Islands join
TO DEVELOP I.T. SKILLS By Tim Baker,
TCB Consulting Founder
Jersey has long been at the forefront of the finance industry. An industry that has been of huge benefit to the island. It was an early provider of financial services.
The last few years have seen an increase in competition for onshore and offshore jurisdictions. As competition increases so does pressure on fees. Pressure on fees means driving down the cost of providing services which leads
inevitably to
automation. A similar pressure is being felt in other sectors of the island including the government. This requirement for automation is increasing Jersey’s demand for quality IT skills as evidenced by the rapid growth in the IT sector over the last few years. Significant IT projects have traditionally been sourced from off island. In order to compete, the Jersey IT sector needs to drive down costs whilst increasing quality.
TCB looked for a way of growing capacity that would reduce costs as well as increasing quality. The accepted method of growing is to recruit and train staff to work locally. This is certainly part of the solution but not the whole solution as the cost of living in Jersey and the scarcity of potential recruits leads to the same issue that we are trying to combat, those of rising costs and (because of
the scarcity)
thanks to a unique combination of costs and available skills. Many high profile names have been attracted to the island during the Maltese government’s drive to turn Malta into an ICT resource hub; vertical alliances established over the past decade include HP, IBM, Microsoft, SAP and Cisco. All of these companies maintain centres of excellence on the Island.
Malta was recently selected as the location for the first Smart City outside of Dubai. This is expected to attract over 200 world class IT organisations, who will be working in a purpose-built tech-business park.
All of these efforts mean that Malta now boasts a growing local pool of multi-skilled IT professionals. Strong cultural links with Europe and English as a natural language ensure excellent communication and there are high levels of ongoing investment in IT infrastructure.
reducing skills and
experience. An alternative is to outsource all of the work off island. This does nothing to support the local economy and is not conducive to a long term customer relationship. TCB came up with another option which was to form a close partnership with an organisation in an anglophile country which is focussing on the technology sector. A partnership was formed with Ascent Software in Malta.
Malta is a prime location for software development, Page 8 A Digital Jersey
This solution brings advantages and comfort to Jersey clients. They have a team on the ground in Jersey that has all the skills to service their needs and has been doing so for almost 20 years. In addition they have seamless access to an unlimited (within reason) number of high quality, experienced, well-educated and English speaking developers in Malta. The Jersey client can take advantage of this extended resource with no impact to them. The entire relationship is managed behind the scenes by TCB presenting the partnership as one virtual organisation. The benefit to TCB is that the cost of the extra resources is significantly less than the cost
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