Not yet we don’t, but …
In his latest post, Simon Brown (a man who I professionally respect a great deal despite not actually knowing him very well) asks does Jersey have an IT industry from an external perspective? Simon argues that Jersey does indeed have an IT industry but that we need to do a better job of promoting it.
In the interests of healthy debate (and to prevent my filling up Simon’s comments with rafts of poor spelling & hyperbole) I would disagree – Jersey does not have an IT industry yet … but it could.
What we currently have is a very focussed group of highly skilled IT professionals most of whom work in support of a specific industry – Finance. Whilst this does mean that the level of software development, hardware support, hosting and the other services that make up an industry are present in abundance, Jersey lacks a number of key elements that need to be addressed before it can be considered as a worthy contender in the Silicon Valley / Roundabout vertical.
Whilst Jersey’s IT crowd is well respected and entirely able in the fields of finance and Microsoft development there is very little in the way of diversity or innovation to be found in the island. For example, in the UK you will find huge numbers of the Roundabout startups basing their businesses around open source tools and platforms whilst Jersey’s development and infrastructure skillset if very heavily focussed on proprietary technology.
A lack of skills in open source development may not sound like a problem, until you consider how key these tools are to emerging businesses in the Web 3.0 field. Jersey is rich in those with, for example, MSSQL skills but is lacking in NoSQL skills. Effectively, our industry is so focussed on government and finance work that there is little room for any technology that doesn’t fit into those arenas.
Then we have innovation. Jersey is an island of (primarily) consumptive development. There’s little of value to those outside of the core supporting industry leaving the island and those few who are producing viable products / services often leave the island when their careers start to flourish. If you look at the key identifying characteristic of Silicon Roundabout / Valley you see that innovation is at the core of the success, ahead even of the technology used and that innovation is leading to products and services that have world wide relevance.
A couple of examples: Music services Last.fm and Spotify – arguably to 2 major players in subscription based streamed media – are both UK companies which now have international reach. Tweetdeck (before being bought by Twitter) was written in the UK.
The ability for a business to say “If I setup in X then I can reach the world” is key to a growing IT community and whilst Jersey may have the technical ability to produce products like the above (and that’s a big may) it certainly doesn’t have the culture.
Finally we have the physical limitations placed on the island, both in terms of the costs of being here and the limitations in the connectivity of the rock. Bandwidth costs off island (a must have for any growing digital hub) are extraordinarily (almost prohibitively) high.
Gigabit Jersey may well be addressing internal infrastructure but it does little to address the core need of growing IT firms to be connected, often at very high speed, to the outside world. Can you imagine the cost of running a service like Spotify out of Foreshore?
Oh and the Regulation of Undertakings law doesn’t help. Restriction on hiring non local workers is all well and good … if you have the required skills locally and the industry in question can be focussed in a single jurisdiction. IT is increasingly a world wide workplace and Jersey’s current position would need to be looked at before businesses can consider locating here without having to worry about not getting the staff they need due to immigration controls.
The island is actually in a good position to address these issues. Increased education and events focussed on a broader set of technological tools can resolve the lack of diversity. Government action may well be required to deal with the connectivity / immigration issues of the island but this can certainly be solved.
And with those problems resolved we can begin innovation, encouraging others to get involved in projects based in Jersey, looking at ways to lever Jersey’s finance and government focus to develop solutions that are relevant on a world wide scale.
Then…
Then we can start to say that we have an IT industry.
