CMI’s Ken Roulston: If you’re not enjoying it, stop doing it!

Gary : Tell us a bit about CMI, Ken.

Ken: CMI came into existence in its current form in October 2009, following the merger of two IT companies, SLA networks and Ethos Information Solutions. Stephen Gillespie and I, who had worked together for many years in a previous incarnation of CMI, which latterly became Aurora and then Sx3, and most recently Northgate, decided we’d like to create an organization that had the same culture & ethos of the original CMI, which was one of excellent customer service, partner relationships with our customers and, indeed, with our staff, and to have an environment where people could work hard and play hard, and feel part of an overall team. And we’d both seen that ethos had got lost somewhat in bigger organisations and we felt that we wanted to recreate something more akin to the earlier days where work was a lot more enjoyable and fun.

So we raided our piggy banks, got some investment, acquired the two businesses, merged them together and that gave us a base from which to operate. The company is a provider of infrastructure solutions to the Northern Irish marketplace and to date our markets have been primarily the private and voluntary sector, although we’re now starting to make some inroads into some parts of the public sector. Our solutions vary from very traditional IT infrastructure through to the current flavours of virtualization, and, we’re just now launching our take on the Cloud, which is a big subject currently. We believe that the Cloud has a lot of advantages but it’s not yet fully developed to a point where every organization can necessarily avail of without considerable issues.

So we believe that on-premise – the traditional environment – is going to be around for many years yet. But we do believe that the Cloud will start to have a role for certain functions and the outcome of that over the next numbers of years is that we’ll see an environment of what is termed hybrid IT – linking together on-premise and Cloud offerings, be it private or public Cloud. So that’s very much what we’re seeing now and we see that transition coming about as a result of the technological advances in IT but also because of the economic pressures, where organizations have reduced levels of capital expenditure available to them, because of the credit crunch and the impacts of that.

We currently have around 200 customers here in NI. We have 23 staff and our customers range from relatively small organizations with sub-10 users to customers that have over 200. Through the investment we made in a service management system called Kaseya, which is a market-leading product for managed services providers – we have the ability to reach way beyond the geographic boundaries of NI, so we’re able to support sites the length and breadth of Great Britain, the Republic of Ireland, and indeed, across continental Europe. We can support customers that are based in NI, but have remote workers or workers in different geographical regions.

Gary: Presumably going outside NI is where the future is for CMI?

Ken: We believe there are still good opportunities within Northern Ireland. The area in which we operate along with our particular blend of skills, services and products is such that we can increase our market share. It’s true that this market isn’t really growing so that market share will come because of competing against our competitors. But of course, we are looking beyond Northern Ireland – through an investment we’re hoping to secure from Invest NI, we can develop a hybrid Cloud offering that will be suitable for communities of interest such as housing associations, charities and so on, and we’re already hooking up with a partner, Montal, in GB, to look at how to roll that hybrid Cloud solution out to their customers. We have an interest in the south of Ireland as well – it’s on our doorstep and there are lots of economic and logistical reasons why it makes sense to look down there. The reality is that it’s going to be better served by finding good people to partner with, rather than trying to establish a position in our own right.

So our way to market, whether locally or externally, is primarily through partnership and alliances, rather than simply doing things in our own right, because that can be highly capital intensive.

Gary: What are the key things you bring to a relationship with a partner?

Ken: What we have in terms of the systems we have developed and customised is the ability for us to manage customers’ IT very proactively, monitor it and deal with issues as they arise. This has tended to be the domain of the large organizations, using very expensive solutions.  But we took the decision when we made this investment that we needed to use state of the art systems and we needed to make a long term commitment to the technology of the future, so we believe that technology gives us a significant advantage over other comparable organisations with similar overheads to ours. That needs to be complemented by a service ethos that is very much about working with the customer in a long term relationship. Now, most organizations will claim that that’s what they do and many do it – so in some ways we’re not unique in that respect – but I think it’s that combination of service culture, a happy workforce and the investment in systems that we’ve made that means we have satisfied customers. And that’s what this business is all about. Because the best way to generate business is through referrals – and if you’ve happy customers, they will do that for you.

Gary: You mentioned about hybrid Cloud solutions – firstly, are you finding that your customers are talking to you about the Cloud, or do you initiate that conversation? What level of interest do you see in the marketplace?

Ken: Cloud as a term has been bandied about for quite a while. Ever since we made the investment in 2009, it’s been on the radar. And increasingly it’s becoming a much hyped subject. And the reality is, it’s like years ago, when people talked about e-this and e-that, and if you go right the way back it’s really bureau IT. However, it is gaining ground because there are a lot of major organizations that are putting a lot of marketing dollars into it – Microsoft, Google, Amazon, HP and so on.  So there is a momentum there which is being driven and which needs to be embraced.

I think it’s not so much being driven by technology per se and the marketing dollars behind it, it’s more about the whole issue of capital expenditure. Organisations are increasingly reluctant to invest large amounts of capital in IT. But if they believe that they can pay on the basis of pay-as-you-go, even if it works out more expensive in the long run, that is very attractive. However, we have found that many organizations have considered it, but once they examine it closely, and look at the communications, security, management and integration issues associated with it, the cost advantage is not as appealing as it first looked.

Now, we are of the view that this is just a stage of maturation that the market is going through at the moment, and in 3-5 years it’ll be significantly further developed. And that’s why we believe that, while there’s a high level of interest in the Cloud, organizations need to really look at their business and all the issues before jumping into some of the public Cloud offerings. So there is a consultation exercise to be gone through with customers to work all this out. But in Northern Ireland, where we operate primarily in the SME sector, and because of the impact of the recession here, it is being discussed more openly than in other parts of the UK, particularly the South East of England.

Gary: So when you talk about these hybrid Cloud solutions, Ken – what are the things that Cloud is particularly suited for?

Ken: Cloud can be very good for providing flexible access to email and products such as Microsoft Office 365. We’ve been very involved in rolling that out for customers. The contract we have with what is the old Nortel Networks organization has about 80 users all around Europe and they are all using Office 365 supplied by ourselves and they find it an ideal way of working. But line of business applications, whether accounting systems, ERP systems – they are much more difficult to put in the Cloud. There tend to be problems with that sort of environment.  So the reality is that those sort of systems really have to remain either on-premise or in some sort of private Cloud environment.

So it depends on security, performance, flexibility as to what works best in a Cloud and what doesn’t. And every organization has different needs.

One thing that we’re seeing is the Cloud is very good for is disaster recovery. It’s a lower cost way of implementing disaster recovery. And we’ve seen a big uptake of this over the last couple of years. For many years, and I never understood why – there seemed to be very little uptake for disaster recovery – when we were going through the worst of the troubles, e.g. Now that that’s hopefully behind us, DR is on the ascendency!  But I think it’s perhaps down to organizations becoming increasingly concerned that they may be exposed in terms of their IT in the event of there being problems, not necessarily as we might traditionally have thought of this, but more in terms of viruses and hacking and internal issues.

Gary:  And companies are more aware than ever that they are very dependent on their IT.

Ken: Yes. And if cap-ex constraints are inhibiting their potential to upgrade to newer, more reliable, more robust solutions, they have to eke out time with older systems. So rather than being totally exposed by one of those systems going down, they’re looking to putting contingency arrangements in place.

I also think there’s a governance issue being driven in the background by the wider market place, whether it’s auditors, insurance organizations, accountants…And also the supply chain is getting tighter and organizations are asking their suppliers – do you have contingency in place, in the event of something going wrong with your IT? So governance, compliance, commercial reasons, all play their part.

Gary: Well, tell us a bit about how you got to where you are right now Ken.

Ken: I started off as an IT engineer, working on calculators that cost £2,500 and had maintenance contracts back in 1979. That was for Burroughs. I then moved to the other end of the spectrum and worked on mainframes and eventually settled on the mini-computer range. And at that point – early 80s – the PC was making its appearance and I moved into a sales-engineer role with Burroughs, which then led to me moving into a break-away company called NIBS, Northern Ireland Business Systems.

We were really the PC reseller for Burroughs and other product offerings like Data General, Onyx and Osborne, which was one of the first portable computer systems. So I was the service engineering manager for that company, which got me involved in many interesting assignments, travelling around Ireland and then ending up in Libya, implementing IT systems in the Sahara desert! This happened about 3 months after Yvonne Fletcher was shot in London, so it was a particularly challenging time to be in that part of the world. In fact I almost got imprisoned in one of Gadhafi’s jails because – very long story – but essentially they stopped me from leaving the country because the IT supplied hadn’t met their requirements. When I eventually did get the chance to leave, Gaddafi closed the airports and I had to spend time in Tripoli with no money and nowhere to stay. He’d closed the airports to keep all the foreigners in the country to help celebrate the anniversary of the green revolution. So it was a scary time!

That company went bust, because it grew too fast and there were issues with the payment from Libya. I then moved into an engineering role in CEM computers before moving into a sales environment in CMI in 1986. I was the first sales person CMI employed. It was an interesting opportunity to take my engineering skill and the time I’d spent with sales people and to try and link the two together and break down the traditional barriers between sales & service. So it was a very services- oriented organization  and thru’ the late 80s we grew primarily organically and then we were acquired by a US organization called Unicomp in the early 90s, which then meant we had the funds to grow by acquisition.

So we grew through the 90s with a number of acquisitions, finally culminating in the acquisition of CEM Computers. And we then created a new identity which was Aurora.  At that stage we had over 230 staff and we were probably the largest independent IT infrastructure provider in the province. That organization was then acquired by Viridian and merged in with its Sx3 business, and having done a brief spell in the telecoms world on behalf of Viridian, I re-joined the business in Sx3 in 2000 and became Business Development Director. And, in a number of different roles there, I operated until 2004, when, because of the big company environment I was no longer enjoying what I was doing and I knew I was going to have to travel round the UK every week, so I decided to leave.

And I ended up becoming a minority shareholder in a business I’d formed a number of years earlier – an Internet business, called Finisco, at that stage. So I did a couple of years in the Internet world, because I felt I’d by-passed that a bit and I wanted to understand more about it. And when I left that, it was to do some consultancy work on behalf of the government, working on the DETI broadband content initiative, reviewing submissions of applications for funding.  That was a very enjoyable period and I worked on that and other IT projects or a couple of years.

And then I got involved running the MS Society in Northern Ireland for 3 months as an interim manager. For many years I’d been a volunteer for Disability Action and was the chairman for 6 years. So when the MS Society ran into governance issues which resulted in the local director being suspended, I was asked to get involved. That was a very interesting and challenging period, though nothing to do with IT at all.

But during that period I was asked if I’d be interested in running Parity in Ireland and I wasn’t sure it was what I really wanted to do – but after a few conversations with the guy I would be working with, who was a Geordie, I could see a lot of synergies. I would be heading up a business in the IT arena, providing SharePoint-based solutions for the public sector and also working in the private sector through its graduate placement programmes and other management consultancy elements. And that blend appealed to me – so I spent a couple of good years there. Unfortunately, Parity hit problems due to the recession and there was a change of priorities in the direction of the organization. And Northern Ireland was subsumed into the GB organisation as opposed to having its own autonomy. At that stage it didn’t make sense to stay – and that’s when I left to form CMI.

Gary: You’ve have a very interesting & varied career, Ken. You’ve got a very unusual combination of experiences and skills – strong in technology, sales, marketing, management, business start-up – that’s all there in what you’ve done. That’s pretty unusual in the IT business, to have all of that in one person. What is it that you’re best at, really good at?

Ken: Maybe it’s for others to say what I’m really good at.What I really enjoy the most is business development and the whole sales process. Sales is a much underrated profession. It’s one of the best professions to be in – it’s all about customer contact, about trying to understand the customer’s needs and then helping them buy a solution from you. I wouldn’t say I’m the world’s best technology person – technology is so fast moving I would always surround myself with people who are stronger than me in that respect. For me, it’s – how do you use technology for business benefit? And that’s more about understanding the requirements of a business, growing revenues, controlling costs or improving service. I’ve spent a lot of time in roles where I’ve been managing reasonable numbers of staff – that’s something which comes with the territory. It’s OK when things are going well but when things are tighter and you’re having to control costs and maybe reduce costs – I would gladly give up man-management because of that aspect of it.

But I’m at my happiest when I’m with a customer and when I’m talking business and how technology fits within that.

Gary: Whenever you and I started out Ken, companies like Burroughs or IBM or ICL all had extended sales training and development programmes. We don’t have that these days. Do you think the sales skills for the IT business are still around?

Ken: I’m often asked where do I see the skills shortages in NI. We’re not a software development house, so that’s not where our problems lie. There are sufficient numbers of people out there for the sort of skills we need – infrastructure engineers and technical architects and so on – but where there is a real shortage is good sales people. Part of the problem is training – like you in the early days I got proper sales training. I don’t think there is the same professionalism today about sales and there’s not the same investment in bringing that talent through. There needs to be a more structured approach, backed by the government that develops the IT sales people/entrepreneurs of the future.

Gary: You said that personnel management is not your favourite job, but you’ve had to do a fair amount of that over the years, Ken. And in leading organisations, you’ve had to create a culture, an environment. What sort of environment makes for a successful organization?

Ken: When you have an open environment where all employees feel they each play an important role – they may be different, I might be MD, someone else is a junior engineer and neither of us could do the other’s job – so we play different roles. So it’s an ethos of all working together, everybody contributing their bit of the equation, everyone being willing and able to work outside their comfort zones on occasion on behalf of the customer. For Stephen and me, that was the norm in days gone by, but what I see now more and more is people wanting to stay within their boundaries. But I believe that good employees are those who are prepared to work outside of those, along with their colleagues, to get the deal done, the job finished, the problem fixed – whatever it takes. The customer comes first. After that it’s up to me and Stephen and the other directors of the business to reward our staff by paying a decent salary and by encouraging them, giving them the training and investment in their careers that they need. So it’s a two way process.

Gary: Ken, as you’ve talked about your career, you clearly haven’t been afraid to make a change, take a risk, start something completely new – that challenge is obviously something you enjoy doing. Is that right and is it the same as you get older?

Ken: I get bored if I’m not continually challenged. I have this feeling that if you’re not going forward you’re moving backwards. People might say I’m a risk taker. Maybe a conservative risk taker – I know my strengths, so I don’t go anywhere unless I know I have the skills to do it. Of course at my age, I’ll probably not be taking too many more leaps! And where I am now, I’ve invested too much time, energy and money in this business to be making any change. So what I want to do is to make CMI a success over the next 5 years and then increasingly take a back-seat role and maybe do a few other things elsewhere.

Gary: If you were to give some advice to a younger person who’s thinking about being an entrepreneur, starting a new business, what would it be?

Ken: They should look at what motivate them, what excites them – you’re always going to be better doing something you enjoy doing. Find out what it is and plot your way forward from there. And seek out people who have achieved what you’re heading towards and try and get yourself involved with those people. Get into an organization where you can learn. Just going out and making a fortune very quickly is very difficult – so learn your trade, build experience and get involved with people who have the expertise you want to build. But also, if you’re doing something and you’re not enjoying it – stop it and change. Don’t be frightened of doing that. Work is too big a part of someone’s life for you not to enjoy it.

Maureen Murphy, Aurion Learning – show your customers you care.

Dr Maureen Murphy, Chief Executive, Aurion Learning

Gary: Maureen, tell us about Aurion Learning.

Maureen:Aurion Learning is an elearning company made up of a team of learning specialists and application developers. We’re based in Belfast, but we do most of our work in the south of Ireland and Scotland. When we started the business back in 1999, we focused primarily on custom elearning – working with clients who wanted to deliver existing classroom materials online, or indeed had a new training or learning and development need and wanted to support staff by delivering the training online.

Since then we’ve extended our service offering, and we’re now more of a ‘one-stop shop’ in learning technology.

While elearning is still an important core of our business, we also spend a lot of our time working with our clients to advise on how learning technology can be used effectively within their organisation for productivity and skills-development.

Gary: Give us some examples of that.

Maureen: Well the three core parts of our business are elearning design; provision of learning technology; and elearning services.

elearning design probably makes up around 40% of the business. We still provide custom e-learning design for clients but we’ve had to respond to increasing customer demand for ‘off-the-shelf’ learning content. We’ve recently launched the Aurion Learning Academy which is an ‘on-demand’ e-learning service.  It’s a fully hosted platform with hundreds of e-learning programmes covering business skills, health and safety, IT and mental health. Our customers just pick and choose which titles they want. The learning content is suitable for both managers and staff and the learning programmes have very short, sharp learning content. This might be anything from ½ an hour down to 5, 10 minutes. It’s very rapid, just-in-time learning.

In terms of learning technology, we design and build bespoke elearning technology solutions to help organisations manage workplace learning and development. Our products range from online learning portals, CPD, coach and mentoring management tools. We‘ve recently taken on some reseller arrangements for a range of learning management systems that can be used for competency assessments, for pre-induction, recruitment…right through to succession planning. I suppose the main advantage for our customers is that we aren’t tied in to any one product.  We recommend what we think is the best product for the client – and if it doesn’t exist – we build it.

The third part of our business is learning services. Here we work with the client to help them develop an elearning strategy for their organisation and we also work with their L&D team to help them develop elearning skills. For example, we train internal trainers on the basics of instructional design, how to design elearning, how to use elearnng authoring tools and so on. In this way, we’re really helping the organisation build their elearning capabilities.

Gary: So is your ideal client somebody who might take all three of those, where you do a learning strategy for them, help them think about learning and elearning throughout their whole organisation, give them a learning management system and tools to do this, that and the other, and, oh yes, there’s a bit that Aurion Learning can do as well in terms of a specific area of training. Is that your ideal scenario?

Maureen: Yes, absolutely. For us the ideal situation is where we become not exactly an out-sourced elearning services company – but almost that, where we blend into the customer’s L&D team. And we have a number of larger customers where we do provide that sort of service.

Gary: So where do you find the real interest in elearning? Is it more public sector than private sector, or vice versa?

Maureen: When we started the business most of our work came from the public sector, but we’re now finding a lot of interest from the corporate sector too.

Public sector organisations have always had to deliver a lot of mandatory training, policies and guidelines, but increasingly now they are looking at change management and succession planning.  So they are interested in how elearning works in the context of change and how to bring staff along with it.

In terms of the corporate sector, we’ve seen a lot more demand for elearning in the past few years, particaulry in developing internal training staff to recognise where and how eLearning is a viable option, and providing the internal team in developing good quality inhouse themselves.


Gary: So, where are we with elearning versus classroom training? Is elearning taking over, or do organisations need a diversity of approaches? What are the trends?

Maureen: Well, of course you read some of the literature which says, “classroom training is dead”. But that’s terribly naive. From a learning perspective, you need to consider the right approach based on the content of material, the speed of bringing it out to the market and the learning community.

For some clients, we do actually develop a classroom-based programme, or we run facilitated workshops to help learners as they go through the online learning. So there is still a place for classroom-based learning, but for us, it’s all about how we integrate existing classroom based training with the online learning that we develop, so that the overall approach is very cohesive.

Gary: So what about virtual classroom methods of training – where you have training delivered online to remote students, but where it mimics a classroom situation, where the trainer has the ability to present visual material, where everybody can see and talk to everybody else, and so on – is this a valid component in the learning environment?

Maureen: Yes, with the rise of broadband access, a whole range of virtual classroom environments have been developed. The main advantage of virtual classroom technology is that you still have the socialization aspect, the human presence of a real classroom situation just not the physical presence.

And bear in mind we’re not just talking about webcasts here, purely didactic learning. Technologies like virtual break-out rooms, online quizzes and and polling can result in very interactive training sessions.

So whether it’s a live virtual classroom or a virtual forum, this type of technology can be very powerful, especially when combined with offline learning.

By the same token, there are good and bad teaching techniques and a virtual classroom does not stop you from having a poor tutor who manages the teaching delivery or indeed the technology badly.

For virtual classrooms to work, the trainer really needs to know the technology well. As long as you’re a good facilitator, you can manage all the rich features that are available with virtual classrooms to great effect.

Gary: So are organisations in 2012 embracing all this learning technology? Is elearning now widely regarded as less expensive, more productive, more effective and so on?

Maureen: Yes I would say elearning is now mainstream. It’s certainly much more mainstream to have a learning management system in place than when we started in 1999. Then it was the exception. And now we get enquiries from informed buyers. They have a good idea of the specification of what they want and we then work with them to refine that.

There are certainly upfront costs with elearning, and we always work with our clients to look at the return on investment model – to make sure they get the maximum benefit from elearning and evaluate the effectiveness of their learning strategy. Sometimes that’s forgotten when there’s technology involved. The technology is installed and then it’s forgotten about.

Elearning just like any other form of training needs to be carefully managed.

Gary: So tell us a bit about what you did before Aurion, Maureen.

Maureen: I completed a degree in Computing at the University of Ulster, and then went to complete my PhD around adaptive technologies for the web. I was sponsored by a US aerodynamics company to research knowledge based systems for wind tunnel design and missiles. I also studied at Stanford University for a year as a visiting scholar as part of the PhD. Once I got my PhD, I worked at UU as lecturer in database management systems, knowledge-based systems and educational multi-media.

After 5 years I left and started my own business. I began working on a part-time basis for the University on a project called Synergy, for a short period, working with businesses in west Belfast. But at the same time, I won a contract to set up an online distance learning centre for UU – that was back in 1997. Developing the distance learning centre was a great starting point for Aurion as not only did we get to work with academics in designing a whole range of eLearning courses for students in UU, I was also able to make a lot of links with outside organisations and institutes that UU was working with.   As a follow on we were able to secure a number of other contracts, the most important of which was a contract with the health service in the south of Ireland.

Gary: At that stage, did you have other people working with you?

Maureen: Yes, I started with a placement student on a multimedia degree and then I took on an administrator who was working on the healthcare distance learning centre. So it was a small team to start with. For the first couple of years, it was just the three of us but it grew from there to where we are today – with15 full-time staff, – split into eLearning designers and educaitonalists and application developers.  We also have a team of associate project managers, instructional designers, AV crews around Ireland and the UK.

Gary: So how did it feel in those early couple of years? Previous to that, you’d been in a fairly secure university environment and now, here you are, moved away from that, trying to build a small business from scratch. Did that just feel terribly exciting to you, or did you think long and hard about it…

Maureen: It was exciting. I’d really had enough of academia and I’d been pretty business-minded even during that period – I was running Masters’ programmes and European projects. So I just made the decision to go and do it. I have a very positive outlook and I just worked hard, put the head down…and maybe it was luck, being in the right place at the right time…

Gary: Well, you make your own luck.

Maureen: Absolutely. I firmly believe that. So, there was no fear and trepidation – just excitement about the future.

Gary: OK…so you moved out of the University of Ulster, you started a new business, you took on staff, and you started a family – all around 2000? And you’re still sitting here smiling?!

Maureen: Yes!! Well you just need to be organised. And my delegation skills have become much more refined over the years. Some would say they still need to be refined! Because I’m a bit of a perfectionist in my approach. But…people can worry too much at times…you just need to get out there and do it! Reflect on what you could have done better, by all means, but don’t linger on it! Move on. What I’ve found is that if you establish a good relationship with a customer, they’ll keep on coming back. To this point we still have 70% recurring business.

Gary: So what keeps the customer coming back?

Maureen: That you actually care about them. We work as part of their team. We typically go beyond what they expect – maybe it’s carrying out an evaluation study for them because they don’t have the time, but we’ll do that for them, because we know how important it is for them. And – just good quality product that fits their budget. And they’ll keep coming back.

Gary: It’s not rocket science.

Maureen: No, it’s just good business practice.

Gary: So looking back over those early years, what were the biggest challenges to building  a new organisation?

Maureen: The biggest challenge has been getting staff and, looking back, we probably could have got funding to employ more experienced staff which might have helped us. Getting the right staff continues to be a challenge. Whilst we can afford market rates, we just can’t get qualified staff in the elearning field. Our universities do not produce instructional designers – which is a challenge to our growth plans.

Gary: So you really have to grow your own.

Maureen: Very much so, or rely on associate staff in England. Which has worked very well for us. But we could employ five  instructional designers right now if I could find them.

Gary: Let me ask you about business strategy. When you’re growing a new business, typically you have to do everything. It’s all hands to the pump at all times so it can be a challenge to take a step back and think about the strategy, how we take things forward and so on. But presumably you’ve taken the time to do that at various points?

Maureen: Yes. Now, we have a really great team that can work with the client from concept through to delivery and support and I don’t need to get involved so closely in everything that goes on.

Gary: What about managing people in this business. What’s the key to managing people in a technology business?

Maureen: Whether it’s technology or not, having a good understanding of a person, thinking about what makes them tick, is very important. At Aurion Learning, we’re very much into team building , team development, looking at an individual’s skills and where they want to go, rather than trying to just mould them into something that they’re not. So we very much have a team atmosphere – it’s very important. People here are friends, they spend time together outside work. We also do a lot of work in the community. We’re one of the most active Business in the Community companies, even though we’re the smallest organisation. That has been fantastic, whether it’s been working with the MS Society, or working with the youth club beside us, or helping some of the older people’s centres with IT. Everybody in Aurion Learning gets involved in community work.

Gary:  So what benefits do you see as a business, as a result of that?

Maureen: It helps to build the team. It builds the individual and lets them see that Aurion Learning is not just about making money. It’s about giving something back into the community. We’re part of this community, part of Northern Ireland, the world, so it’s our job to give something back. And people really enjoy sharing their knowledge with others. It’s very rewarding.

Gary: Fantastic. So what is it that you are really good at, and how did you get good at it?

Maureen: I’m good at very rapidly understanding someone’s business problem! And getting to the nub of things, getting rid of the chaff around it. Getting to the core issue.

Gary: How did that develop? Was that because of your education or something you’ve learned in business?

Maureen: I suppose I’ve honed it over the years. But I’ve always been able to do this – seeing the light through the fog. And we have such a wide experience in elearning now, in really getting to know the psyche of an organisation…this is quite core.

Gary: What about being a woman in business.  Northern Ireland is very male dominated, even in the IT industry, even though it’s maybe better than some other sectors. Has this ever been a problem for you?

Maureen: Never.  Maybe because I’m quite a strong personality…but I’ve never had any issues being a woman in business.

Gary: Finally, Maureen, what piece of advice would you give to someone starting a new technology business?

Maureen: Look carefully at what your competitors are doing. See what the trends are. Define your niche. That’s why we’re successful – we’re niche. Keep a focus on your niche, make that your differentiator. We play the expertise card very strongly when we’re bidding for business. We really know our market and we have solid experience which we can build on.

http://www.aurionlearning.com/

Next up…Dr Maureen Murphy, CEO, Aurion Learning

Review of 2011: Huge potential for greater success in Northern Ireland

As 2011 gives way to our hopes for 2012, it’s time to briefly review the interviews we did last year, which attracted over 11,000 visitors. We published 12 interviews with Northern Ireland’s technology leaders over the past 9 months, getting a unique insight into their careers and their business experience. In the process, we’ve learned, if we didn’t already know it, that the ICT industry in Northern Ireland is in rude health and that we have world-class leaders, capable of making an enormous impact worldwide.

Ian Graham

As Ian Graham, Chief Executive of Momentum, the industry’s membership organization, said, “The ICT industry is hugely significant for the overall economy in Northern Ireland, not just in terms of what it can do by itself, but how it can enable competitiveness in all other sectors. In areas like Smart Grid, like wind and green technologies, ICT is a key enabler. So this can fuel the whole expansion across many sectors of the economy in Northern Ireland.”

Skills: Business leader after business leaders pointed to the major strength we have in the quality and capability of the people that come through our education system. All good, except for what Ian Graham called a “skills crisis”, where there simply are not enough skilled people coming through the education system to match the demands of the industry. Almost all our CEOs mentioned how difficult this is making life for their business growth plans. Bro McFerran of Allstate suggested that his 2,000 strong workforce might conceivably have been double that,  had the numbers of skilled people been available.

Aidan McGrath

The difficulty is felt at all levels – Aidan McGrath, CEO of Aetopia told us, “Another big challenge for us is getting staff in Northern Ireland – there’s a shortage of skilled Java programmers. They are being eaten up by some of the large IT companies. There is no doubt there is severe pressure on skills at the moment. And this brings with it pressure on salary levels which makes it very difficult for small companies to compete.”

Given what our companies are achieving at the moment, and the potential that they have to do even better – constrained only by having access to people with the right education and skills – the onus is on the Northern Ireland Assembly and the various relevant government departments and bodies – notably the Department of Education, the Department for Employment and Learning, and Invest NI – to come up with a strategy along with Momentum to maximize the economic contribution of the ICT industry to Northern Ireland. We have done well over the past 15 years with inward investment and wealth creation through local companies – but we can do much, much better. And the first job is to fix the education system which is at present failing our industry. Radical action needs to be taken to create a cohesive system where every public body which can contribute to creating large numbers of people with the right education and skills works in tandem with the others towards a common goal.

Bro McFerran

At present, we see little joined-up action and even less joined-up thinking. As Bro McFerran said, “if we want to grow this economy the way we want to grow it, all of our educational output should be focused.” Is there a champion, someone of vision in the Assembly who will work with the industry to help the industry realize a vision, not just for itself, but for the benefit of the whole Northern Ireland economy?

Peter Shields

Business Leadership: We had some great insights into business leadership from last year’s interviewees. Peter Shields of Etain, told us to be prepared to forget the business plans and be prepared to wing it at times, going with a gut feel for what is right. Most of our leaders pointed to the need for a steady customer focus above all else as the key to success. Noel Brady of NB1 suggested that respect was a key element in customer relationships while Relay’s Alastair Bell pointed to the need for exceptional customer service, which, he said, required his staff to really understand not only their own software products, but the customer’s business.

Alastair Bell

Patricia O'Hagan

A common thread throughout many of the interviews was the need to surround yourself with and trust a good team of people. Core Systems’ Patricia O’Hagan of said, “you need to create the right environment so [that your staff] can do what they do well. It needs to be a place where they’re happy and comfortable in their relationships and open in their communications and they have multiple channels to input their ideas and see their ideas being developed.” Sound advice.

Rob McConnell

Which Rob McConnell of SQS agreed with, “In terms of managing technology people, you need to give them space to be creative; you also need to support them in terms of training and development – especially  in today’s very competitive environment, to retain technical people, you need to give people some space.” On a similar theme, Replify’s Brian Baird said, “listening, understanding before you make decisions, being empathetic and collegiate and taking good opinion into play is important before you take any action.”

Noel Brady

Noel Brady pointed to the clear need for technology companies to be able to sell competently – even doing basic things well, like translating features into benefits for the customer and knowing how to close. Brian Baird felt that, with regards to sales and marketing, we just need to believe in ourselves a bit more. Peter Shields, as well as Noel Brady, pointed to the need for and the value of networking as a means of business development. Several people, like Rob McConnell, talked about always being on the lookout for how you can improve your business -  how to make it more profitable, more efficient. Always being on your toes, looking for the next opportunity, spotting the new wave – to coin Denis Murphy’s phrase – was a key ingredient of success, according to our CEOs.

Denis Murphy

Denis Murphy was one of many who mentioned funding as a key ingredient in the future success of our ICT companies. Making sure you’re in the right technology space at any given time and having a credible management team are, he said, critical in attracting funding.

Joanne Stuart pointed out that financing for growth was difficult in Northern Ireland, with the banks – with their traditionally hyper-conservative approach – funding most of this, whereas companies like Andor and First Derivatives modelled a different approach.

Des Speed

Des Speed, now building another technology company after the success of Lagan Technologies, also highlighted good levels of funding as crucial to a technology business that has global aspirations. That, and “having a product that is strong and differentiated in the market”.

The final thread we might point to is the sense of vision that each of our CEOs exhibited. Des Speed talked about setting a clear vision about where you want to get to and being able to get everybody in the organization bought into that. A sense of vision was definitely true with respect to each of our CEOs companies, but most of them were very aware of the broad implications of their business with respect to Northern Ireland.

Joanne Stuart

Joanne Stuart, until recently the Chair of the Institute of Directors locally, said that she saw a lot of business leadership in Northern Ireland, with many business leaders willing to help and mentor newer entrepreneurs. The combination of this focus on one’s own business with an interest in the wider economy and a willingness to help other organizations contribute and share in the success, is I think a wonderful characteristic of the ICT industry in Northern Ireland and augurs well for its future.

Perhaps, we’ll leave the last word from last year – which really looks to the future – to Brian Baird:

Brian Baird

“I would love to see the Northern Ireland ICT industry getting recognized as having flair and capability. Northern Ireland, Ireland being a world-class innovation and development environment for networked and software products. I do think if we concentrated on that we could get a reputation here. There are some fantastic initiatives happening…there are good mature mentors around and so on. But there needs to be a real will to get there. And what I would love to see is Northern Ireland gaining that reputation. We do have the potential of being very successful.”

Noel Brady: Respecting your customer is at the heart of doing business

Noel Brady of NB1

Gary: Noel, tell us a bit about your career to date.

Noel: I started with the NI Civil Service in 1975 as an unemployment benefits clerk in Corporation Street office, Belfast.    I was 17 and I stayed in the Civil Service until ’91.  In the DHSS I worked in a number of different jobs, but the main change came when I moved to DFP in 1980 (Department of Finance & Personnel).  In those days what we would now call a Business Process Engineering Consultant was known as an Organization and Methods Study Officer! So I was trained as an O&M practitioner.  We were trained to look at processes, procedures, forms, people, technology – everything to try and make the process faster and more efficient.   So it was the early days of business transformation and all the buzz words we know, like BPO, BPR and so on.  Often the solutions we began to find revolved around technology. The solution to a business problem might be electronic typing, top-end electronic calculators, golf-ball typewriters, early word-processors – which were innovative for their day.  The leading names then were Wang, Brother, IBM, Olivetti– this sort of equipment was drastically changing the way people did their work.

A PC came on the market called the Rair Black Box, an 8-bit machine. And it came with a calculator, spreadsheet and a word-processor. We got hold of one of these in what was called the Small Systems Division of DFP. And this Rair machine made a big change in the Civil Service, because we were able to show people for the first time a computer that was small, that could do word-processing and spreadsheets and it made an amazing difference to people. The PC revolution was only starting round about then.

As time went on, I got involved in bigger and bigger solutions and I got involved in large IT procurements – large office automation projects. The first office automation system in the Civil Service was procured from Digital for DFP and I led that project.

The next big change for me was, in 1989, Margaret Thatcher introduced “market testing” where the whole civil service across the UK had to market test certain functions and if it was cheaper to do it in the private sector, then it had to be privatized.  In Northern Ireland, one project was identified and it was the market testing of CISD, the central computing function. I don’t know whether they chose that because they thought it wouldn’t end up being privatized – but anyway as it turned out when it was advertised in the European Journal, we had a storm of companies interested. So CISD was privatized and the contract was won by CFM Group Limited, which then became ICL-CFM, which is known today as Fujitsu Services.

I had been project manager for the project and when the contract had been won, CFM approached me and asked me to be their Director of Business Development, selling back into the public sector. Now, that was a big change for me – up till then, I was a career civil servant, had been for 17 years.

Gary: What you’d been doing was very hands-on, very operational. That’s a very different role, and different skills set from what you were now being asked to do.

Noel: It was a big surprise! When I was asked to for the main sales job, I was very surprised indeed.

Gary: What would have happened if you had not been asked?

Noel: I’d have just stayed in the Civil Service and I had a career mapped out in front of me. I could look forward to, maybe a bit of promotion, another big project, maybe some more promotion. I’d have become a sort of efficiency/ICT/procurement specialist and that would have been my career in the civil service. The idea of leaving and taking up a sales job was a strange option.

When I joined CFM, I didn’t know what a salesman did, the basics like how do you sell things, how can you be successful at this? What do I do on day one? But, within 3 months, I just loved it. I took to it naturally and thought – why haven’t I been doing this before? Now, of course, I probably was doing it before – selling people new processes and so on – but I wasn’t actually charging them for it!  But in this new situation, you were selling and people were buying and they liked it and you got a bonus as well – I got a buzz from selling,  and the more you sold the more you made,  there is an excitement in it …and personally I got a great kick out of having satisfied customers.

It’s an old cliché, but it’s absolutely right – people buy from people. It’s all about relationship building.

Gary: And is that true with public tenders too? When you see the tender documents on your screen or advertised in a newspaper, that looks like a clinical process where someone ticks boxes as they evaluate your response. Is relationship still important here, too, Noel?

Noel: It’s still the case. Obviously there’s a process in tendering and you have got to answer the questions and fill in the forms. 70% of it is that. That has to be right. The public sector has to be very tight on this. But I often say to people, if you’re putting 50 to 100 pages in front of people and you want them to read what you’ve written, and to give you a high mark for the quality of your proposal, it almost needs to read like a book. It needs to be a good read. When people read the management summary, you want them to want to read on. So the management summary makes them think – they seem to understand our requirements, they seem to have some good proposals, cost seems about right – and that  leads them on to the rest of the document. And if there’s a nice flow to the document.

I always say to people, when you’re writing the document, decide on a theme. Decide on some major messages that you want to keep to the fore. Say something about your company or your service or your people that you think gives you the edge, then make that a major theme of the document – keep repeating it. Decide on your main selling point, keep playing the same message over and over and that’s the way to make sure you get it across.

I have owned my own company since 2004, my company is NB1 – it stands for Noel Brady 1. When people do business with my company, they’re dealing with me. I will do the job, I won’t have someone coming in to do the NB1 service. It will be me personally.  Now that obviously restricts the growth of my business, but that’s the way I want it – I want it to bring a personal service to my clients. So I try to build that sort of relationship with my clients very quickly. You can’t work with somebody if they don’t like you or if they don’t understand what you’re trying to do, or if you haven’t explained it properly. If you haven’t created some rapport and if you haven’t understood their business too and their problems.

I very quickly learned, when I took up the sales job, because I had worked in the public sector, the relationships I had built with people stood by me – and that taught me something. There was trust, there was relationship, there was respect. When people talk about bad sales people – those salespeople have stepped over the line of respect and friendship.

Gary: That’s a very interesting word to use about sales, isn’t it? Respect. It’s at every stage, isn’t it – from when you first talk to the customer and try to understand their needs – right through to delivery and making sure they get value.

Noel: The trouble with sales people who have bad reputations is that they don’t have respect for the people they are selling to. They just want the forms signed, they don’t care what type of product or service they are selling or how they will be supported in the future.  They never go back to see how the customer feels.

Respect is very important. Mutual respect too, You expect your client to have respect for you as well. I wouldn’t work with people who would be disrespectful to the way that I want to work. So it’s important to understand the limits of a business relationship. It’s possible to go beyond those limits – where you try to over-sell, or try to force people to buy something. Sitting back and listening – the old 80/20 rule applies – when you only speak 20% of the time – you definitely sell more by listening to people. Sometimes they ask for additional products as well, and if you haven’t been listening, there may be opportunities going past you.

Gary: In talking about respect and your customer respecting you as a salesperson – what do you do to earn that respect?

Noel: I think you have to be honest with people. In my business, where people are asking me to help them sell their products and services, sometimes I need to be quite direct and say – guys, your whole approach is wrong, people in this market are not even aware of you! And this can be a great shock to people! Sometime you have to be straightforward and honest, but you do it in a way which gains their respect. You try and work with them and help them along the way. But always be honest and straight. Telling someone that everything’s great may not take them anywhere.

Sometimes people don’t take your advice – that’s up to them. In talking to some clients about their tendering process, their attitude has been – we’ve been doing this for years, we don’t need any help with that – but then six months later they tell you they’ve not got back on to a public sector framework which means they’ll not get any business for at least the next four years. That’s a very costly mistake. But they could have spent a few days looking at how they do things, a wee bit of investment…the payback is huge, but the downside is also huge.

Gary: So having moved into business development and sales, Noel, has that been the direction of your career ever since?

Noel: Yes. Whenever CFM became ICL-CFM, I became Client Services Director for the public sector in Ireland. Which helped me build up my network across the whole of the public sector here even more.

Gary: At that stage, Noel, you must have had guys working for you who had been in sales a lot longer than you?

Noel: Yes, quite a number of them. That was interesting! But my job was to find the big opportunities and pass those back to the sales guys. The more I could find, and the more they could convert, then we all won our bonuses. So, once the sales started coming in, everybody saw that the process was working. This was between 1991 and 1998 – ICL-CFM won some fantastic contracts. We grew from 145 people to 700 in seven years. Our first contract was the civil service which was worth £4m a year; by the time I left, we were turning over £77m a year. In Northern Ireland, that was huge growth.

Two good friends Robert Bailes,  Norman Greg and I were head-hunted and we became the founder directors of SX3. This was a big start-up! 450 people overnight! I became Sales and Marketing Director for the Group.    The plan was to grow the company through contracts but also through acquisition. In a period of 18 months after we started in SX3 we acquired 6 companies. This was a much bigger role for me, it was across the whole of the UK and the salespeople of any companies we acquired worked for me.

I then became MD of Ireland around 2002. I enjoyed some elements of that but not others – I wasn’t close enough to the customers. But it was good experience to have – running a company of 850 people, £72m turnover, part of a plc group.

When I left Sx3 in 2004 I had a number of choices going forward.    I had offers to become CEO of this or that – because I had spent 14 years growing two companies into much bigger companies – I could have tried to do that again. And then there were other opportunities to take some equity in a company. But there was also the opportunity to do something on my own – but the question was, could I really build a business around it? It took me about 3 months – some people had asked me to come and help them with bids, with building a sales strategy and team – and after about 3 months I thought, there’s something here, but is it sustainable as a business?

The turning point was in July 2004 when I created NB1 as a limited company, mainly because I could not handle international clients who were Plc’s if I wasn’t a limited company, but also by that time I was convinced I could make a go of the business.

Gary: Everything about this direction, Noel, was different than anything you’d done before. You’d worked for sizable organizations, you’d been working in the context of a team – almost every aspect of what you are about to do is different. Now you’re working for yourself, on your own, it’s so different…

Noel: Totally. There’s not a day now in my company life that is the same as the day before. I don’t work 4 days a week for company X.    Today I might be working for company X, tomorrow for company Y. And company X might be a public sector body and company Y a Renewable Energy company from Europe that would like to do business in Northern Ireland. One day I might be doing work with a company’s board, tomorrow helping another organization do a business strategy. I’ve other roles as well – I’m a Belfast Harbour Commissioner, I’m a non-exec with a company and I’ve retainers with different companies, in different industries. So every day is different.  I work with small companies right through to large global players, but who have a very small footprint in Northern Ireland.

Gary: That really must keep you on your toes, Noel, from day to day? Did this sort of working come naturally, right from the start?

Noel: At the start, it was very, very different indeed.   I’m a very process-driven person, that’s the ex-civil servant in me.  So I like having things under control! And when you look 3 months ahead and see all these half days and days with different companies doing different things, it’s very daunting at the start.    Your customers are paying for your advice and experiences, so they’re expecting you to say something profound! They expect you to tell them what needs sorting and how to do it.     Sometimes I act as a mediator when problems occur within or between companies, or I might be hired to establish if there’s an appetite for a merger with a certain company, discretely.    So I can be hired to do a lot of different things – but it’s all basic good experience and advice. I understand how the public sector works, I have worked in big corporates, I have worked in sales roles, I have been an MD, I’ve been a member of boards, so all these things come together. And if I don’t know the answer to somebody’s question, I know how to find it.   Sometimes for particular situations specialist advice is required my job is to find someone who can do it at a reasonable price for my client.

Gary: A lot of what you do Noel, is around business development. How do you think we fare, here in Northern Ireland, with regards to our business development skills, and particularly in the IT industry here?

Noel: One good thing about working for ICL back in the early ’90s was that their training for sales and marketing was superb. Account management, management of pipeline, processes of engagement – all that was part of ICL training programmes. I wonder do today’s companies actually invest in that level of training for their sales people.   I chair the Sales Institute and it’s a big issue with us – we’re trying to get the profession to be more professional. We have professional sales programmes from basic certificate right up to degree level and Masters level – mostly in ROI but available in NI if required, the difference being that in ROI the courses are heavily subsidized by government grants but this is not the case for our courses in NI.

We have a gap in sales and marketing skills in NI.   I work with clients’ sales teams and there is an absence of real killer sales people. When you look at the IT industry over the past 20 years, you can probably name the 5 or 6 sales people who have sold the really big deals.

Some technology companies think that the person selling needs to understand the technology. I don’t necessarily agree with that. They need to understand the benefits of the technology – yes – need to understand what the technology can do for the client. Beyond that they can bring in a support person to explain more details.

Gary: Translating the features into benefits. Too often not done.

Noel: I think one of the key skills that I see that is lacking is being able to close, knowing when to close the sale. Sometimes you can close the sale in five minutes, sometimes it might be two hours, sometimes you might have to leave it until the next visit. The ability to close, the confidence to close, not being arrogant, reading the signals right. Watching the body language, the signals, you just know that the person wants to buy. You then just need to close it down professionally.  Next time you are in your favourite shop observe someone closing a sale – I love watching food sales people at work – when they say “do you want me to leave this beside the till for you sir” – you’ve just been closed by a professional!

Gary: Noel, a last question – you’re dealing with a whole range of industries – as you look round Northern Ireland, what do you think we’re good at?

Noel: I think NI People are very good at building relationships. The difficulty can be getting to the people you need to talk to. And sometimes you need help with that. But Northern Ireland companies have a good work-ethic – people respect that – we tend to be proud of what we do, the service or product. The issue is back to the front-ending, the selling and marketing of it. We’re not good at that. A lot of the problem is to do with access. Once our companies get access, they tend to be very successful.

Gary: So we just need to add a bit more professionalism to the sales and marketing side of things?

Noel: I think so. And networking is very important. You don’t sell things sitting in the office, you sell things out meeting people. But it’s all about raising your profile – it’s no good if people don’t know what you sell and what you’ve got.    Profile is so important.  In times of austerity at the moment, some companies will be taking the view – batten down the hatches, don’t go to events, no marketing, no events, we’re cutting down our sales force. We’ll starve our way through the crisis.    Absolutely the wrong way to go. There may be a crisis, but there is still business there to be got! You’ve got to get out and get it. The clients are out there, they’re not in here, you’re not going to build your business waiting for the phone to ring!

Momentum’s Ian Graham: The ICT sector offers a huge opportunity for Northern Ireland – but the skills shortage needs to be addressed

Momentum CEO, Ian Graham

Gary: Ian, tell us a bit about your career in the ICT industry.

Ian: I went to Queens to study electrical and electronic engineering, as a Post Office student apprentice. When I graduated I got an ICI post first degree award, so I went to work for ICI in Runcorn, Cheshire. And after a year, they sponsored me to go and do a PhD. Once I had that under my belt, I was appointed as a lecturer in the department of electronic & electrical engineering. I lectured in engineering mathematics & control theory. And I had nine great years there!

But I began to wonder if I was achieving as much as I could; at that time Ford was running their carburettor plant in Finaghy and – this was 1980 – they wanted an IT specialist to come in to write an operating system and to install a client–server minicomputer suite to automatically, in real time, check & calibrate the carburettors that came off the production line, by controlling forty test stands. I had four GA (General Automation)  16440  minicomputers that controlled ten test-stands each, plus a master.

Gary: That sounds like a very ambitious project for its time.

Ian: Yes, it was huge – and it was all written in Assembler. And implemented in 15 months – it was real-time and tested 16,000 carburettors a day. Plus, it would calibrate them – so they were taken from my test stands, bolted on to the engines and the car drove off the production line.

I then decided to put a reporting system in place because we were collecting a lot of data. So we could know how many carburettors were being tested, what had failed, why it had failed and so on. And I remember giving the plant manager, Walter Caruthers, a terminal, and he had no idea what it was! But when I showed him what he could use it for, he thought it was brilliant. So then he brought Sam Toy over from Warley in England and boasted about what we’d done. The result was I was immediately promoted to manager in charge of test and monitoring systems for Ford Europe!

And…I had a great time! I was based in NI, but travelled to Warley in Essex on a Monday morning and then back on a Friday evening. But we travelled throughout Europe, because we did projects in Cologne, Ghent…all over. But after about 9 months, Ford said, it’s about time you moved – we’ll pay for your wife and you to come over for a week to see where you’d like to live. So Katharine and I came over, but after one day I knew it wouldn’t work! We’d a young family and I could see my wife was unhappy. So I decided I’d have to make a move from Ford.

At that time, Gordon Bell was recruiting for Software Ireland. So I joined the company, in Linen hall Street – in exactly the premises that Singularity are now in!

Gary: Software Ireland had come out of ICS?

Ian: Yes, it was a spin-out of ICS – as was Computer Maintenance Ireland. Software Ireland, although it did a lot of services work and had an ambition to become a software product company, selling products into global markets. It was an ambitious, but very challenging vision, created by Tom Winter and Gordon Bell.

Gary: That wasn’t something that was happening in NI at the time, was it?

Ian: No, not at all. And we had the devil’s own job to convince IDB that software was manufacturing, so that we could get support for R&D  and so on. So I put a team together of myself, Shane McMordie, Paul Madden, Colin Chambers and Alan Gilmore. ICS at that time had moved into distributed time-sharing systems, using DEC PDP-11s, using the DIBOL language, the DEC equivalent of COBOL. Now, my team decided we were going to move into the new UNIX operating system. We thought it was better than DOS because it was multi-user, and we saw great opportunities for mid-range systems, as well as lower end systems. This was mid-80s.

So, we thought – there are really no applications available for this new range of UNIX systems. So, if we could produce a DIBOL language complier for UNIX, then the vast range of commercial DEC applications could be made available. Easily – by just re-compilation. So, I bought us all a copy of Dennis Richie’s C programming manual & we all went off and read it. We all considered how you would go about writing a compiler, we learned about all the UNIX utilities…and we wrote SIBOL – Software Ireland’s Business Oriented Language, which was DIBOL compatible. And we sold it all over the States, to Fortune listed companies, and to the huge plethora of young companies that was emerging, based on UNIX, multi-user systems, which were trying to compete with Digital. And we enabled them to do that.

Gary: So this allowed their Digital applications to run on these new UNIX systems?

Ian: Yes, that became our niche. And one of our customers was AT&T, and they said – would you like to develop an IBM System 36 equivalent? We’ve got our new 3B2 Unix product line,  we like your DIBOL product, but we’d love to get after the IBM market. Because that is huge. So they paid us and we did it. And it was no easy task – because this was not just one language, this was Job Control Language, totally different screen processing, message handling, database – all of this… a big job! But we managed and so that became our second product and we sold that to companies like Siemens Nixdorf, NCR, AT&T, and so on.

Gary: So this by now had spun out of Software Ireland?

Ian: No, it stayed Software Ireland, but the products side got much bigger than the services. So the second product, for System 36, became quite successful, and we had a great time along the way! Selling it all over the world. I remember we once had a user conference meeting in Antigua in Guatamala for all our South American distributors and it was fabulous! We had 8 people came – but our American guy, he ended up going to the Antigua in the Caribbean by mistake!

At that time, then, the System 36 was being superseded by the IBM AS 400, so that was our next challenge. And in some respects that was a bridge too far – because it was hugely complex, with a very sophisticated relational database management system. We started the work, kept going, but never actually got it perfect. We did a very big deal with MAAPICS [IBM’s manufacturing application system], but we struggled to deliver what they wanted and they eventually pulled out.

But at this time, we’d been bought over by the Unicomp Group – run by Steve Haffer. Unicomp was our distributer in America, and they decided to buy us from Lamont Holdings who owned us at the time. So he bought us, but in 2000 that was the dot com bust – the market went, there was no money, and Steve had no alternative but to sell. So they sold us to a fly-by-night outfit from California. The dream had disappeared! We did mange to look after everybody in the company, everybody got paid and so on. But, when we were bought from Unicomp, they were more interested in doing development in South America, rather than Belfast.

Nineteen years of my life…so I do know about selling into global markets and the huge challenges that you face doing it. But there’s no question, you need to have a product focus if you’re going to be successful.

Gary: So what came after that, Ian?

Ian: Well, you’d just left Invest NI as their software sector advisor! So I applied for that post and got it.  I joined Invest NI doing the same role as you – going out there, supporting their sales teams in the field, convincing potential investors of the value of coming to Northern Ireland. It was a great job…fabulous…and I learned a lot about the local technology sector, about what companies were doing with technology right across the States.

Gary: So, you’ve seen the job that Invest has been doing, in terms of FDI, from the inside. What do you think of the job they’ve done over the past 15 years or so?

Ian: If you think back to the problems here through the Troubles, if you think back to the fact that we’d no outstanding advantages, other than our skills and capability, we didn’t have low corporation tax – frankly I think Invest NI have done a great job and they continue to do so. They compete very well with other regions and I think it’s a tribute to their capability.

Gary: Ian, you’re the Chief Executive of Momentum, which has a whole range of members – most of your members would be local companies. So what’s your feeling about FDI – one aspect of FDI is that the companies coming in take up resources coming out of the education system, so what’s your view about this, and how beneficial or otherwise is FDI for Northern Ireland?

Ian: The ICT sector offers a huge opportunity for Northern Ireland. But we are nowhere near critical mass yet. There is plenty of room for expansion. I believe our long term aim must be to focus on creating a globally successful indigenous sector, but we need inward investment as well…because that fuels the whole growth of the sector; it creates the high level skills that can then percolate out into the indigenous sector. A balanced combination of FDI & indigenous is what we need. Certainly, at our stage of development, just as it is in the rest of the island of Ireland, FDI is required to accelerate development and growth. So, I accept that some of the larger investments coming in create not just a ripple, but a tsunami, in terms of the impact they can have on existing companies. Because they compete for skills and they can attract existing employees.

But what we should be doing, is ensuring enough people with the right skills are available. We need to create a pool of available skills to address this, which can reduce the impact of FDI on existing companies.

Gary: And do you think this process is working successfully at the moment?

Ian: No, I think that, at the moment we have a skills crisis emerging here. We’re doing some work at the moment to try and assess the scale of this.  The feedback from companies, in the sector – in all ICT positions, not just software development – is that there is a real shortage of skills that needs to be addressed. I’ve got figures from the universities – and now we’re not running any graduate conversion courses at all, like the Software Professional course – and the numbers of graduates in ICT subjects are pretty small. Particularly when you compare them to the projected demand.

Gary: One might argue, that the ICT industry has been doing well for a while, but there are bumps and dips, as we saw in 2000 – so, someone might say, if we put a lot more funding into increasing the pool through the education system, who knows what the future might hold and so are we just storing up trouble for ourselves…it might be all right now, but it may not be all right tomorrow. How do you feel about that argument?

Ian: I can see that, but it’s impossible in this sector to exactly balance supply and demand. Companies have told me that we are losing opportunities through not having readily available skills. They are having to turn away work. If there are the skills available, companies, particularly the inward investors, will be bidding for more work, projects from their parents. And so I think we need to take a positive view on how we can grow the sector – build it and they will come! We need to create that skills resource. Across Europe there is an increasing ICT skills shortage. The Republic of Ireland, for example, reckons it is short by something like 2,500 people.

And of course, they are immediately addressing that. Through conversion courses, through initiatives to encourage more people to take ICT subjects – they are addressing that. We need to do the same. We need to be much more aggressive; if we’re going to build this economy, to  be globally significant and to meet the expectations of our population, then we have to take some risks. It’s just impossible to predict exactly supply and demand of skills, and the problem is, it takes 4-5 years for skills to come through the standard education system. So – let’s go for the optimistic view ofthe growth, rather than the pessimistic view. Forget about trying to balance it – that doesn’t work.

Gary: Ian, In your position as Chief Executive of this membership organization, you believe the ICT industry is potentially significant for the overall economy in Northern Ireland?

Ian: Very much so. And it’s significant not just in terms of what it can do by itself, but how it can enable competitiveness in all other sectors. In areas like Smart Grid, like wind and green technologies, ICT is a key enabler. So this can fuel the whole expansion across many sectors of the economy in Northern Ireland.

Gary: Looking across your members, Ian – what are the key strengths of the industry here?

Ian: This industry is truly a knowledge-based activity. And our strengths are the quality and capability of the people that come through our education system. There’s no question that we generate world-class programmers, world class IT people. And that is our major strength.

Gary: So what could our companies be doing better?

Ian: We need – if we’re going to be successful – we need to look outward, not inward. There’s a big market out there and we need to address it. It’s not easy. It’s no coincidence that all the world-class software companies, bar one, are US based. They have a market of 350 million who speak one language, on their doorstep. So they can afford to build their capability locally before they go globally. The one exception is SAP and the reason they were successful was because Germany had such a huge manufacturing base and they provided a manufacturing ERP solution. 80% of their sales in the early 90s were still in Germany. Then they went global. Now, we haven’t that luxury; we have to go global at a very early stage, which is not easy. But we need to have that vision. Global market development is becoming a key requirement in all that we do in this sector. One great development at Momentum recently has been to welcome the digital content companies on board – and some of them are world class – but again, they have to think globally. So we’re working closely with Invest NI’s trade division and they have had some extremely successful single-sector trade missions to America and other parts of the world.

Gary: So we’ve a positive story to tell about Northern Ireland companies, Northern Ireland skills, the IT industry here in general – it’s in rude health at the moment?

Ian: It is indeed – except for the fact that, at the moment, we have a shortage of skills. That is becoming a major problem that could really upset this projected growth that we’re hoping to achieve.

Gary: So, who needs to do what?

Ian: Well, we need to get government and industry aligned and working together on a series of initiatives that, yes, encourages more people to study computer science, but also look at ways at rapidly increasing the number of people available – through conversion courses, through looking at how we increase the number of students that can be brought into universities – to exceed the MaSN cap, e.g. for subjects like computer science. So we need to agree a range of initiatives with the Department for Employment and Learning, Department of Education, Invest NI, industry…and then we need a plan of action. David Mawhinney is now chairing the employer board, which consists of many of my member companies, and is pursuing a number of these initiatives to try to solve this current situation.

Gary: Looking back on your own career, what would you say was the thing that you’re most proud of?

Ian: I think, the launch, along with AT&T of our System 36 product in Morristown, New Jersey, at their headquarters. That was a proud moment!

Allstate’s Bro McFerran. The IT industry has massive economic growth potential for Northern Ireland – having the right skills is all that’s constraining us

Gary: Bro, you’re running the largest IT company in Northern Ireland. You employ and continue to employ people with high levels of skills. That must be an on-going challenge?

Bro: Similar to a lot of other IT companies, we at Allstate need .Net, Java, Tibco, Middleware, all those frameworks, and we need Premier League people, whatever analogy you want to make. We need rock stars for our industry.

The problem is you get a sort of revolving door for these good people…but I suppose the only good thing about that, is that if you can keep then in Northern Ireland…it’s great. But I’ve recently seen some companies from the South coming in, offering top dollar, all sorts of deals to get them on board…and if we lose these people to Northern Ireland, it’s going to be to all of our detriment.

So, I think what we need to do is, seriously think how we upskill, re-skill people. What we do in this building here is, we identify what are key talents, the people that are really worth investing in. We used to have a system here where, if somebody wasn’t doing so well, they were trained on new skills. But we quickly came to the conclusion that…hang on, we shouldn’t be investing the key, strategic skills, in people that aren’t able to contribute properly to the project – it’s the guys who are the heroes in the projects that need to get the additional skills added on to them so they become the people we continue to build the organisation on.

Gary: Actually there’s been quite a bit of research on this which shows that, it’s a waste of time training people in areas that are not their strengths. Where you really want to put your training budget is in people’s strengths and make them even better.

Bro: And you see, the message that I would like to send out clearly to the government departments and agencies, is that they need to invest in those sorts of skills – it’s not just getting graduates up to speed. They need to make sure we have that knowledge layer with the experienced people, who can put it to good use.

We have seen recently where budgets have become under constraint and some of those training pockets have dried up – which is not good for Northern Ireland industry. But we also need to make sure that the money we do spend in re-training, upskilling, is spent exactly where it’s required and that we get the rights sort of results from that.

Now, because we’re one of the largest IT companies in Northern Ireland, we’re the biggest target for any potential inward investors. So, I’m very conscious when I’m talking to inward investors – and I do, I don’t discourage them, I’m a great believer in the sort of halo effect you get from this – I say to them, if you come here, you’ve got to be good corporate citizens and do the training programmes. We’ve trained a lot of the people, some with very little IT background. If I look at the 1900 people that we have, I’d say at least four or five hundred of them have come in with non-IT degrees. We’ve nurtured  those people into the industry and yes, it’s starting to bear fruit now, but I think if other companies are prepared to do that, and be good corporate citizens, then that is a good model for Northern Ireland going forward.

And I not only welcome those companies, I would try and help them in any way I can to try and set up their business here, because I think it’s going to be good for all of us in the end of the day.

Gary: The IT and software industry has huge economic potential for Northern Ireland, but we never approach it in a really strategic way, so that the inward investment and local investment and the training and the education system are all joined up – and if we need to do special things like bring in people on special visas or whatever to get people in key areas, I mean all of that… with a strategic view to say, look, this industry could be a growth engine, a much bigger growth engine for us…could we ever get there?

Bro: We could get to that point. But we haven’t done it; we’ve done it in spurts. What has happened is, various people have seen that the IT industry is burgeoning, and it gets a lot of attention,  whether or not it’s strategic or just tactical…then all of a sudden if there’s downturn in the IT sector, they take their foot of the gas and then it’s, “Yeah well, I told you so, this IT sector’s not going to work out after all”. And that is not a good place to be in.

Gary: Everything seems to be in silos – you’ve got the universities doing what they do, FE does its thing, DEL has its priorities and budgets and Invest NI the same – and there’s not much continuity, no cohesion, how could we ever produce that? Is that a political matter, or how do we get things joined up?

Bro: There’s a lot of the parties need to come round the table and agree with that. There is a certain arrogance in some parts of Higher Education that says, we’re the ones responsible for turning out these type of people. FE have their role to play as well…but I think we really need people with an IT vocation, who really enjoy it. Too often it’s a young person’s 2^nd or 3^rd choice. We need to cultivate the spirit that we can create something that has massive potential here – just look at the example of First Derivatives, which is an example of a very good, top-tier company that can be developed out of Northern Ireland – and, or course, you can’t ignore the fact that companies like Allstate and Liberty and Citi and New York Stock Exchange and those sorts of companies are producing a lot of really good, well paid jobs in this economy and are making a massive contribution.

As well as that, I like to think that, in the way that Queens and UU have spawned the odd business project – and probably not enough of them! – I think you get the same thing coming out of businesses such as ours – people who get knowledge, who see that there are niche skills that they can put to good effect, and you get spin-out companies from that too.

I call this the Boucher Road syndrome – somebody once set up a car showroom in Boucher Road and I’m sure they worried about their competitors setting up either side of them, but now it’s a honey pot for car buyers. And far from this competition doing their business harm, it’s done the opposite – it’s improved it. And that theory works in the IT sector – I don’t look on a big inward investor as a competitor. I see that as a potential for more cooperation, collaboration and getting more momentum behind what it is we want to do as a region. And it adds to the credibility. Invest NI, credit where credit’s due, did a fabulous job over the last 10-15 years in attracting mobile IT jobs to Northern Ireland, in the face of very steep competition, particularly from the Republic and the other UK regions. So  we’ve done well, and we need to build on that.

I’m old enough to remember when, back in the old days of the Software Federation, we said, “Is it reasonable to set a target of 4,000 jobs in the IT sector?” Well, I’m now in the situation where I can say that, had the skills been available, we probably could have done that in Allstate, never mind Northern Ireland.

But we need to be aware that we have growth issues. We would be a bigger company if there were more skills available here. I’ve no doubt the same thing is true of all the other inward investors. If we had really good skills here, we would be the first port of call for any development. And our ability to get those skills is the only thing that’s constraining us.

So it has to be the focus.

Gary: So how would you ever get that level of cohesion between the
relevant departments and agencies, educational institutions and the industry? You’re on various working groups involving DEL – presumably that’s  a good vehicle in that department. But that sort of wider cohesion, trying to promote & enable a more strategic approach to Northern Ireland and this IT opportunity – how would you ever make that happen?

Bro: I think it requires more than just me and my peers in the industry carping from the sidelines. We do need to get a vision created that this can happen and we need a champion for that vision. We in the industry are, very single-mindedly, trying to deliver the visions we have for our own organizations, but I’m a strong believer that the whole of education in Northern Ireland need to be overhauled. We’re maintaining three or four different education systems…we don’t need integrated education, we just need education full stop. The whole education system needs overhauling…if we want to grow this economy the way we want to grow it, all of our educational output need to be more focused.

Somebody told me the other day there are 200 people training as pharmacists in the University of Ulster and I think there’s only a requirement for about 50 a year here – so why are we directing resources at training those people to become unemployed pharmacists?

What we need to do is to say –if we have a buoyant IT sector, these are the sustainable numbers going forward, so therefore that needs to feed back into all the educational system -  FE, HE, schools, right down to primary school level. We really need to get people focused on this.

I’ve often said, it’s far better to get someone to come out of education with a business plan than a A level certificate. But we aren’t nurturing entrepreneurial skills, we aren’t highlighting entrepreneurial success. If you look at the US, no matter how you want to criticize their education system, there’s no doubt that the kids that come out of their education system come out brimming with confidence. And I don’t think we have enough of that here.

It’s changing slightly, but it’s still got a long way to go. If we did all of that, and we had a programme for government and a programme for economic development that was highlighting where the sectors are, the sort of skills that we need and that all fed back to the education system, then…

Now, you’re asking – what are the chances of doing that? I think – not in my lifetime! But at the same time, I think we can get closer.

Gary: Are we looking for a political champion, that the industry can work with and together we can try and promote this agenda?

Bro: Unfortunately – you see this a lot in Northern Ireland – if some visionary comes out with a plan for the education system, one side will say their piece and the other side will say theirs and there’s always some sinister force at work. So until we get  rid of all of that baggage here, it’s going to be hard.

Gary: So, what does the IT industry needs from the education system?

Bro: I think what we need to do is make sure that it’s all connected right through the education system. We’ve done a lot of work here on schools programmes like Time to Compute, and trying to get more girls into computing and science based subjects – and that’s been very successful. Even this week, one of our guys is developing a publication to go round all the schools, which is designed for 8-12 year olds, getting them to design their own websites. That’s definitely the sort of thing we need to be doing.

But we also need to make sure we connect all the dots from education, through FE, through HE and on through to the workplace, because, y’know, we’ve suffered from it as have other employers. You get new graduates in and only about 20% of what they’ve learned is relevant to what you are doing, so you have to retrain those people. It would be great if we had a seamless path through education into the workplace and people were coming out with oven-ready skills that we can put to work straight away.

Now, I wouldn’t also rule out the possibility of us doing apprenticeships, and maybe using that as a route. I just think we need to be more creative about how we attract people to the industry. There is no doubt about it – there’s a worldwide shortage of IT skills. It’s a global issue, not just here in Northern Ireland.

If we can get the right quality of education here and produce the right quality of IT people, quite frankly, I don’t think Invest NI would have anything to do! Because all of those global FDI projects are going to come here as their  first choice anyway.