Innovative State Projects Would Stop the Brain Drain

The state’s projects, whose implementation lags far behind the commercial sector, are hindered by extensive bureaucratic red tape. However, if their setup changed, they would become a means to modernise the country and attract IT talent from abroad.

Although market demand for individual IT technologies varies from year to year, international interest in specialists from Slovakia remains high. The global success of Slovak brands such as ESET, SYGIC, Slido, and PixelFederation proves their talent. The hard-working, responsible, and reliable approach of Slovaks, together with their lower price compared to professionals from Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Finland, England, or the USA, make Slovakia an ideal country for IT development centres of many global companies.

Nevertheless, innovative Slovak companies face the problem of insufficient talent. Competition for talent exacerbates the problem, and foreign enterprises can easily overpay Slovak companies. However, the state is also on the losing side, because without a proactive talent policy, it loses tens of billions of euros in added value every year.

However, the IT sector is entirely dependent on state projects, so the situation would improve if the state’s approach to their implementation were to change, said Marek Greško and Róbert Dusík, former programmers and founders of TITANS. According to them, the problem is that state projects in Slovakia, which would be completed and deployed relatively quickly in the commercial world, are stalled by unnecessary bureaucracy. They also point out cases when the final solution, its integrability, and long-term usability are not taken into account during their implementation.

There is no shortage of high-quality developers

“Slovakia should create meaningful digital projects that would help modernise our country,” says Marek Greško. “They should be secure, robust, transparent, and provide good conditions for subcontractors. Since they would be used by 3 million users, they would also be attractive to developers.”

Connecting experienced IT talent with innovative projects is the focus of TITANS, a long-standing Slovak leader in outsourcing IT specialists. Outsourcing refers to hiring a third party to work on projects instead of an in-house team and provide services that are time-consuming, require expertise, or are not the core business of companies.

When brands rely on an experienced partner when looking for external reinforcements, they don’t have to waste time with a long selection process. In addition, at TITANS, we also provide our clients with a pre-selection of suitable talent from the large pool of IT experts in our database, considering the specific needs of companies. For them, this minimizes the disruption encountered during and after the completion of individual projects. Another factor not to be underestimated is the guarantee of an outsourcing partner that offers only proven and highly qualified IT specialists.

State projects could boost the whole IT sector

TITANS is trusted by more than 600 clients from both domestic and international environments, including respected names such as Zurich Insurance, Sygic, Swiss Re, Erste Group, Accenture, Slovak Telekom, O2, Orange and Siemens. They share a proactive approach to tackling technology debt, i.e. the suspension of innovation required of IT departments by company management. By implementing overdue projects, companies gain significant advantages over others. “At TITANS, we are looking forward to helping them in this area by supplying them with experienced IT specialists,” says Marek Greško.

According to Róbert Dusík, a good setup of innovative state projects would be an effective motivation for IT talents from abroad to work in Slovakia and develop it further. “There are EU funds, projects are also in the queue, but the implementation stagnates,” says Róbert Dusík. “It is necessary to get the state apparatus moving so that projects can be implemented through transparent tenders, under real commercial conditions, by many high-quality IT companies. The result will be quick solutions, refreshment of the Slovak IT sector, the interest of developers and IT people to stay in Slovakia, and other great opportunities to connect other non-IT businesses to the state.”