Five tales of IT leadership in the time of Covid
IT leadership has been crucial to steering a course through the pandemic, and so has the presence of strong networks and trusted communities
The pandemic has brought home the crucial importance of both technology and trusted networks of individuals and organisations, as revealed in many Computing interviews with IT leaders over recent months. The five stories summarised here come at the topic from different angles, but all are testament to the primacy of trusted communities at a time when many feel cut off and isolated.
Let's start with Octopus Energy. Last October, Octopus launched an internship programme with a difference. A clue is in the title: the Ada Lovelace Project, after the pioneering mathematician and computer programmer.
Ada Lovelace may have written what was possibly the first ever algorithm for a machine in 1843, but this promising start for gender equality in the tech sector failed to gain traction, a story that continues to this day.
Led by Octopus's senior front-end developer Gilly Ames, and with direct support from company director, the Ada Lovelace internship project was specifically geared at attracting more women into the industry.
‘All tech companies, including us, have a role to play in making this industry truly diverse and representative', Octopus said.
Another difference? Tea-making chores and photocopying runs played no part in the interns' activities.
Instead, their projects were real, and the interns were expected to add discernable value to the business. Importantly, it gave the them a chance to hone their tech skills in the real world.
In this article, Rebecca Perry-Gamble interviews two interns who went through the Ada Lovelace Project, showing us the world of tech from their perspective.
The first thing female starters have to face is the scarcity of ready-made networks that women and other minorities in the sector can easily plug into, which can make tech jobs seem particularly daunting and which ultimately tends to monoculture. At a time when algorithms with their inevitable biases are influencing ever more parts of life, a correction is well overdue and desperately needed.
One of the interns, Cerise Abel-Thompson said she had no pre-conceived ideas of exactly what the work at Octopus would be like, but immediately felt comfortable because Gilly Ames was a woman.
"She was really good at chatting to us about what it was like being a woman in tech... so it felt slightly less intimidating. In the past it's always been men in big teams of men, and there's like one woman there."
Another intern, Computer Science graduate Noshin Begum was more circumspect when she entered the process: as a woman from an ethnic minority she'd steeled herself for comments about box ticking and tokenism.
"I just said to myself, 'You need to prove yourself even more than everyone else'. But straight after the first meeting that pressure kind of disappeared and it felt like we were all measured equally," she said.
Octopus Energy director Rebecca Dibb-Simkin was thrilled with the interns' contribution to the company, saying, "During their few weeks with us, they made huge strides in building new features… The exceptionally bright young women that joined our first Ada Lovelace internship are living proof that women will flourish in tech with the right kind of support. And we hope this placement opportunity will inspire more women to enter the tech industry."
Another type of community was important to James Robbins, who found himself seeking a change of direction after a stint as a CIO in a large organisation didn't go as well as planned. Having previously led several large organisations through transformations, he also felt it was starting to get a bit samey.
"I found the idea of taking a similar journey in similar sized business unappealing," he said in this video interview.
"But if you could take the best bits of it, and use that to help peers, then that's much more enjoyable."
So, he started thinking about becoming a portfolio CIO, taking elements of what he'd learned during his CIO career and re-applying them in different areas, sometimes as a coach or mentor, sometimes in more hands-on roles.
Some sectors are very competitive in their upper tiers, but in those with which he was most familiar - energy, water, logistics and transport - IT leaders tend to be collegiate and coopertative by nature - they have to be because in those industries its vital everyone is using the same standards and protocols and talking the same technical language.
"I started to think about my network that I developed mainly through working in less competitive industries where there's been a need to work with other CIOs", he said.
Robbins started ringing around some of the people he'd developed a relationship with during the course of his career, and while he'd expected a sympathetic ear, the strength of the welcome surprised him.
"I suddenly found the door was open," he said.
So far he says he hasn't looked back, finding the challenge of being parachutred into someone else's project intellectually stimulating and without some of the more mundane aspects of the CIO role, such as paperwork and contract management.
"It's about real peer-to-peer relationship first and foremost," he said.
Through a consultancy he set up, he's building a portfolio by supporting technology businesses, particularly ones that are in markets he'd worked with before as a CIO, but not always in firms of the same size. He has found that many skills are transferable from the large established businesses he was used to, into smaller rapidly growing organisations, particularly in areas such as gaining a single view of the customer and optimising the experience of that customer by paying attention to delivery and stock management, all essentials he learned from the logistics side of the businesses he'd worked in before.
And, as time has passed, Robbins says he's found himself less engaged in transformation for transformation's sake, and much more interested in the underlying purpose of the businesses where he's working and what they are trying to achieve. The portfolio role gives him this overview, he says.
Another IT leader for whom a sense of purpose and vision is important is Anna Barsby, CIO of Asda.
She was fairly new in her role when the CEO asked her to set the wheels in motion to help the up to 1.8 million children whose education was suffering under lockdown and who were unable to participate fully in online lessons due to lack of equipment or broadband.
She may have been new to the role but fortunately she was able to call upon a number of well-established networks which allowed her to get the project up and running within a few days. One of these networks featured Dell, who sponsor a women in tech mentoring programme. Barsby spoke to the scheme's manager who put her through to the UK CEO.
"We just had a really quick chat and he said, 'Absolutely up for this'" she said.
In just a few days the scheme was launched. Dell agreed to provide 7,000 Latitude 3190 11" two-in-one laptops, complete with a headset and a one-year guarantee. Because many homes do not have reliable broadband, a dongle including 20 Gb of pre-paid data was also provided, supplied by Vodafone and funded through the Asda Foundation.
The other community she was able to work with to deliver the project was Asda's network of local fundraisers and volunteers called Community Champions. The Community Champions identified schools that would receive the laptops and to deliver them to the neediest children. They are also responsible for monitoring the scheme to ensure it is delivering as promised.
Since not every home has a tech-savvy member and school IT support is overstretched, Asda support engineers are on hand to help with any setup issues.
The scheme received positive feedback from a number of MPs and enjoys huge support within the company, Barsby explained.
"We've managed to pull together our store community work and schools and our relationship with Dell. It has really strong support from my team in tech to try and make sure that our skills are being used for the community," she said.
A strong sense of purpose is also important to Charles Ewen CIO of the Met Office.
In this video interview, Ewen says that the fact that the Met Office is an organisation with a clear mission, one that that its employees believe in, has been fundamental in seeing it through the pandemic.
"Even in uncertain times it's easy to keep that focus on what's important, whereas I think if you're unfortunate enough to work in an organisation that doesn't carry that purpose, then you get knocked into second-order debates around profit and revenue," he said.
"Of course, those things are really important, but organisations whose raison d'etre is around those things and without any broader purpose or vision have found it very problematic."
The Met Office is in the prediction business which also helps: responding to rare events is part of its genetic makeup. There are several well-practiced procedures to handle with extreme weather events, for example, and the culture of rapid response is ingrained.
Dealing with chaotic systems like weather has taught Ewen is a lot about uncertainty. He doesn't like to make predictions about technology but notes that current tech trends all embed uncertainty within them: they come from a recognition that tomorrow will not be like today, and therefore flexibility and agility must be built in.
"In a business context, I think the learning and uncertainty is something you can't always reduce to nothing, and planning to live with those uncertainties is in many ways quite welcome," Ewen said.
"This is a big part of where digital came from, and where DevOps came from, and where Agile came from - this knowing, from a technology point of view, that actually you're arrogant, if not naive, to think that you can ever know how you can deploy technology to actually hit the value that somebody else has perceived."
However, as psychologically well prepared as he himself was for the pandemic - and even as someone who says he doesn't mind working alone - Ewen finds networking over video links unsatisfactory.
Bouncing ideas off one another, and the all-important blue-sky thinking, doesn't really work over Zoom, and maintaining a cohesive team of diverse characters is hard to do at a distance, particularly as time goes on.
For that reason Ewen said he's very much looking forward to a return to office life, whatever that might look like when it happens.
Local authorities have had to deal with business-as-usual as well as adding myriad other responsibilities to their shedules during the pandemic.
Sudip Trivedi, head of data and analytics at the London Borough of Camden, uses data held by the council to help coordinate a large network of volunteers and charities to assist the many people affected disproportionately by Covid-19.
The council built an app to help co-ordinate more than twenty voluntary organisations providing food supplies to the needy in a scheme called Food Aid. People requiring assistance can register for support and the most appropriate organisation will move in to help them.
The local authority has also been engaged in efforts to close the gap between technology haves and have-nots, where the people without access to or experience in using online systems have been especially cut off during the pandemic.
"We've been looking at how to tackle the digital divide, and getting funds to provision devices in schools. We've provisioned more than 6,000 devices for school children in Camden," Trivedi said.
"We're also aware of the adult population that's affected by this divide, for example people seeking jobs without access to devices."
The emergency has forced the council to make the most of its data, he went on.
"Pre-pandemic we all talked a good game around database insight and data-driven decisions, but the pandemic has really brought that to life.
"Everything has had to be based around data. Starting from what the Prime Minister talks about in every press briefing, through to here in Camden looking at what our communities are feeling - it's all based on qualitative and quantitative insights and lived experiences."
He puts the success of the authoritiy's initiatives down to this willingness to look outside the council's walls to collaborate with external organisations.
"It's the power of the collective. A lot of time we may be the initiators of something like Food Aid, but we don't always have all the answers. We're not the community groups growing food in Camden. So how do we work as a collective to get that need catered for in most efficient way? We work with those communities."
Author spotlight
John Leonard
More from John Leonard
Ofcom fines TikTok £1.9m for failure to provide child safety information