McDowell, one time founder and manager of Strategic Business Systems for Ernst & Young, is a consummately gifted story teller (you can smell the peat and the Tilley lamps) in contrast to some of world's top speakers like IBM's James Martin,  who excel rather at an impresario style.

His opening was that it was hard to argue against the truth of such a report, but it was time to ask what you are going to do about it?

"The title 'Enabling Digital Scotland' bothers me a bit" he confessed. As a world traveller, he knows of similar groups all around the world.

Where, he wanted to know was the focus, and what investment was there for what precisely? And where was the risk willing investor in Scotland? Are we encouraging our entrepreneurs to really think 'exit strategies' for those of them who enjoy the start-up, the success, the exit sale, and the new business start.

He noted the effort to develop games in Dundee as a historic development and wasn't there  a new  games company starting up?

"How many people have heard of Zinga?" he asked his audience, appearing to change story track. "Microsoft went calling on it," he explained "because it was buying more of our software than any other organisation and it hadn't exited three years ago."

With turnover close to $250m, owners and staff (130 people) all "young smiling, and aged average 21," an impressed McDowell, noted Zinga in moving office this year, has signed the single largest leasing deal in San Francisco for five years. Implicitly, he left his audience to wonder if Outplay Entertainment in three years will be signing up the largest office deal in Dundee.

"Focus, or where the bets are placed, is a priority," says McDowell, "as is the need for more aggressive [joined-up] competition."

Scotland, he said is well known as a natural cool spot for data centres, but internal competition for a variety of locations ie Lockerbie, Echlefechan, Dingwell, Pentland Firth, Shetland, has actually ended up with the 'more aggressive' Irish scooping  Microsoft's as its largest employer, with its latest datacentre  which services all Europe.

At this point, McDowell appeared to switch tracks again, admiring Sue Bruce and her approach  to the six cities of Inverness, Aberdeen, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Dundee, St Andrews, as key drivers to Scotland's future economies.

It was at this point, McDowell mentioned a community IT piece of a deal Microsoft has done with all the 2009 Home Coming pictures, brochures etc.

"Long story short," he said "Queen Margaret University was the agreed partner to using beta software Zentity."

This is a research output platform that sits on a database to provide a suite of building blocks, tools, and services and  helps you create and maintain an organisation’s digital library ecosystem.

With Zentity, researchers can easily access, analyse, and unlock the previously hidden structure and relationships among data elements, as well as extend existing data models by adding additional relationships and properties to these relationships.

"Interest in this," McDowell adds,  ranges from educatuion goverment, private business, and even the Olympics."

Scottish Universities, he records, have abandoned the one-time historic academic cold shoulder to business, and  taken up the Cambridge aggressive participation  example, with business and industry and academia finding synergy from cluster developments.

And he urged Scottish academia to repeat this by re-examining the cultural issues to improve the learning product without threatening the status quo.

Higher education, he feels, is held back by the older infrastructures and he cites North Carolina University with its 18 campuses (another, long story short) testing game technology values and approaches in building attractive and faster learning, education systems.

That outcome was education of students in 1/5th of the time and 1/3 of those were best in class. Teaching methods of UNCG  or similar  approaches could motivate taking degrees early and save cost by this method.

This naturally led to University of the Highland & Islands  emergence being duly noted, and with its many campuses, its current pharmacy strength.

A gentle  McDowall implication is that it is the ideal distributed centre for data bases, software enterprise, offered low land cost, and of course was really aided by Scotland being a such a convenient focal point of all the diseases currently being researched as in cancer,  diabetes, alcoholism, heart attcks, strokes, etc.

Another apparent change of track and McDowell referred a couple of times to attending a Prince's Trust meeting, where the PR tool of social network is defined as "Every order is a Tweet." It is he said a demographic issue that Scotland needs to become comfortable with.

And rounding up, he paid one great compliment to the country for getting it outstandingly right, back in 2007 when the Scottish Parliament hosted Microsoft's Government leaders in Europe forum in January 2007,  which used the Parliament building and the services of the house's Speaker and acting as a community Scotland provided a breath taking event for those attending. (It also, he asided, provided excellent business for the Edinburgh hotels in an out of season period.)

McDowell is not much in favour of the report's call for a digital champion. "Did the Scottish parliament not have a CIO?" he asked. ScotlandIS' executive director, Polly Purvis said it hadn't in the past, but one had just been appointed.

McDowell felt that the community needs to appreciate that computer technology is just a toolset, that it should focus on business process problems and a CIO could effect that for government's role model technology.

Amusingly his final 'long story short' swipe was at terminology of Cloud computing.

He hates the word, thinks it "stoopid" pointing out that it is little different from 'Tymeshare' and involves only three essential elements: bandwidth, security and data storage.

His final and most heart-felt advice to Scotland is for the country to work to ensure in the creation of successful business people, who are willing in turn to be risk funding investors and venture capitalists, in order to generate more business, more jobs and more wealth.   Gail Purvis.