By Jim Baer
Here’s the scene setter: It was getting close to the luncheon hour as Tracie Gildehaus, director of portal and business applications, Scottrade Inc. moved to the head of her breakout session and started a Power Point presentation on her laptop computer. The room was overflowing. IT techies ringed every spare space in the conference room.
Gildehaus, just 34-years-of-age and already a 10-year veteran communicator, heading a six-member associate department, had her audience eating out of the palm of her hand. All of a sudden, lunch could wait.
The 2009 Gateway to Innovation Conference, a daylong session, highlighting information technology (IT) particularly in St. Louis as an economic driver of industry was well under way at the Chase Park Plaza Hotel. More than 400 were attending the daylong event.
Gildehaus was putting on a command performance. The growth of IT locally is all based on innovative and strategic thinking. This has become a young person’s game.
Just striding around the conference areas, it didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out what is occurring at the moment. Twenty and thirty something men and women were keyboarding their laptops, surfing their social networks and tuned to their iPods while working the iPhones and BlackBerry’s at break neck speed.
“If we want to reach the Millennials, this is how we communicate,” says Gildehaus. Ten years ago, when a younger Gildehaus arrived fresh from the University of Missouri-St. Louis, Scottrade had just one web page and a couple of links. Having gone through two major designs, the company has burst to the next generation of Internet linkage with an Enterprise web 2.0 program and almost a thousand web pages. High-ranking corporate officials are writing their own blogs. Thousands of customers are logging on constantly to trade online. Scottrade, home to the $7 Internet trade is communicating directly to its more than 400 brokerage outlets.
“We’ve generated content to help people reconnect with their friends. We can solve our business needs the same way,” she says. “Our staff and our customers Twitter; they use Facebook and YouTube; Lycos IQ and a whole host of social networks. We had to empower our fellow employees to be more content-generated friendly. We’ve created our own corporate Wikipedia. We’ve taken the lid off capital interest.” Today, young people are not e-mailing or relying just on their cell phones. “You have to know your culture and your audience and answer the question: ‘what’s in it for me,”’ says this dynamic speaker.
Getting there has taken precise planning. “We think big—we start small—and we move fast,” says the portal director. “These days, people really want to reach out, communicate and share ideas,” says Gildehaus.
Keynoter Agrees
Peter H. Gray, professor of commerce from the McIntire School of Commerce at the University of Virginia was on the same page with the same message. Professor Gray, who began by having his own Internet company at age 16 eventually drifted from the world of commerce to the world of academia.
Professor Gray leads the Technology Enabled Network Group of the Network Roundtable, a consortium of 75 organizations sponsoring research on network applications for critical management issues at UVA.
The University works directly with more than 200 strategic networks with more than 120 Fortune 100 and 500 companies, improving their innovation and competitive advantage. You’d recognize the names of the high-powered organizations, including the likes of IBM, Mercer, Merck, the American Red Cross, NASA, the Department of Defense, and 3M, reciting just a few.
Professor Gray used a series of examples to show how ties to networks are key components to IT innovation and how important it is to connect ideas.
He did a for instance, talking about a Texas Oil Company that took one of its star innovators and stashed him far away in Prudhoe Bay, Alaska.
“Sometimes the very best people are on the periphery and unconnected to the network. People who think they are not important to collaboration can be incredibly important to the group,” says the Virginia professor.
“In this case (the guy in Alaska) came to the company as an outsider, and established people in the company resented the fact he might tell them what to do.” Eventually, that all changed.
Professor Gray too is a disciple of social networking. At UVA, Gray, and his partner, Rob Cross, associate professor, Management Department have helped a garden variety of major companies overcome their disconnect problems.
The UVA consortium sponsors critical management issue research on a wide variety of disciplines for companies in pharmaceuticals, healthcare, software, electronics, chemicals, etc.
“Social technology is so important. We can’t confuse communications with collaboration. What it often is simply, a case of I help you—and you help me. In most cases, I am the one helping you before you ever help me,” says Professor Gray with confidence and a wide smile.
The Importance of the Conference
Willem F. Bakker, executive director Information Technology Coalition of St. Louis is the brain trust of the organization. He brings IT parties together to make things happen.
Bakker was so happy with the way the entire conference was transpiring that he declared the date for the third-annual event, which will be on April 20, of 2010. Most important, Bakker cheerleads for the local IT industry. He can recite successes of local companies the likes of Express Script, MasterCard, Monsanto, Anheuser-Busch InBev, Scottrade and many others.
“Most important we need to take care of the talent needs of our professionals. We are vulnerable in the sense companies on both the east and west coast will take away our most talented workers.”
Optimistically, he states, even in a recession our leading companies are continuously looking for new talent.
Mark Showers, recenty retired CIO of Monsanto is there too. Showers chairs the Coalition.
“Our continuous goal is leveraging assets, developing and training (IT) talent and retaining that talent. Right now, we have a lot of people between jobs and we need to maintain all that talent in our region,” says Showers, who in retirement has founded his own consulting company.
“It is important to talk about our big companies, but we have to recognize our entrepreneur startups also,” he states.
Showers likes to talk about all the new young talent coming into the IT world. “Young people tend to be risk takers. They view the world as their oyster. In many cases, they truly can handle more risk,” he estimates.
Just maybe, Tracie Gildehaus age 34, was inadvertently one that Showers had in mind while referencing young talent. When she completed her remarks, Gildehaus got a very nice round of applause. In a delightful and refreshing tone she says: “Wow, this is fun.” The eloquent yet, self-effacing young lady could have gone on and on. She didn’t. It was time for the lunch buffet.
