of these traits make St. Louis very attractive from a people standpoint. Also, when you look at infrastructure, St. Louis has very low power and utility rates and plentiful telecommunications, which are key ingredients for IT and for deciding where to locate data centers, which are the engines of corporate IT.
Brigadier General Daniel R. Dinkins Jr., US Air Force
Dinkins: Information technology (IT) is a significant enabler for commerce. IT enables the region’s commerce from automobile, software, and pharmaceutical production to medical research and financial services. I see the diversity of commerce within the St. Louis region as a major factor behind the strength of the IT segment.
U.S. Transportation Command, with its components, serves as the hub for command, control, communications and computer systems for global transportation in support of the Department of Defense. I’ve heard it said that our business is just as much about moving information as it is about moving cargo, passengers and fuel. We work with commercial partners on various IT systems for our worldwide operations, as well as our internal administrative processes. Our business is a $10 billion enterprise responsible for passenger and cargo movement, terminal operations, aerial refueling and patient aeromedical transportation.
From this perspective, I consider information technology “geography neutral;” information is truly a global capability. There is, however, a lot to be said about geography as it relates to the resources needed to deliver IT. St. Louis is a natural crossroads for transportation including water, road and rail. This confluence of transportation infrastructure has provided an optimal site for businesses, both public and private sector, to locate here in the region. As commerce gravitates to the St. Louis region, skilled IT professionals follow; delivering top-notch information capability. This has resulted in a number of strong IT segment in the marketplace. Having a strong IT pool of talent is a good economic growth engine for the area.
Vinny Ferrari, Edward Jones
Ferrari: St. Louis has a consistent track record of attracting a wide variety of industries, such as manufacturing, financial services, agriculture/biotech and health care, which require advanced technical skills. While the business landscape has changed in St. Louis over the years, the region continues to attract a diverse group of companies, many of which continue to need technical skills.
What challenges does St. Louis face in sustaining/fulfilling its potential as an IT hub?
Caro: Traditionally, only very few companies in St. Louis would have been considered technology companies. But now almost every company has become one to some significant extent. They, like Brown Shoe, have realized it’s a way to serve their consumers better and faster. But this change has created additional pressures; one being an extra demand for IT professionals. And I think that has created a challenge for our businesses to stop competing and to start cooperating to share our best lessons learned and to increase overall productivity, quality and the effectiveness of the technology organizations in town.
Ferrari: In recent years, several longtime St. Louis companies have been purchased by companies outside the area. If these companies decide to leave
St. Louis or move their corporate headquarters, many of the IT jobs go with them. Attracting companies in growing business segments, such as in the service and biotechnology industries, will be critical to ensuring that St. Louis maintains
its IT hub status. If a long-established firm leaves St. Louis, it opens the door for another firm to move in or start up. Overall, the region continues to have
a great mix of companies that are growing, thriving and generating jobs for qualified IT professionals.
Dinkins: I believe the region needs to maintain and modernize IT infrastructure while maintaining a critical mass of highly skilled IT professionals. IT is one of the most dynamic and fast-paced fields. Technology that once took eighteen to 24 months to develop and get to market can now take less than six months to bring to the customer. At Scott Air Force Base we recently rolled out a new electronic staffing capability in under 90 days. Along the way we had to modernize some of the underlying IT. We were able to adjust and modernize the infrastructure because, in large part, of the highly skilled IT workforce available in the region. U.S. Transportation Command as well as the many DOD organizations at Scott air Force Base tap into this talent to improve operations. Finally, I believe we need to be constantly assessing our information environment looking for opportunities to update, improve, and protect our IT infrastructure. For St. Louis to remain an IT hub we must ensure the IT capability we delivery to our customers is protected. I think we need to develop that next generation of IT professionals with a greater understanding of ways to protect information in the global, cyber world we live in today.
Hassell: Probably the biggest issue is generating more awareness of what St. Louis has to offer. I grew up in the Midwest and worked in IT for 10 years before moving here to take the CIO job for Emerson five years ago. It wasn’t until after I moved here that I really gained an appreciation for what St. Louis has to offer. When you think of high-tech centers, places like Silicon Valley, Boston, northern Virginia, and Seattle immediately come to mind. Not surprisingly, IT talent and venture capital tends to flow to these more popular areas. For St. Louis to reach its true potential, we have to catch the eyes of more people outside the local area. Fortunately, we have groups like the St. Louis IT Coalition that are focused on doing just that. I mentioned the family-friendly nature of the St. Louis region, but we also are home to world-class universities, an amazing biotech industry, some of the best health-care institutions around, great sporting events and teams, and top-notch cultural institutions—all of which help to make St. Louis an attractive IT hot spot.
Doer: I think we need three things. First, we need to attract more headquarters. That’s where IT personnel are generally employed. To do this we need to have the necessary infrastructure for a diverse workforce in terms of commuting, and tax structures need to be appropriate. We also need a vibrant investment community to create new businesses which will increase the need for IT support in the area even more. And finally, we need to create more opportunities for IT personnel to progress in their careers from entry level all the way up through CIO.
How do we generate and keep IT talent?
Ferrari: In today’s economy, it’s especially important to focus on developing and retaining talent. Companies generally react to a poor economy with layoffs or pay cuts, which can serve to undermine recruiting and talent management efforts. It’s critical to recognize that top talent is necessary in any economic situation. Generating talent begins by partnering with colleges and universities with strong IT programs. At Edward Jones, we’re fortunate that many of our associates have strong alumni ties with several local schools. Companies can have a dramatic impact on the IT talent of tomorrow by getting involved in speaking engagements or various events today. The students benefit by learning more about IT in the real world, and the companies are better poised to attract talented individuals from these schools. When it comes to retaining talent, the importance of salary and benefits can’t be understated; however, today’s IT associates also value challenging opportunities and a sense of involvement in the portions of the business that they help impact.
Dinkins: For the Department of Defense, as well as private industry, partnerships with academia are essential in training and developing IT professionals. Post-secondary colleges and universities in the St. Louis area and across the bi-state region have established a well-rounded and diverse network of training, education and executive development. As individuals, businesses and government organizations, we need to take advantage of this precious commodity and develop partnerships for maintaining the current levels of IT education, while also striving to improve the education for our next generation of IT professionals. Also important is respect for families. Speaking as an Air Force officer, we hire airmen, but we retain families. The St. Louis region has a lot to offer families, and we need to continue to support the efforts in the region that make it a good place to live.
Doer: We’re already doing quite a bit—fostering communities of interacting professionals, tying IT to our natural strengths like healthcare, drawing education into the story. But we need more jobs. It’s true, we already have quite a number of IT professionals, but I think it’s lumpy. They’re concentrated. If we had a larger population of major employers we’d have a larger variety of jobs and that would provide more opportunities. And as I said, it’s just as important to be thinking about career stages if you want people to stay in the area. So you need to have lots of CIO positions not just a large quantity of help desk positions. You need jobs at the senior level as well as the entry level. They all may count in terms of volume, but they don’t necessarily assure a career path opportunity.
Caro: We have some very good CIO roundtables in St. Louis so we work pretty well together at the CIO level. I think there’s an opportunity to replicate this cooperation at all levels of our IT organizations, so we can share best practices, standards and lessons learned within each area of technology. We all do basically the same work, but for different industries, so why not share our best technology thinking to our mutual advantage. For instance, one area where we can standardize is to get to more of an architectural standard of technologies we use. St. Louis companies tend to use a lot of the same technologies and if we formalize that it could be very beneficial. We’d get better pricing, we could more easily share lessons learned, we’d start building a skill base in those technologies, and our employees’ skills become more transferable. So it would not only help local IT talent and attract talent from outside the
region, but our businesses would be able to execute projects faster and at a lower cost because we won’t have to continually retrain people on new technologies.
Hassell: It all starts in the schools. IT, along with other science and engineering disciplines, requires an intense desire at a young age to understand how things work, and then to apply a disciplined process to change things for the better. Somewhere along the way, our children started to lose that desire, and now we’re seeing the results in a severe drop in interest in the IT and engineering professions. It’s a major concern for technology companies like Emerson, and is one of the reasons we work so hard in the educational community to foster interest in engineering and technology careers. Once we recruit talented IT professionals, it’s a matter of maintaining a challenging and rewarding work environment along with the culture and lifestyle to round out the individual and keep them here. With the combination of the companies, professional organizations, and activities in
St. Louis, we should be able to not only attract, but retain the world’s best IT talent.
