Life After Technology Or….Where the real money is!

WHAT WILL WE COVER TODAY ? …. and why is my job absolutely Fab and why are we talking about this ? Variety & Variance The hard problems The nature of the Generalist IT Manager

Michael Roberts Who am I and where am I drawing my information from ? ◦ Private sector – 14 years management and application of IT  Whole variety of roles, but most importantly … instrumental in delivering significant business change ◦ 3 years in sector ◦ Member of RUGIT and a number of vendor led information sharing groups Cisco, IBM, Janet ◦ 12 years commercial management : sales and marketing, P&L responsibility ◦ 5 years training and application in 6 Sigma methodology ◦ I have made many mistakes ! ◦ I have been fortunate to work with, and for, some excellent people ◦ Hopefully, you can benefit from both

The real money What do I mean by real ? ◦ Achievable ◦ Substantial – i.e. a lot of money

A – Early career; low skilled roles B – Junior-to-middle managers Technical roles ! C – Senior Managers, VP’s, IT Directors Non-technical roles ! D – Entrepreneurs, inventors, Guru’s etc

The nature of generalist IT What do I mean by generalist IT ? ◦ Not HPC ◦ Not mass spectrometry or Genome modelling ◦ The challenge of the distributed workforce ◦ The challenge of distributed creativity ◦ Distributed transaction

Variety and Variance Variety is great ◦ Choice ◦ Options ◦ Power ◦ Individualism Variance is terrible ◦ Engineers hate it ◦ Managers hate it ◦ I hate it !

More about Variance Variance (or the elimination of it) is at the heart of the most satisfying IT management jobs The key challenges I have faced have been to do with reducing variance ◦ Reduce variance and you reduce cost, waste, time ◦ The rise of Lean !

The Hard Problems The things that make the job satisfying, challenging, interesting The known-unknowns People with problems …. People with solutions ◦ Duplicated solutions ◦ Unrealised potential

More about variety Not found in all places Don’t necessarily equate seniority with variety ◦ But can equate seniority with reward ◦ But not with technology

The well paid prisoner Corporate IT Communications IT Web Broadcasting Manufacturing IT MRP systemsLogistics IT Regional IT Sales Customer services

The problems of working for a Global Organisation You get well paid You get great benefits But you also get the non-IT issues ◦ HR, budgets, audit, governance And you don’t get the variety Ultimately – it gets a bit boring ! Did I mention getting well paid ?

So what am I advocating ? The best jobs in IT may not be technical Consider planning your career to ultimately arrive at ◦ A generalist IT role ◦ In a medium sized organisation ◦ Look for variety

Do you have to be an IT expert ? ◦ Yes ! Isn’t this just general management ? ◦ No ! ◦ Relatively wide (not so deep) knowledge of IT ◦ Visionary ◦ Complementary skills ◦ Communications excellence

Why work in a University ? Not necessarily where I’d suggest you start – or spend your entire career It’s more interesting – or has the potential to be so ….

Why so ? Back to variety … ◦ IT content variety ◦ IT exposure variety ◦ Environmental variety ◦ Discipline/skills variety ◦ Responsibility ◦ Freedom ◦ Resources – experiments

SUMMARY rewardvariety Breadth ?Generalist ?Security !Scale ?Technical ? Universities are far more fun than Global Banks !