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

2. 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

3. 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

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

5. 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

6. 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

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

8. 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 !

9. 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

10. 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

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

12. 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 ?

13. 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

14. 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

15. 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 ….

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

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