Though only having been in the IT business for 11 years, ZacWare chief executive officer and founder, Damian Hickey, has already survived government work in two locations and has since become a contributor to the open-source community through his Joomla!-based Jentla multi-site content management system (CMS) offerings. Computerworld Australia recently talked to Damian about the transition from government IT to self-employment, and the perils of arrogance when looking for a job.

How did you get into IT in the first place?

It was around the [late 90s] bubble, I thought it would be fantastic to get a career in the IT industry so I started at the very bottom in help desk work because I didn't have any formal training in IT. I progressed through very quickly and got promoted. I think, really, I just got promoted because I'm relatively sensible. That's one of those things about IT shops - if you can actually understand what the business is interested in, then you're much more valuable.

I got into Windows systems engineering and then from there Unix systems engineering primarily around HP UX, and a bit of Solaris and Linux was coming through in 1999/2000 onwards. In 2003 I left WorkCover Queensland where I was looking after the main HP UX systems, and started to venture out on my own.

That started from my wife needing an e-commerce system for her yoga business. There was nothing at the time that could sell events and products together - she wanted to be able to sell things like yoga mats and books but also complex, recurrent events so we extended an open source e-commerce system. To be pretty frank, my role in that was business analysis and project management, I'm not a coder. It has progressed to grow from there, and now we've got a range of products based around the Joomla! CMS [content management system].

I had run some small businesses before so my time in IT was largely around learning technical skills to support business analysis. The types of businesses that come to us have complex web information requirements and I just love talking with them about how to bring those to life on the web, and how to do that sensibly with architecture behind it.

Is there any reason you chose to go open source for your software ventures?

I'm particularly attracted to open source as a business model. We've been able to progress the development of Freeway to work with the Joomla! CMS. It's provided a good platform as a business base for us, to provide an array of services for complex web problems. I suppose it's suited to the way that we like to work. That there's this piece of software that's continually evolving and developing that many people are contributing to. It's powerful, it's secure, it's got a really good roadmap and it's the sort of software that I feel comfortable passing onto our customers and supporting as well.

Maybe it's something about me, I like to share.

How does the open source business model differ from one with proprietary IP?

We earn our income from subscriptions around support, we don't earn any income from licensing. The whole software world is tending to move in the direction of software subscriptions now and services-based income streams as well.

We're not doing anything radically different from where the market is heading. The age of the million-dollar CMS license is going. The bigger companies will have that ticket price on their CMSes, but when it comes to providing those solutions it's basically a services model that they use. The fact that it's open source means that it's got a whole series of other benefits associated with it as well.

We get people saying "we want to stay on the roadmap with Joomla!" if they're already a user because they like the ease of use and the extension set, but we also get people saying "our CMS has just gone end of life, no one's supporting". That's fairly common.

What's the roadmap for moving your existing e-commerce solution, Freeway, into Jentla E?

The work that's occurring with that now, the final stages of work is to make it use the native Joomla! template system. If you've got the template work for the articles, it will also work for the e-commerce content, and there's a fair bit of work going on around subscripton-based access to websites. At the moment, the target is for large-scale education websites, professional education websites like health journals and so forth, but equally for a whole range of other industries.

We've done an awful lot of work to make the extension set native to the Joomla! CMS. Now what we're doing is we're making it more deeply integrated with Joomla! in the front-end. We're also doing the sort of work that means a large organisation can have 100 web stores across 100 websites all fed from the same content. It's scalable e-commerce really.

Have you ever considered moving into the cloud with e-commerce?

Our business will have to evolve a fair bit further before we can support the full Joomla! base. The software accreditation system we're rolling out over the next four months for Joomla extensions will let us go a bit further before we offer a fully supported build of Joomla. What we do support is our own extension set and a select set of other extensions.

Just pure support of Joomla! might be something we do in the future but it's not really on the roadmap right now. We eventually want to gain really comprehensinve support for mobile applications in the CMS.

In an overall sense what we're hoping to do is manage everything to do with the web CMS. We're pretty much there, but further than that, we're hoping to manage the multi-site aspects of the web CMS very elegantly for every part of it. We're quite close to that.

You spent a lot of time in government IT. Was there anything in particular that pushed you out into the private sector?

I think, inherently, I like to look at problems and work out solutions for them. Government holds an incredibly important role, but it's not a huge innovator, so I had a lot of pent up energy around innovation that I've been able to release by running my own company.

I understand why government is inherently cautious, we need government to provide a stable role for us, but it doesn't give a playground for young entrepreneurs to express their energy and innovation.

Are you particularly interested in government as a client for Jentla products?

We do work with government, we work with one large Queensland government department, we've got a big project for 52 city councils in NSW through the Local Government Association of NSW. We work for a very large state-owned education institution in the US - Florida State College in Jacksonville, the 7th biggest education institution in the US. The government and non-profit sector are particularly in our sweet spot - they have complex, large-scale, multi-site content sharing requirements, and that's exactly where we fit.

How would you say you gained most of your experience in IT?

The good thing about working for WorkCover Queensland was that they sent me on heaps of HP UX courses so that was a really good structured learning situation. I suppose the nice thing about WorkCover was that it was more business-focussed because it was a semi-government authority. It was much more autonomous than a full government authority, so we didn't try and do what the rest of government was doing.

But the best way to learn things is to have to solve them when the customer really needs to be solve in the heat of the moment.

Was running your own business more beneficial to your experience then?

It's a different experience. You gain a lot of about working in a large organisation when you work in government, just as working in a large corporate; they're not particularly different. But having to run a small business and particularly provide the project management and business analysis part of some projects, that's a huge learning curve. It's both rewarding and some of the biggest difficulties I've done.

One of the big criticisms of IT workers by their employers is they don't have the required business skills to work effectively. Do you see this in your experience?

I had a couple of good managers, one particular manager was very focussed on making sure what we did was actually what business users wanted.

It's a question of whether that dialogue exists inside the workplace. It's a question of whether you're focussed on the customer.

What are your suggestions for aspiring IT workers looking to get ahead of the pack?

Don't be arrogant. I think that people presume that they know other peoples' experience just by looking at them, but it's really very important to listen and try as best you can to clearly perceive what the real situation is of what the person is in from the perspective of their business needs. That's really the part that people struggle with in IT; they become overly specialised and they get encouraged to do their job, they don't get encouraged to take leadership.

Try to work effectively with your manager without undermining your manager, but also do as best you possibly can to work out the business solutions for the customer as well as the day-to-day tasks that you're doing. Sparing a little time to talk through why you did what you do, thinking about how you can do what you do a little more elegantly, thinking about how to automate something.

You do have some freedom of movement as an employee to do a little bit better, and every little piece that you learn from it makes a difference. The staff we employ, we specifically employ them because we see that they've been able to work effectively with their managers to get good solutions. We're looking not just for people that can do their job but for people who can think about the long term. These skills are valued and it makes a difference for us.

The staff we've employed at Jentla have alloowed us to grow from 2 to 40 staff quite quickly, because they don't just think about getting the job done, they think about doing it elegantly and intelligently.

Original article in Computerworld