IT Week: What would you identify as the main challenges facing the UK IT industry?

John Higgins: You have to ask, what’s the position of the UK in the global knowledge economy and what strengths do you need? The role of a well-developed Western economy has to be high added-value and creative industries, but the big question is: are we in a good position to deliver that? Well, skills and education are undoubtedly our two biggest weaknesses. We need better basic IT skills, better specialist skills, better management skills and better understanding of how to apply IT skills for economic advantage.

Is enough being done to solve this problem?

The Sector Skills Councils have a big role to play in analysing the quantity and quality of people the economy will need. They also have the ability to bring together all the parties involved and act as the spider at the centre of the skills web if you like. They are pretty good at doing this but they are hugely under-funded.

That situation doesn’t look like changing any time soon. Is it fair to say Gordon Brown’s Budget last month did little for the IT industry?

I’d agree there wasn’t much in it for IT. The best assessment I heard was that it was not a case of robbing Peter to pay Paul, but robbing Peter to pay Peter. The boost for IT comes through more R&D tax breaks and they are an incentive, but for bigger companies making decisions about where to invest it is not the only factor they are considering.

Is the private sector doing enough to tackle the skills crisis? Surely they too have a responsibility?

Big companies do make investments in staff and I don’t buy the argument that smaller firms don’t do enough to develop people either. I think people know that you have to develop employees’ skills or risk losing them. The industry is aware that training and skills development is often what staff are looking for.

But are businesses really doing enough to develop a knowledge economy here when compared with some of the progress made in other countries?

There is an issue with the integration between the different areas of the knowledge economy. It is like with people, where scientists say that ideally you want a strong left side of the brain delivering practical skills, a good right side of the brain delivering creative skills, and the ability for the two sides to work well together. It is a similar set-up with the economy. We have a great creative industry sector in the UK worth eight percent of GDP and a good enabling technology sector, but we don’t always see those two areas integrated particularly well. In this Web 2.0 world we need IT to be seen as offering the power tools that can help make those successful creative industries even better.

Is enough being done to deliver this integration?

The aim of the [government and industry-backed] Knowledge Transfer Networks is to address this problem and bring together different sectors. In technology they tend to be focused on bringing together business and academics, but in the creative sector they’ll focus more on bringing together those creative thinkers with the people with those IT power tools.

You mentioned Web 2.0. There have been suggestions that the market could be repeating the mistakes of the dotcom boom. Are we really seeing the widespread IT revolution many of the vendors claim or is the whole trend being over-hyped?

I don’t get any sense of a boom or hype. I think that what is happening is that Web 2.0 technologies are just moving into the mainstream. There is a sense that this time it really is an evolution not a revolution.

If it is going to be a more gradual process do firms need to make the game-changing investments some vendors are recommending?

There are big changes taking place, but I’m not sure you need to throw out yo ur legacy systems – I think people will augment their legacy systems. What will happen is that Web 2.0 will just allow people to use legacy systems in lots of different ways – after all, you still need a database and you still need a network. What it is all about is helping people use these technologies in ways they couldn’t before.

The other big issue for the IT sector in the past year has been the environment. What should the industry be doing to tackle its decidedly mixed environmental record?

We want to address two issues with the environment. The first is to be much less of the problem and show people how we are addressing energy efficiency and encourage them to buy these systems. The second is to ensure that we are also seen as part of the solution. We really want to get over the message that work is what you do, not where you go each day, and show firms that there are technologies out there that can really help you reduce the carbon footprint associated with travel.

Most business leaders still regard IT as risky. How does the sector go about changing that perception?

We all need to be asking how we can improve IT professionalism and how we can improve the perceived professionalism of the industry. I’d love to hear from IT directors about how professional they feel they are and how they believe they are perceived. Are they asked to do things they think are unprofessional and release systems that they suspect aren’t ready? Because it is that which is really contributing to the perception that IT projects are always risky and this pressure is only going to increase as demands on IT departments get bigger. That is why nurturing a culture of genuine professionalism is so important for the industry.

About John Higgins

John Higgins, CBE, was appointed director general of Intellect at its launch in May 2002. Intellect represents around 800 large and small IT organisations and aims to influence public policy, develop markets, and improve members’ business performance.

Higgins has worked in IT since graduating in 1975.

He is also vice-president of the European high-tech industry association EICTA and a member of the steering committee of the World IT Services Association.