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COALITION FOR INFORMATION
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COMMUNICATIONS TECHNOLOGY
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By Jim Baer
The emerging plant and life sciences industry has enjoyed much local
and national recognition and growth the past few years. St. Louis
is known for the growth of this so called BioBelt: Center for Plant
and Life Sciences. Today, business and academic leaders are working
hand-in-glove to grow the IT industry to the same level.
A nerve center for this IT effort in the St. Louis region is located
on the third floor of “A” Building at the Monsanto Campus in Creve
Coeur.
Mark E. Showers, chief information officer for Monsanto, and a community
leader with 23 years of experience is the first chairman of the
budding organization to put IT awareness on the St. Louis map. His
group is the St. Louis Coalition for Information and Communications
Technology.
Information on the IT super highway is moving along at warp speed.
Showers and his compatriots want to capture that information, have
the right people in the right jobs, and grow a Coalition to spread
the word of St. Louis’ role in this highly technical field.
Catalin Roman, professor and chairman of the Computer Science and
Engineering department at Washington University has 32-years of
experience in the information field.
Professor Roman noted an increased level of local IT interest as
a result of the May 2005 International Conference for Software Engineering
in St. Louis. “We had 1,100 attend, and that was a record number.
We discovered that business leaders were interested in what we were
doing. We knew we would have to tap local business and organize
funds to make a lasting impact on the region and to benefit the
community,” he says.
In conjunction with the International Software Conference, the RCGA
and Washington University partnered to hold an IT Summit for business
and academic leaders in the region. Over 100 area IT leaders participated
in the Summit, and the idea of establishing an ongoing coalition
to stimulate growth in this sector was born.
A comprehensive examination of the St. Louis IT industry was undertaken
in 2002 by Battelle in an industry cluster strategy commissioned
by the RCGA. When the dot com crash occurred shortly after the completion
of the Battelle strategy, it was decided to “let the dust settle”
in the then turbulent industry, and to revisit the cluster strategy
when the industry was back to normal. Many of the original Battelle
findings and recommendations continue to be timely and relevant
to growing this industry, and the new Coalition is mining the original
Battelle strategy.
“The idea of an IT Coalition was embraced by RCGA and other members
of the business community,“ notes Roman, a member of the new group.
“We knew a crisis was looming locally. Statistics indicate that
16 million new jobs would be created and that 60 percent would be
related to IT, and all of this would happen in the next 10 years.
We were seriously worried about a personnel shortage of skilled
workers in this region,” states the professor.
One who understands that is Greg Sullivan, CEO of Global Velocity,
a start-up company in the highly advanced communications’ industry.
“I came to St. Louis in 1978 to get my engineering degree (Washington
University) and to stay and work in the region,” he explains.
Today, Global Velocity provides high speed streaming data mainly
for communications firms. Customers are telecommunications; cable
and media access organizations, working with local broadcast outlets.
The company is working with Professor John Lockwood, an applied
researcher in the computer science department at Washington University.
Their goal is to take the professors’ inventions and bring them
to market.
A charter member of the new Coalition, Sullivan values the close
ties with local universities. “We are blessed to have so many significant
and meaningful local universities, offering engineering curriculums
and being able to provide so much talent,” he reasons.
Sullivan says the IT Coalition far transcends the networking component
of an organization. “This organization is invaluable to start-up
companies such as our own. We can do important things and put into
place discretions that will have an important environmental impact.
We are sharing our knowledge and our resources, and that is important
to everyone,” says Sullivan.
Kent Neely, Dean of Arts & Science at Southern Illinois University
Edwardsville, and a member of the newly formed IT Coalition says
the challenge is knitting all of the components together. “Our challenge
is to bring together major corporations and educational institutions,
define a mission and objectives and then point to future growth,”
he says.
Showers recently organized a 17-member advisory board from major
companies such as the Boeing Co. and Microsoft, as well as key educational
institutions at Washington University, Southern Illinois University
Edwardsville, UM-St. Louis and the St. Louis Community Colleges.
(See complete list of the Coalition on page 28).
Showers points out that the region has 50,000 good paying jobs in
IT already. The goal is to nurture and retain talent at the local
level and compete with Atlanta, Minneapolis, Chicago, Cincinnati
and other regional cities for the best available talent.
“I am thrilled that Mark (Showers) is our first chair of the Coalition,”
says Ed Glotzbach of TPI Corp. and former Chief Information Officer
with SBC Corp. Glotzbach, who with Showers, Edward Jones CIO Rich
Malone, and the RCGA, helped craft the Coalition, points out that
St. Louis is a major center for both software and hardware development.
“We have so many great corporations that work at the highest level
of IT,” rattling off the names of Anheuser-Busch, MasterCard, Monsanto,
Emerson to mention a few. “We need this Coalition to keep rolling
along and gain momentum. After all, success breeds success,” says
Glotzbach.
Showers’ immediate goal is to define the Coalition’s initial initiatives,
and to raise sufficient funds in order to hire a staff director.
He already has one in mind.
“In the late 90s, we went through such a tough time in IT,” says
Showers. “We experienced the dot com bust and now we are breathing
life back into our industry,” he beams with pride.
One of his main goals is to stem the ‘brain drain’ and grow the
local talent base. As a community-minded leader, he focuses on the
key assets of the St. Louis region. “In addition to pure economic
development, we need to focus on how information technology impacts
the social fabric of our region,” says the Monsanto exec.
Showers points out the Coalition is focusing in four main areas.
“We are looking at the labor force to make sure we remain strong
and we are using the RCGA approach to market St. Louis from outside
the region. We want to create as many good high-paying jobs and
keep our university graduates home. At the same time, we are looking
at the entrepreneurial climate to provide the right kind of start-up
support, so new systems and small companies can flourish.”
Showers also believes in funding the incubator system. “We would
like to model after the successful incubator environment established
for plant and life science development,” he points out.
Getting the word out means creating educational opportunities, having
forums and networking sessions; creating user groups and having
good high-paying jobs.
Another Coalition member, Brenda Newberry, chairman and CEO of the
Newberry Group in St. Charles sees a bright future for the region.
“St. Louis’ central location and quality of life will allow us to
continue to grow our national accounts business throughout the country.
Currently 98 percent of our business is from outside this region,
but we would definitely welcome the opportunity to bring more talent
to this region to fuel economic development and retention of talent.”
Newberry says the Coalition doesn’t need to be solely technology-based.
“Rather, it must also be people based. The first, last and most
critical step is for every business and every person in St. Louis
to agree to work hard to attract the best and brightest from around
the country, and to be open and welcoming to the new people.”
Newberry is in accordance with her contemporaries when she refers
to creating the right working environment for the IT industry. “Our
talented IT workforce must see lots of opportunity for their continued
and varied employment with many companies without the need to relocate.
They (the workers) must see many options for career development
and growth…many more options than just a few large corporations
and several mid-cap companies.”
“The new UMSL IT Incubator/High Performance Computer Center (planned
for 2007) is envisioned to be a cooperative project with other universities
and research centers in the region, as well as with industry. The
incubator is designed to be a cross-discipline research center of
excellence serving all academic and industry researchers requiring
high-performance computing; a springboard for major external funding
supporting research, technology transfer and economic development;
and an economic development engine encouraging the development of
new start-up companies in a high-growth industry. In turn these
efforts will provide high paying job opportunities for UM-St. Louis
graduates and others in the field,” says Coalition member Dr. Thomas
George, chancellor at UM-St. Louis.
Sharing of information is key for Neely at SIUE. “We believe in
a thing called Accordant Technology at SIUE,” says Neely. It is
something like TiVo technology where students and faculty alike
have access to this form of communication 24/7. “We need to share
documents with large groups of people. Our clicker technology of
instant polling and on-line quizzes and instructional needs on the
web is the wave of the future,” says the dean.
Showers summed up the plans by saying: “What we really are doing
is bringing together academics, as well as large, mid-cap and small
companies. We are working on our image and putting St. Louis on
the IT map. Our overall goal is to create a level of synergy and
to just let people know we exist. We may not be San Diego, Seattle
or Boston or the Silicone Valley, but we have great assets and we
just have to paint the right picture and get off on the right foot,”
he says. |
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