Helping businesses to become more efficient and productive through the use of software technology is the number one priority for Nova Ltd.'s new director of business Mark Steiman.

In his new role, Mr. Steiman will be responsible for growing the software development company, promoting the Nova brand and ensuring it takes part in community events among other things.

He brings a wealth of experience, having worked in the industry for the past 27 years, mainly in the North American markets, including a number of top positions at manufacturing and distributing firms of hardware equipment, as well as working as a consultant for solutions providers.

But now he is fully focused on assisting companies to be more effective and boost output via the latest advancements in technology available to them.

Statistics from ITC have revealed that up to 35 percent of an office worker's time is spent looking for information and half of the time they cannot find it, and Mr. Steiman believes that this proves businesses looking to cut costs should be optimising their existing investments and enabling their work force to be more productive and take on more business rather than laying off their staff.

"From my perspective, this was a very strategic opportunity to come to a community and make a difference," he said.

"I am here to help Sandra (De Silva, managing director of Nova) and the team to succeed, by growing the business, achieving a greater recognition for who Nova is in the marketplace and participating in community events.

"I have been taking a consultant approach with my clients to really understand where they are and then to develop and design a proposed solution."

Mr. Steiman, who hails from Montreal originally, has thrown himself into his new job, arriving on the Island less than one month ago, one of his first assignments was to attend the World Technology Information and Services Alliance's (WITSA) Global Public Policy Summit Bermuda 2009 (GPPS) held at the Fairmont Southampton at the beginning of November and has been proactive in developing an internship scheme to nurture local talent in the technology sector, as well as being tasked with building a group of mentors to drive the operation.

One of Mr. Steiman's first jobs was working for Softcell, where he helped turn a $20 million business into a $1 billion plus one in the space of 10 years, before moving on to Tech Data Canada in 1996, which grew from a $145 million enterprise to more than $1 billion by the time he left, going on to become a partner at software company Three Soft and working for various consulting companies in the field of business development and business process management.

"I started selling products for a manufacturing company in 1998 and I saw the days of bulking up with technology hardware and equipment and adopting it had become main stream and more mature and I saw the real need for optimising those investments and building out solutions for the clients and users to use technology to add efficiency and productivity and have control over their business," he said.

"It was about taking the intelligence available and putting it into a new format and being strategic for the client in helping them move from one platform to another and to upgrade or get new versions of the platform.

"It was the business intelligence and content that was critical, so I got involved in building portals and custom solutions for collaboration."

Mr. Steiman said the key to transforming and enhancing a workplace was to control and automate the data so the business intelligence was there to act on and thus reduce the time taken by employees to find the information and pick it up.

"That is exactly what Nova is doing," he said.

"Nova is actually a company which understands the value of data and have positioned themselves to help larger organisations to control the confusion and chaos which can arise.

"It helps to relate to where the data is today and where it needs to be and working with its clients to realise what it is that they are trying to achieve so that they understand from a business context and then our senior architects and developers will be able to support those requirements using technology which they have already invested in."

The re/insurance industry, banking and Government are some of Nova's biggest clients.

With so many variables to the re/insurance sector and the extensive information requirements for making sound business decisions, he thinks Nova is well-placed to capitalise on the situation using its expertise to implement data from different sources to produce a solution for these companies via the likes of testing and quality assurance, risk modelling and portfolio optimisation.

"We can take any process that is a challenge and apply the rules of compliance and transparency with the technology to really enable the automation of the business's network," he said.

"It speeds the process up because there is less guess work and it makes it more effective from a knowledge perspective, making workers more productive and able to do more of the strategic work than the manual work.

"We can really help the client design what they want, even if it doesn't exist today — all we have to do is marry their vision with all of the tools we have available."