Is there another digital divide in IT in the UK?

As someone who always devours the latest edition of Wired Magazine – and as an Apple fan – I was more than delighted to see Sir Jonathan Ives on the front cover of the July edition as No.1 in the “2012 Wired 100”, who the magazine describes as the UK’s digital power-brokers.

Now, it is notoriously difficult to categorise in groups the digiratti, since yesterday’s web entrepreneur is today’s venture capitalist and/or government IT adviser.

However, whilst stuck on a long train journey I did try and categorise all 100 of the Wired power-brokers, because something struck me forcibly when I flicked through the list, and I wanted to see if it was really true.

It is, as I said, wonderful to see Sir Jonathan at No.1 – and it is appropriate that he has been recognised with a “K”.  No more needs to be said on that.

So here is my categorisation of the 100:

• 25 venture capitalists
• 20 web entrepreneurs
• 9 media/journalists
• 7 conference and exhibition organisers
• 6 IT company leaders
• 6 in government IT
• 5 in advertising
• 4 in retail
• 4 in games
• 3 in politics
• 3 in charity
• 2 authors
• 2 inventors
• 1 consultant
• 1 in telecomms
• 1 private sector CIO
• 1 singing artist (that’s Adele).

What struck me was how different this was from the lists that appear in the CIO Magazines that are aimed at the corporate sector, and this is reasonable enough.  Yes, I know Wired  aims to be uber cool and (ahem) perhaps we CIOs and IT Directors are less so…

So my point is that there is perhaps another ‘digital divide’ in the UK, and that is runs between the web entrepreneurs and venture capitalists on one hand and the corporate CIOs and the IT companies on the other.  The more I think about this, the more it rings true.  We inhabit very different worlds – corporate IT and the web investment world.

This is something of a shame, since – in my own field, for instance – John Lewis is now 25% online company, and retail and many other industries are being revolutionised by web technology.

But, more than a shame, I think this ‘divide’ could also have a serious impact on how IT is viewed as a career and how we train young people in IT skills.

Maybe we should be breaking down the barriers between these worlds?

Crisis in Numbers Studying IT at GCSE – what’s the answer?

Analysis by e-skillsUK of GCSE results this year shows that the number of students taking all ICT courses has fallen for the seventh consecutive year to just 70,418.  And this figure is a decrease of 12.5% on last year alone.

The number of students studying ICT at GCSE has been declining dramatically year-on-year from a high of 261,970 in 2005.

This continuing decline should be of great concern to universities and employers – and to everyone interested in the future competitiveness and success of the UK.

We know that demand for skilled IT professionals continues to increase, yet we are as a society failing to inspire a generation of young people to  study technology or to take up technology careers.

Something must be done!

It is for this reason that e-skills UK announced a few weeks ago that our Behind the Screen programme will be available to all schools from September 2012.

Behind the Screen offers GCSE students IT projects to tackle with interactive online materials supported by full teachers’ notes. The projects have been developed in close consultation with a number of employers, including John Lewis, and are based on a variety of real-life business issues.

Our aim is that students learn computational thinking, develop technical skills, and gain creative, team working and entrepreneurial skills – all in a fun, interesting and interactive way.  After all, students these days are the most connected and IT-enabled generation ever.

Young people who play computer games can learn to create games.

Young people who use apps every day can design apps.

Young people who use social media to connect with their friends can use social media to connect with customers.

I am very excited by the potential of Behind the Screen - but with the rapid decline of students even considering studying IT at GCSE, we have no time to lose.

Doctor, Doctor, please help – I have too many blogs…

As a fan of all that is “social media”, I tend to try new things and to start blogs – or at least promise to start them.

In my personal (that is, non-work) life, I have this blog on WordPress plus a Twitter feed, both of which repeat onto my Facebook page.  (I also have a LinkedIn page as many of us do these days – is that work or personal, though?)

I am a great fan of the daily photo site Blipfoto and have just taken a look at Pinterest and Tumblr too, although I have not succumbed to any of those yet.

At work, when I became IT Director at John Lewis, I also started a closed weekly blog for all IT Partners in JL.  (Well, it’s nearly weekly…)

And, in recent weeks, I have started two new social media sites.  The first was in John Lewis to support the roll-out around all our shops of our new “Retail Revolution” Strategy.  We put this site together in less than a month on Googlesites, with some great help from Google. It is intended to be fun and engaging, and has – in my view – been wonderfully successful so far, with many Partners around the country logging on to get more information in the form of the presentations and videos that support the Strategy.  They have also become involved in discussion threads.  We have had votes on which question to “Ask Directors” where several of my colleagues and myself have gone online interactively to answer questions.  We have also held a vote on which IT investments Partners would like to see made in the next year.

The other site, which went live today – and made me think about this topic – is another closed site: it is a Portal for the SITA Council.  This is built around WordPress and is the forum for members of the SITA Council who represent over 30 airlines from around the World.  This site has the ability to privately circulate papers and briefings as well as to start discussion topics.

Social media in both of these examples has the ability to link together dispersed business communities – in SITA’s case globally dispersed – more effectively than conventional emails, circulation of papers and relatively infrequent meetings.

Now, I don’t claim any originality for any of the above.  There are lots of examples like this that you will be aware of.  However, what has struck me is the number of different social media interactions I now have – now not just in the personal space like Facebook and Twitter, but now in the business space as well.

Technology is breaking down barriers both of geography and time: we are indeed connected any time and anywhere.  It is also breaking down the barriers between personal and work in terms of interaction.  But how many social media entries can you – and should you – make?

What’s Wrong with the UK IT Industry and What we should be doing about it? – Speech to the Chemistry Club

This is the text of a speech I gave last month to the Chemistry Club in London:

I am delighted – and not a little surprised – to be here.  When I received an invitation to speak, I thought it definitely was a mistake! Just look at the list of Ministers, Politicians and CEOs who have come to speak to the Chemistry Club over the years.

So, it’s nice to be invited as someone who practices IT and knows about Technology.  I must confess, however, that I don’t actually know very much about Technology as Technology.  I wouldn’t, for example, recommend anyone to ask me how to code in Java or C++, or to run a test script…

The reason – I imagine – for my being here is that I have experience in running technology in business and as a business:

I was CIO of British Airways for 10 years from 2000 and I am now having a great time as IT Director of John Lewis – a company you all know, and one you all probably know is, uniquely for our size, co-owned by our employee Partners.

I have also been Chairman of SITA – the Societé Internationale de Télécommunications Aeronautique – which is owned by its customers the world’s airlines. I am also privileged to be Chair of the National IT Skills Academy, part of e-skillsUK – of which more later.

I have been asked to talk about my experiences as CIO of BA and IT Director of John Lewis, and to compare and contrast the Travel Industry and Retail.

Well, I am going to take a leaf out of the book of some of the politicians who normally address you at these events and not entirely answer the question I have been asked.

What’s wrong with the UK IT Industry?

What I want to talk about this evening is “what is wrong with the UK IT industry” and – more interestingly – what we should be doing about it.

I understand that this evening’s audience is made up of one-third CIOs and IT Directors from the private sector and one-third from the public sector, and the rest from the IT vendor and consultancy sectors.

Actually, on the face of it, there’s not much wrong with the UK IT Industry – at least if you look at the numbers from one angle.  So the IT and Telecomms industry produced annual Gross Value Added of £81billion or 9% of the UK economy.  It delivers the highest output and productivity growth of all sectors of UK industry – past present and future.  One in 20 of the UK’s working population is employed in the IT and Telecomm sector.

So can we assume we are doing very nicely and there is nothing to worry about?

Absolutely not!  I am concerned that the UK IT industry COULD (and I stress COULD if we don’t act) go the way of other great British industries, either disappear – like Shipbuilding or Motorcycles or becoming an adjunct of Global players with the HQ and product development overseas.

Three malaises in the UK attitude to IT – “3 Dragons to slay”

However if you look closely I see three malaises in the UK’s attitude and support to IT, which we, as the leaders of the UK IT, should address – “3 Dragons to slay”.

Dragon Number 1 is that IT does NOT REALLY MATTER in this country. It does not usually have a seat at the top table and – worse than that – people react defensively or even worse see it as a bit of a joke.

Dragon Number 2 is that IT in schools, universities and colleges of EDUCTION IS NOT DELIVERING the numbers or types of skilled apprentices and graduates we need to sustain the position IT now holds in the Economy.

Dragon Number 3 is that we do NOT WORK TOGETHER EFFECTIVELY as we could as a Technology Sector to raise the importance of IT for the future of our British Economy and Society.

 To be continued…

Steve Jobs Legacy

I wanted to say some more about Steve Jobs and, in particular, his legacy.

I work for a company in very different industry with a very different heritage.  John Lewis is co-owned Partnership, owned by all of us who work there.  We have Democracy from the shops all the way up to the Partnership Board.

The point of this is that the business of John Lewis of 2011 is still very much the creation of John Spedan Lewis who took his father’s shops and gave them to the people who work there in 1929.  I made a presentation a few days ago to the elected John Lewis Council, which started with Spedan Lewis’ remarkable Principle 1:

“The Partnership’s ultimate purpose is the happiness of all its members, through their worthwhile and satisfying employment in a successful business.  Because the Partnership is owned in trust for its members, they share the responsibilities of ownership as well as its rewards – profit, knowledge and power.”

You can read more about this remarkable and revolutionary statement at the John Lewis Partnership web site.

The point of this is that John Spedan Lewis is still very much alive as the inspirational force for the Company, having made his farewell in 1955.

Steve Jobs’ Apple team is immensely strong.  It will be interesting to see how the genius of this remarkable man lives on over the decades – as Spedan Lewis’ has in John Lewis – in Apple the company he created and then re-created.

We can but hope so.

More on “50 Things I wish I had known…”: the video online

Simon LaFosse and his team have made some changes to the website about the “50 Things” Event, so you can now see the video highlights or – if anyone is a real glutton for punishment – watch the whole thing including the presentation and Q&As.

As is often is the case the Q&As are in many ways the most helpful part.

There is also a link to the whole lot on YouTube.

What is Leadership in IT?

This is a topic I sometimes get asked about by journalists.  There are numerous articles published in magazines and online about “leadership”.  Consultants will sell you studies and there is generally supposed to be a rather large problem about it.

The IT profession worries a lot about how it is perceived by its customers, partners and suppliers: whether it has a seat at the top table, whether it is listened to and, when it is feeling collectively pessimistic, whether anyone is listening at all.

Now there is a lot you could talk about here and I will only attempt to answer the leadership question.  It’s something I have put a lot of thought into, after all it is a large and a complex topic.

Lets start at the boring end of this and define our terms, leadership in the Oxford Dictionaries Web-site is defined as:

• “the action of leading a group of people or an organization, or the ability to do this”

Not much use is it?  So we then get to leader where the first definition is:

• “the person who leads or commands a group, organization, or country”

This is not getting anywhere is it?  So then we take a look at lead and at last with the third definition (ignoring the parts about leading animals and winning a race) we find:

“#3 be in charge or command of:

• organise and direct
• be the principal player of (a group of musicians)
• set (a process) in motion
• begin a report or text with a particular item
• in boxing make an attack
• in card games play the first card”

So let’s see if we can work with these?  Well simply it is important to recognise that leading and leadership have many different meanings for different people, different organisations and different contexts.

There are four elements of this that resonate with me.  The first is that leadership in IT requires you to organise and direct. And I like the dictionaries juxtaposition here of ORGANISE and DIRECT.  It is a big risk that you may sometimes be tempted to do too much organising of the IT Department and forget to set strategic directions clearly; and vice versa since direction of IT without effective order and organisation will almost certainly end in tears.

Secondly setting a process in motion is of course also very familiar to anyone in modern organisations these days.  Leadership in the 21st Century is usually rarely in the military mode where you ask people who report to you to advance in a particular direction (or indeed shout CHARGE! follow me!).  Most likely in complex organisations these days IT leadership is about working with, persuading and influencing “business process owners”, in your and often in other companies or structures, to deliver together the shared objective.  Less dramatic than shouting CHARGE, it is probably harder to do and requires a completely different set of skills including, analysis, communications and political ‘know-how’.

Thirdly being the principal player of a group of musicians is a really tremendous definition, which I really like.  These days no-one in IT knows it all, understands every technology old and new, is a database expert and a networking genius, can manage waterfall and agile projects and so forth.  You rely on the talent and the experience of your immediate team and their teams.  If I have learnt one thing over my time as a CIO it is that IT is a team sport.  For it all to work it has all to work together and the analogy of an orchestra is an excellent one.  Whether the CIO is the conductor or the first violin depends on you, and I think sometimes it is smart to be part of the team and sometimes to conduct it.

Finally there is the boxing attack, and yes on a small number of issues you are going to have some fights.  Most things can be resolved by compromise but leadership does involve having some principles and lines in the sand, where an IT leader will need to fight his or her corner.  An example will be the point where if a system is not renewed the business is in danger, or you are insecure, or don’t have adequate back-up.  You cannot compromise on those issues.

I invariably disappoint the journalists with complicated answers like this on IT leadership but I really do think it just depends – depends on the culture of your organisation, depends on the circumstances you find yourself in (a Recession requires very different leadership from a Boom) and above all depends on you.

But I would suggest you think as an IT leader where you want to be on the following dimensions:

• organise
• direct
• process
• conduct
• (and very rarely) attack

More on ’50 Things I wish I had known…’

I looked recently through the material Simon LaFosse posted following the Event I did for him back at the end of May.

It was – by some way – the scariest piece of public speaking I have done, on account of the number of CIOs, IT Directors and other IT industry people in the audience.  They know what being a CIO is like.

There is a handy – and quite pacey – summary on Simon’s site of what I said that evening, based around my “50 Things I wish I had known before becoming a CIO”.

Reading that summary through makes me realise I need to take some more of my own medicine.  Or, to put it another way, please don’t anyone think I actually manage to do all of this: the 50 things are what I want to do and am trying to do.  Real life is as ever both more complicated and more interesting!

If you are interested in more, there is the actual “50 Things” booklet I self-published on Lulu .com.

Joining John Lewis

I am delighted to have been appointed by Andy Street to lead the IT Directorate of John Lewis.

I am looking forward enormously to joining the Partnership later this month. John Lewis has a richly deserved reputation not just for excellence in customer service but also for being a great place to work because of the principles of the Partnership.

John Lewis Partnership will be well known to everyone in the UK, but for other readers I wanted to mention its unique and attractive business model.

All permanent staff are Partners, or co-owners, of the business which has 32 John Lewis shops across the UK (28 department stores and four John Lewis at home); 244 Waitrose supermarkets www.waitrose.com and www.johnlewis.com.  Partners share in the benefits and profits of a business that puts them first.

I am to going to be IT Director of the John Lewis division.

When the founder, Spedan Lewis, set up the Partnership, he was careful to create a governance system, set out in the John Lewis Partnership Constitution, that would be both commercial, allowing the Partnership to move quickly to stay ahead in a competitive industry, and democratic giving every Partner a voice in the business they co-own.

As their website says, Spedan Lewis’ combination of commercial acumen and corporate conscience, so ahead of its time, is what makes the John Lewis Partnership what it is today.