Isle of Where?

It feels to me as though 2018 has taken a few weeks to get into its stride, at least as far as IT and Data matters are concerned, but it’s taken off in February with the first and second readings of the Isle of Man’s attempt to frame legislation which will achieve EU GDPR “adequacy”, the appalling and shocking UK disclosure that all of the two hundred NHS Trusts assessed so far have failed to meet official NHS cyber security and resilience requirements, the big-brother UK proposal to review its laws governing online behaviour and to impose a code of practice upon Social Media companies, etc. etc. Each of these will affect us as residents or businesses on the Isle of Man - the environment and expectations imposed upon us from outside of our little island are unstable and changing quickly as bigger jurisdictions play regulatory catch-up with the rapid rate of change which technology is bringing to the world. 

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Starting them young …

A recent local news story caught my eye, “Almost Half of GCSE students missed A*-C grade in ICT”. Disappointing, especially as the percentage of students achieving grades A*-C was lower than in England, where the results for GCSE ICT were also poor. 

The IoM Dep’t of Education, Sport and Culture kindly sent me a long email about the topic, confirming that they too are disappointed but observing that  “results in ICT in A level have consistently been above 70% A*-C for 2014, 15, 16 and 17” (which is OK). 

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IT’s Good For Our Health

Really? As you throw the computer out of the window in a red-faced apoplectic fit of rage, pulse racing, blood boiling, frustrated by the latest Microsoft updates which are taking forever to install, and berate the poor sap on the IT helpdesk once again, and this fool Burrows is telling you that IT is good for our health? Really?

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The Power of Information

I confess, I’ve been reading The Guardian newspaper recently :blush:. Not really my preference in newspapers, but I felt I owed it to them to buy a few copies as they were kind enough to publish an obituary of my daughter last month and, more pertinently to this column, a Guardian / Observer writer, Carol Cadwalladr, won the Technology Journalism category at the 2017 British Journalism Awards in December so I was interested to understand more about The Guardian’s coverage of technology - had they perhaps invested in a spell-checker?

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A Digital Skills Gap?

I quite like the research done by the the UK Federation of Small Businesses (FSB) - because it is highly relevant to the Isle of Man. In the UK a “Small Enterprise” is one with fewer than fifty employees, and a “Medium Enterprise” is 50 - 250 employees. In the UK these SMEs between them make up 99.9 of all businesses, and employ around 60% of the private sector workforce. Clearly in the Isle of Man most of our businesses are “small” by UK standards and the lessons provided by UK FSB research are directly relevant to the huge majority of our employers.

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Digital Discrimination

Many people perceive the Internet, and in particular the World Wide Web, to be the digital equivalent of the Wild West - newly discovered prairies of largely unregulated opportunity where people can be influenced through virtually unfettered free-speech or propaganda, new markets can be reached without any need to invest or pay corporate taxes in the customer’s communities, pornography can be sold and bought without shame, terrorists and subversives can collaborate out of sight of state authorities, data and intellectual property may be stolen without fear of prosecution etc.  If we’re honest, such perceptions are not far from the truth - the Internet does not have many passports, borders or customs inspectors. 

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Paradise in the Boardroom

OK, I’m officially a bit miffed. I have felt like a bit of a Cassandra in recent years, writing repeatedly about the importance of data governance and cyber security - to the extent that over the past year I have sometimes avoided the topic in this column even when it’s been appropriate - so here’s something I wrote in July 2014 following the Kleinwort Benson Jersey leak:

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Recruiting Your IT Manager

What do you do when you need a new Head of IT for your small / medium-sized business?  Chances are you call in a local recruitment agency, or advertise directly, and that neither the recruitment agency nor you actually have a strong understanding of what the job entails. You know some of the outcomes you want for your business, but the qualities and skills necessary to deliver those outcomes? You, or the agency, are likely to be a bit less clear on those - and without that clarity the final selection interview, full of hope and optimism, is often the start of a slide into disappointment. I’ve hired a few IT Managers over the years to work for my consultancy clients or to work for me, and of course I’ve done the job myself. Every business is different, and very different attributes are needed for the IT leaders of large corporates, but in general these are the qualities I would look for in IT Managers for the small and medium businesses typical of the Manx economy:

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IT’s All About “U”

Long ago, when I worked in ITT’s Engineering Research Centre developing the UK’s early digital telephone exchanges, there was a small department that specialised in Human Factors Engineering, sometimes called Ergonomics. One of the engineers therein explained to me the fundamentals of their work - evaluating product designs for both mechanical operability by humans (buttons, labelling, easy to hold etc.), and psychological operability - the terminology, layout, clarity and logical grouping of information on display screens, sequencing of operator menus etc. Basically all of the aspects of the Man-Machine Interface (“MMI”) which make operation of a machine seem more intuitive and simple to a human. Human Factors Engineering is generally a broader discipline than the User Interface (“UI”) considerations in software development, because it also encompasses the design of the hardware which a person will use to control the system.

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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.

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