China is hoping the 2008 Olympics will demonstrate the application of new IT technologies and the progress of IT industries.

The world's most populous nation, China lacks sufficient numbers of trained IT professionals to match the growth of its IT infrastructure.

While China is still well behind the West in the development and widespread deployment of sophisticated IT resources, the country's government, industry, and university sectors are keenly focused on closing the gap. How successful have they been in doing so, and will the dearth of trained IT professionals hinder China's progress?

Professor Li Wenjun of the Department of Computer Science at Sun Yat-sen University answered these and other questions in a recent e-mail interview.

Can you describe the current state of IT in China today?

Along with the rapid development of China's economy, the research, development, and application of information technologies are more advanced in China today than ever before. But it seems that the challenges currently outweigh the opportunities. In particular, I think there are two bottlenecks we must overcome. One is the lack of creative IT enterprises that own intellectual property rights for key technologies. This is true in almost all IT fields, from low-level IC design and manufacturing to high-level software development.

The other challenge is the lack of killer applications. Many key national construction projects such as Three Gorges Dam did not demonstrate IT leadership as they should have done, to say nothing of actually promoting the role of IT in such a project. I hope the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games will be a successful demonstration of killer IT applications.

At the Global Information Infrastructure Commission Annual Forum in Beijing five years ago, The Honourable Mr. Wu Jichuan proposed three IT breakthroughs: bandwidth, technology development, and information sharing. Has progress been made on those fronts?

We have made progress in the last five years in two of the areas. For example, as everyone in China can attest, the network bandwidth has grown remarkably. More and more people are connected to the Internet, and more and more multimedia data are transported over the network smoothly. Some national and metropolitan project developers, such as China National Grid and Shanghai Grid, will undoubtedly promote new information infrastructures—including bandwidth—in the coming years.

Although no explicit outputs were produced in the key area of technology development, significant progress has been made. More IT enterprises are establishing mechanisms to be more creative and innovative, such as increasing investments in technology research and development, and promoting collaborations between the IT industry and universities.

However, I do not think that we did very well in information sharing. Although many technologies, such as networking and service-oriented architecture, enable information sharing among government departments, enterprises, and academic institutions, non-technological factors such as administrative guidelines and lack of motivation still present obstacles to information sharing. Government departments should be the leaders and models in this area, and only when they realize this will we begin to see progress.

How large is the gap between the number of trained IT professionals that are needed in China and the number existing today? Where are Chinese companies outsourcing to get these skills currently?

The media tell us that the universities are turning out surplus IT graduates each year and that these graduates have difficulty finding suitable jobs. Maybe this is true. But meanwhile, many IT enterprises complain that they can't recruit the qualified IT professionals they need.

I think the reason is that there is a structural imbalance between the supply and demand of IT professionals. It would appear that low-level IT professionals are plentiful, while top-level talent is in short supply. This imbalance creates serious problems because we cannot fulfill the huge personnel requirements of the rapidly developing IT industries in China today.

The Ministry of Education of the People's Republic of China launched an initiative at the beginning of this year called Quality Engineering in Undergraduate Education. I think this will help solve the problem.

Tell us why EMC's storage technology curriculum was chosen, and describe how it will help close the IT talent gap.

How to improve the skills and creativity of our undergraduate students is an important task for us. When we updated our teaching plans two years ago, we decided to introduce a series of industrial-level curricula into the third- and fourth-year optional courses for undergraduate students. We decided these curricula should be developed and supported by IT enterprises to balance the theoretical and practical approaches currently in place. Furthermore, the technologies covered must be leading-edge and forward-looking, and our partners should be world-class.

We were very lucky that EMC launched its Academic Alliance Program last year and we had the opportunity to be one of the first universities to join the program. The storage technology curriculum fit well with our criteria. EMC's staff was very collaborative, and we were able to transfer the curriculum to our university quickly. After careful preparation, the Storage Technology Foundations course was introduced this past semester (February to June, 2007).

The course was quite successful. Though optional, about 200 third-year students took it because of its practical orientation and its relevance to the future IT infrastructure in China. The course was praised by most of our students and in fact, the teacher of the course was named Most Popular Teacher by our students.