SBA

In Pursuit of Excellence

As I write this, I’ve just returned from my old stamping ground, Cambridge, where I started my career in Computing at the beginning of the 1980s. Whilst there I met up with an acquaintance who is recognised globally as one of the world’s leading surgeons on the connections between ear and brain. He has performed over a thousand operations opening up patients skulls to remove tumours on these nerve connections, and of course he needs the hugely sophisticated and expensive facilities of a major research and teaching hospital in order to perform such advanced work. As a specialist professional he epitomises excellence, but can only achieve his potential because Addenbrooke’s Hospital and the University of Cambridge can provide the required environment.

Whilst chatting he remarked on his admiration for those who like me who work in Computing - this uber-technician of the inner ear and acoustic nerve characterises himself as technologically naive. What irony. 

Later this week (last Friday by the time this article is published) I will be interviewing some entrants for the UK IT Industry Awards - I am very privileged to be judging the “IT Manager of the Year” category. In preparation I have been reading the nominations for the ten finalists who have made the shortlist. Each nomination - submitted by one of their peers - is very impressive. Each is around double the length of this article and explains their achievements in depth. As an IT leader I would consider myself privileged to meet and interview any one of them, so ten in one day will be awesome.

So? What can we in the Isle of Man learn from this? Each of these finalists has demonstrated personal excellence in some aspect of the management of information technology within their organisations. They have enabled and driven the implementation, management and utilisation of technology to help improve their organisations. They have made their organisations stronger and better able to serve the needs of the organisations’ customers, they have inspired their colleagues in IT and “in the business”, and they have inspired and led their organisations to change - to do things differently than before with better, faster, cheaper outcomes. 

Each of these finalists has evidently been part of an organisation which has been willing to change for the better in or through their use of technology, and has been enabled and supported by their organisation, their colleagues, in order to achieve significant improvements. Reading the nominations it is difficult to conceive that any of the finalists would be on the shortlist if their organisations, their colleagues and co-workers had resisted change. Instead they have been empowered to achieve professional excellence by their employers and colleagues being willing to change, to take risk in order to improve. Instead of the attitude of “we’ve always done it this way” they have been supported by people who have accepted that if there might be a better way they should take the risk of trying it. 

I know that feeling, as an IT leader I have benefited from the same support, faith and openness to change from my colleagues, employers and clients. I have been given licence by them to strive for better ways than today’s benchmark of IT “Best Practice”, and I’m not alone - a decade ago one of my peers, collaborators and competitors coined the term “Better Practice” for our shared philosophy that the best practice of today is necessarily stagnant, nothing more than the foundation for change to achieve the next improvement. Excellence needs both a critical mass of knowledge and purpose, and a conviction that yesterday’s achievement was not a destination but merely a stepping stone to the next. 

In the Isle of Man we are a small community, it is difficult to assemble the critical mass of expertise and facilities to establish authority in any particular field of human endeavour. Nevertheless the island has achieved it in Financial Services, e-Gaming, Precision Engineering, and Cycling to pick out a few. I wish I could say the same of IT, but sadly I can’t. We have a few notable beacons lit, but widespread excellence is going to need more work. This matters, because Financial Services, e-Gaming and many other business sectors are increasingly dependent on excellent IT in order to remain competitive. 

In this respect the island is at a disadvantage - most (but not all) of the organisations from which the candidates on the IT Manager of the Year shortlist have come from are larger than the Isle of Man’s largest employer - our Government - so each of these organisations has the critical mass to develop its own depth of expertise and the diversity of thought and experience to challenge its existing best practices. Each also has the incentive to seek improvement through technology change and the associated risk, because the bigger the organisation the greater the potential benefit of a technology based change. It is harder for small players to achieve excellence. 

Harder but not impossible. A few weeks ago I wrote about an example of world-class technology development on the island - Rayzig - which is seeking investment and entrepreneurship to take it out to the global market. Rayzig was developed by a couple of elder statesmen who have accumulated their expertise over many years. 

Similarly remarkable, the Isle of Man is supplying two of the c. 50 judges needed to judge the 25  categories in the UK IT Industry Awards - I am one of the two judges for IT Manager of the Year and Kurt Roosen is one of the three judges for the UK Innovation and Entrepreneurship category. Given that the UK population is 765 times larger than that of the Isle of Man, our supplying 4 percent of the judges seems improbable, but both of us are closely connected with larger IT communities off-island and we are not alone; there are dozens of IT professionals here who are, or have been, part of larger IT communities where the critical mass, depth of expertise, acceptance of change and desire for improvement to establish better practice have provided the necessary environment in which to grow our skills. 

If we want, nationally, to achieve the best IT for the island and our key industries, be the best we can be, we have to find ways to include more of our IT professionals in wider communities where we can learn from more of our peers, develop more critical mass, share more “Better Practice” thinking, and have the confidence to take more risk. The Isle of Man has shown itself to be excellent at clustering - Financial Services and Insurance, Aerospace engineering, e-Gaming - and in doing so is not materially different to the phenomenon exhibited in Cambridge in the late 1970’s, early 1980’s when lots of new technology firms sprung up to create a concentration of technologically innovative employees who inevitably circulated amongst those entrepreneurial small businesses, exchanging ideas, raising the standard of technology development and exploitation and thus creating world-leading enterprises. 

The only difference today is that almost every company of any substance is a technology company, in that we are almost all dependent on IT and for many businesses it is IT which enables our competitiveness and the differentiation which makes our products and services attractive. If our comparatively small Isle of Man businesses are to compete for excellence with the industry giants in the UK and globally who each employ tens of thousands of people then we must facilitate our local minnows coming together in forums or networks or clusters - large Petri dishes which enable our IT professionals to achieve and share excellence and give our business leaders the confidence to seek better technology despite the risk of change.