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 Describe your background and how you got into IT
I had a fairly privileged early childhood and went to public school but unfortunately due to family problems, I ended up having fairly disrupted teenage years and I dropped out of full-time education after completing my ‘O’ levels. I didn’t catch up with my education again until I was an adult.
During my fairly turbulent adolescence I was living with cousins in London who ran a small management consultancy business from home. They had just heard about these “new-fangled micro computers” (this was prior to the days of Microsoft) and a piece of software called Visicalc (the early forerunner to the spreadsheet). As I wasn’t really doing anything useful (apart from mooching around and getting into trouble, as adolescents do), they asked me if I would be interested in trying to get one of these computers to work for them as I had always loved electronic gadgets. I ended up fascinated and I soon developed a system to process their manual client accounts, saving them lots of time and effort. I then got into setting up databases and doing some programming in Basic and Assembler, including writing a few text based adventure games with their young son. I seem to remember it involved lots of goblins and getting lost in tunnels! I soon got asked to help set up a payroll system for a friend of my cousins who ran a small employment agency in the City. They paid me £1.50 an hour - my first salary! After a year or two of similar odd jobs I decided to get some qualifications in computing and started studying for my BCS exams for CITP with the National Extension College. Once I had a real qualification, I got my first ‘proper’ job in IT as a systems analyst and programmer with a greetings card manufacturer, working on stock control systems on a Wang VS and using Cobol.
What is your current position / situation?I am Director of Information Systems and Media Services at Anglia Ruskin University. I have now worked in IT for nearly 30 years (if you include those early teenage odd-jobs!) and the last 12 years have been as a senior manager. I have an MBA with the Open University and am now a Fellow of the British Computer Society. I have over 100 staff in my team and I have responsibility for a combined revenue and capital budget of around £6m.
What do you like best about working in IT?
It continually changes. As technology advances new opportunities continually emerge to help organisations do what they do better. I enjoy the technology (I’ve always been a bit of a geek) and I love the way that IT solutions can bring about dramatic change for the better, sometimes very quickly.
What have been the highlights of your career so far?The highlights are always when you get positive feedback from customers. Seeing through two major turnarounds of failing IT departments and hearing customers positive feedback about the huge difference the change has made to them is very rewarding. Winning the 2006 Best Place to Work in IT award when I was Head of IT at the RSPB was a good moment too, as was being runner-up in the 2009 UK IT Industry Awards for IT Leader of the Year.
What are your career aspirations?To stay within the public sector – so, not-for-profit, education, health or government and gradually move towards a CEO position, perhaps of a charity or into the civil-service where I can have an opportunity to work on public sector IT policy and strategy. Although I have worked in the private sector in the past, it is important to me to go home at the end of the day feeling as if I’ve contributed to making a real difference somewhere, not just helped make a bit more money. The next step for me will probably need to be another CIO post but with a wider remit.
What are your tips for success?
Take every opportunity to continue to learn. There is so much knowledge out there that is useful and interesting; it has to be a continual process. I am currently doing a BSc in psychology with the OU and am already finding so much of it is useful and applicable in my day to day work.
Develop your political skills and emotional intelligence. It is not true that you either have these skills or you don’t. You can learn them and you can always improve them. Make use of tools like Myers-Briggs for self-development. Get engaged with mentoring, coaching, creativity exercises, influencing tools and so on. IT people can often get bogged down in process and methodology and can easily forget that organisations tend to thrive when they know how and when to break the rules. So develop those right-brain skills!
Talk to customers about their business not about IT. Customers don’t care about IT, nor should they have to. But they do care about what IT can do for them. I was once advised to make sure I knew two or three things about what the hot topics were at any one time in each different area of the organisation, so that if I were in the lift with the Marketing Director I could talk about Marketing things, not IT. Develop this habit, and you soon find that you get a reputation for understanding the organisation and being an ‘approachable’ IT person. You’ll find your customers are then much more willing to listen to you when you need to talk about IT.
Network, network, network – take every opportunity to communicate and share with others, not just in IT but more widely within your organisation or sector. Get involved with the BCS or other networking groups. If you don’t know the answer there is always someone else who does.
What books / websites etc. would you recommend to a woman just starting out in IT?Not sure I’d recommend anything specifically for a woman and different books inspire people in different ways, but the books that I have found hugely helpful are:
- Organisational Politics for IT Managers by Robina Chatham
- Unstoppable People by Adrian Gilpin
and for the nuts and bolts of understanding strategy in any sector (which is ultimately what it’s all about) :
- Contemporary Strategy Analysis. Concepts, Techniques and Applications by Robert Grant
If the latter is just too much of a heavy tome for your taste then I would thoroughly recommend the following website
www.valuebasedmanagement.net/index.html
Can you share a few words of wisdom for those people who are thinking about pursuing a career in IT?Not sure how wise they are and I’m not sure they apply just to IT careers, but for anyone starting out I would recommend thinking about whether your preferences lie more in being focussed on the technology or its application. Whether you prefer working alone, solving problems and generating solutions or whether you want to work with customers and clients helping them to understand their needs and to make the best use of the solutions available. Spend some time and money understanding your own preferences, perhaps with some Myers-Briggs based coaching, and try and select an area of IT that is a good fit for your preferences. You will always do better at something you naturally enjoy.
How important do think your education or background has been in influencing your career choices?Not important at all.
Do you think it might have been a different story, of "how you got to where you are now", if you'd been a man?Yes, definitely. I would have got a lot further, faster. As a woman in IT you certainly have to demonstrate a much higher level of skill and competency to get to the same place. I hate to say it but gender prejudice is still alive and kicking in the IT world and as an out lesbian it has been even harder (I once read an article by a prominent female CIO complaining that all the senior women IT leaders were short-haired butch lesbians!). You need to maintain high levels of self-belief and a thick skin. My attitude has always been that if someone has a problem with who I am then that is their problem, I’m certainly not going to allow it to be mine.
Tell us a little about your life outside of work.I have been married to my wife Erica, who is an artist, for 11 years (although only legally since the “civil-partnership” legislation came in!). We have two children, a daughter aged 16 and a son aged 13, so much of my life outside of work is fairly dominated by family demands – being a teenager taxi seems to be the main one! I spend most of my non-working time at home being a wife and mother. I also try and keep reasonably fit and healthy as I find this helps with keeping stress levels down. I go to the gym a few times a week, sometimes as a family activity, and I have recently taken up open water swimming, competing in the Great East Swim for Cancer Research last year (pictured) and, I hope, again this year. I swim a mile three days a week, in the early morning before work, which I find both relaxing and invigorating and a good start to the day. I’m also currently studying for a BSc in Psychology with the OU and I am finding that both fascinating and a good distraction from worrying about work! I also enjoy singing and conducting and am involved with the local village choir.
Do you think that there are obvious differences between what men and women have to offer an IT department and are you aware of any preconceptions or stereotypes of women in IT?There does seem to be a trend for women to be more prevalent in the customer-facing roles such as business analysis and business relationship management, and men to be more prevalent in the introverted technology/infrastructure facing roles. I think there are also some preconceptions and stereotypes along the same lines and it’s probably a self-perpetuating vicious circle. I think the jury is probably out on why this is, but personally my hunch is that it’s mostly socialisation. Technology is still seen as a ‘boys’ thing and schools, as well as the media, are not doing enough to challenge this. There is some research evidence to suggest that there may be a statistically significant difference in the way that men and womens brains work. Men may tend towards preferring left-brain logical, analytical activities and women activities that require more right-brain flexibility and emotional intelligence. If that is the case then I think IT could do with having far more women in it as it needs a lot more right-brain thinking! However, I think socialisation is by far the strongest influence and any woman or man can succeed in any job they wish to if they have the motivation and the willingness to learn the necessary skills and capabilities. Whilst there may be some evidence for a few gender based psychological differences they are not really relevant to what an individual is capable of, and it is not really possible or helpful to generalise.
What do you think could be done to actively encourage more women to join the technology market place in general?I think much more needs to happen in schools, and in the media, to try and help the ‘image’ that technology careers have and to help both boys and girls in schools avoid falling into the sort of preconceptions that exist. Ironically this generation is more IT literate and knowledgeable than ever. I have watched my daughter naturally develop IT skills as she makes use of technology in pretty much everything she does, socialising, shopping, studying, playing and so on. She is far more IT literate than many of my customers in a working environment and yet she would describe herself as having no interest in and knowing nothing about ‘technology’ – a self-description driven by not wanting to seen as a ‘geek’! We have a lot of work to do to reposition what IT is all about and what a technology career can be about.
I also think IT professionals themselves could do more to help. I was disappointed at the UK IT industry awards this year to yet again see groups of young male IT professionals indulging in excessively ‘laddish’ macho behaviour, especially as the evening wore on. The choice of entertainment was also very geared towards a male audience. Men in the profession need to start adopting a slightly more professional attitude if they are going to help change the industry’s image.
If you could give young women looking for a position in the IT market place a single piece of advice what would it be?Be yourself, believe in yourself utterly and go for it. The fact that you’re a woman is totally irrelevant and if you really believe that then so will everyone else.
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