A couple of weeks back I made my first visit to Ukraine, to keynote the (outdoor!) ITEM conference in Dnipro.

It was one of those trips where you don’t really feel like you see the place. Due to flight troubles (the culmination of many frustrations with Ukrainian Airlines) I arrived at my hotel in Dnipro at 3am, and departed at 5.30 the next morning.

That, combined with delivering two talks, hosting two Q&A sessions, being interviewed for two different video shows, and being on a panel meant the whole day is a bit hazy in my memory, but a few things stand out.

The hotel

With such a short visit, I didn’t get much time in the hotel, but it still stands out as one of the more distinctive I’ve visited. Set inside the Menorah Center, the biggest multifunctional Jewish community center in Europe, the building was huge and rather imposing!

My talks

My keynote was about how to get started with digital transformation. I told some of the GDS story and highlighted some examples from elsewhere, but primarily exhorted the audience to start, and start small. Throughout my time in government, and in several consulting engagements since I’ve been frustrated by the assumption that to make big change you have to start out big. The mission should be bold, the vision should be big, but the first steps and initial team should be small.

I also gave a short talk exploring some of the themes about open source, open standards, and what I’ve learned about leadership from exploring those topics. There’s a separate blog post or two in that, which I should get to at some stage.

The diversity panel

I’d initially been inclined to turn down ITEM’s invitation as their website gave me the impression that they weren’t doing much to encourage diversity. I was delighted to be proven wrong.

While primarily white, the audience had more of a gender mix than I’d expected and there were a number of children present. There was also a wider range of speakers than the initial announcements had suggested and the organisers had laid on childcare - particularly important for a weekend event.

It was sobering to see the context in which that was happening during our panel. After the panelists had all said our bit, the moderator asked the audience to raise their hands if they thought lack of diversity was an issue in the Ukrainian IT industry. Not a single hand went up.

Estonia

I didn’t realise when I gave my customary shout-out to the Estonian government in my talk that the next speaker was from their E-Residency programme.

The E-Residency team were sponsoring the event, which was the first time I’ve seen a government sponsor a tech event of this kind in another country. It was also striking how international the team representing e-residency were.

It seems Ukraine is a big source of e-residents, in part because running a business and moving money around in Estonia is much simpler than in Ukraine. It’s clear that Estonia’s reach in the region is significant, and their work remains fascinating to watch.

Future of Ukrainian IT

Several people approached me during the event to ask about how they win more outsourcing business. It was apparent that a lot of the IT sector in Ukraine is built around being an outsourcing provider, but that is being squeezed as cost of living goes up and western companies want to move away from traditional outsourcing.

While quite a few startups were present (and it’s difficult to draw inferences from such a short visit) there’s also not nearly such a large local economy as in India and so not quite the same opportunity to transition to providing products to a growing local market.

I encouraged those I spoke to at least move from talking “outsourcing” to a clearer presentation of whether they’re providing a product or a partnership, and to make those partnerships more agile. But there are no easy answers and with so many countries vying to rebuild their economies around tech, many of these companies could be facing a challenging transition.

Going back, seeing more

It’s been a real privilege over the last few months to get insights into digital and tech in such different contexts: Canada, Philippines, Australia and now Ukraine.

For Ukraine, 26 hours really isn’t long enough to see very much and I’m hoping there’ll be a chance to go back and see a bit more before long!