Does Swiss IT Matter?
A few days ago I attended a conference on Swiss IT. This conference was one in a series of events on the occasion of the year of computer science in Switzerland. The conference focused on the perspectives of the Swiss IT market.
The first presentation was given by Stephan Hug, CTO of Credit Suisse Private Banking & Switzerland. He explained how Credit Suisse is migrating from PL/1 to Java and at the same time from the mainframe to a distributed environment in the back end. They have quite some challenges to tackle, especially in decoupling all the subsystems. A decentralized environment is inherently less reliable than the mainframe and decoupling is the most important measure to increase reliability. This presentation both interesting and a pretty good PR stunt to attract new talent to Credit Suisse.
The next talk was about the transformation of a service company into a product company. Working for Canoo which is both a service and product company I have first hand experience of the challenges of a product company. It is common place that product development is tough and takes always longer than expected. Overall the talk was more on the entertainment side than it conveyed valuable information and I certainly missed the importance of marketing in his talk.
The most interesting talk, at least from a Canoo perspective, was Claude Honegger’s “Integrated human resources management in the IT division of a global financial services company”. Claude Honegger is the CIO of Credit Suisse Switzerland. Credit Suisse IT has been agressively offshoring in the last few years which had quite some impact on Swiss IT service companies. They will continue with this strategy albeit they had to realize that not all IT projects are equally suited for offshoring. At the same time his division has more than 200 open positions. Nevertheless, they intend to replace external contractors by internal personnel as far as possible. At the same time they are cutting the rates for external contractors by 10%. It will be interesting to see how they can fill their vacant positions while at the same time deterring external contractors and singing the praises of offshoring.
The remaining talks mostly dealt with economic aspects of the Swiss IT market: The economic climate will definitely turn colder in the future (a recession is not expected, though), IT salaries will continue to rise, albeit slower than in the past and government promotion of IT education has basically failed. One of the presenters urged to rely more on career changers then university graduates in IT.
The conference was concluded by a panel hosted by one of the most well known Swiss TV hosts, Stephan Klapproth. The panel was quite entertaining but the panelists were too much of the same opinion. All agreed that Swiss IT still matters and that there are still many job opportunities despite a tendency to offshore near and far.
What’s my conclusion and how can Swiss IT companies (esp. smaller ones) survive? We have to be highly flexible and close to our customers. Social skills, which IT workers are generally not attributed with, are decisive for being close to our customers. Education and experience are more important than ever. I don’t see how career changers can fill this gap, hence we still have to rely on university graduates. Last but not least we should promote Swiss quality not only in chocolate or watches but also in IT. Combined with positive thinking which is not a basic Swiss property I am convinced that Swiss IT is still highly competitive.
