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/

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 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 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!

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.

Bro: It’s funny, I’ve been through all sorts of evolutions…I’ve been a teacher, a civil servant, done clerical work, moved into sales. That was the big breakthrough for me and at that time I was selling for Rank Xerox – that really was a metamorphosis for me. They did great sales training, you got visiting a lot of different businesses and you were able to pick up business experience along the way. You got rid of all your self-doubt and started to build up confidence. So that was a great training ground. I did that for about seven years and worked here and down south – Dublin, Cork, Belfast.

Great training, but then, my father’s words were ringing in my ears – “get into the computer business son!” So I decided to try and get into computer sales. I applied for jobs with ICL and Memory Computers and ICS – they were the big hitters at that stage. ICL was setting up the small business, System Ten range, and I fast realized that the only way you could sell these things was if you had really good applications to run on them. So I wasn’t their best salesman! In fact it took me all of 9 months to sell my first System Ten – it was a £60,000 sale, which I suppose in those days was pretty good! But that was for a machine with a 40K processor and a 2.5Mb removable and 2.5Mb fixed disk system. That was the total of my success at ICL!

I was then approached by my erstwhile Xerox colleagues who had secured the franchise for Wang in Northern Ireland. Wang was an up-and-coming word-processing and minicomputer company. They had a very exciting range of products and I got involved and eventually one of my ex-colleagues and I set up Logicom.

And Logicom went for about 20 years. We grew it to about 60 people and we were doing sales, servicing, software development, training…and it was very successful. But Wang’s star rose and subsequently fell – with the advent of the IBM PC, word processing took on an entirely new image and, whilst we still had a very good installed base, it was obvious that we were plateau-ing and in danger of becoming extinct. At stage we took the decision to sell off various elements of the company and we sold part of the company to a Nasdaq company called IMR. They bought that as the nucleus of a software development division in Northern Ireland which they asked me to head up.

We delivered about 120 jobs and then they suggested to me that I came and worked for them in the US as Vice-President of Global Sales and Marketing. Which sounds very grand, but effectively we were selling mostly Y2K solutions into the big corporates in the US. And IMR had a big development potential in India as well as Northern Ireland. So I spent about 18 months doing that.

Gary: So how did you find doing that sales job in the US?

Bro: It was a lot different. It was a seven-day-a-week, 14-hour-a-day job, and you had to do everything , from sales situations to presentations to market analysis. Which was tough and you did a lot of travelling. We grew sales substantially while I was involved, but I found it increasingly difficult to punch in the  hours and I wasn’t enjoying it. So whenever Allstate announced they were going to set up in Northern Ireland, I thought that was an ideal opportunity for me to get back and involved in probably what I know best. So I threw my hat in the ring and was very glad they offered me the job. And that was in January 1999.

So I got embroiled in this, enjoyed the company, enjoyed what we were trying to do – and to this day I’m still enjoying it very much. Because, if you can’t enjoy what you’re doing – and at IMR I wasn’t enjoying what I was doing and, no matter how much I was earning, it didn’t compensate me for the fact that I wasn’t getting the same job satisfaction out of it that I do with this job. I love this job – job satisfaction would be number one for me…money’s secondary.

Gary: How would you compare the job you are doing now with managing Logicom. Are the same skills required?

Bro: Yes, very much so – the scale is different. But you’re managing people, managing people’s expectations, trying to get the most out of people, trying to broker deals. It’s not any different from when there were ten of us in Logicom and when there’s 1,000 or 2,000 in Allstate – you still have to manage people, get the best out of them, broker the deals; you have to create an environment where innovation can flourish. And you also have to make sure that it’s fun for everybody. So, y’know, I don’t want people coming into this organization with clenched fists on a Monday morning, thinking “this is an awful job I have to do”; we try & make it a nice place to work and we’ve got lots of examples of people who’ve left here for more money and allegedly for more opportunities, but they’ve come back because they like the organization.

And you want to work with people who want to work with you…and it’s not that everybody thinks I’m a fabulous boss to work for… this company is everybody that works for it, it’s all the interactions of everybody in the business. And I think we’ve created something of a template for potential inward investors. You only have to look at the number of awards we’ve won over the years for things like work-life balance, corporate social responsibility, training and development of staff, best place to work…they’re all important components, they’re all as important as the outputs we have for some of the fabulous projects we’ve delivered.

We do some very mission-critical projects for Allstate, very complex projects, and do a fabulous job…and the biggest kick for me is that they are now looking upon us as being leaders in creating things and it’s no longer a subservient relationship. We’ve been going through an exercise recently where we’re trying to grow the effectiveness, the value of the work that we do…we don’t have any vested interest in continuing to grow purely the numbers in this company. I’d far rather leave this company knowing that we’ve increased the value of the work that we do, rather than simply that we’ve increased the headcount.

Gary: So how would you characterize your own personal leadership style?

Bro: I think it’s  quiet. One of the best definitions I read recently of a leader was, a leader is someone who gets people into the situation where they accomplish things by themselves and they don’t even understand that a leader’s been involved. That’s the characteristic of the sort of leadership style we have here. Everybody’s got initiative – that’s why we hired them – and we expect them to make decisions, we expect them to be innovative, to automate processes, eliminate waste.

And if we get an opportunity to highlight and laud people’s success, we very much do that. Recognition forms a very large part of what we do here. Every 3, 4 weeks people come to my office and I personally recognize them for things they’ve done, or good comments we’ve got from our client base in the US. That’s important  – people understanding they are appreciated, that they’re making a difference and it’s not just a case of coming in, getting the job done and leaving at night.

So, I don’t impose a rigorous leadership style on the business, other than you’re expected to get the work done. Obviously you have to create the vision for the company,. You have to keep everybody enthused about that, believing that vision can be a reality…. and you continually have to keep emphasizing that vision, making sure everybody’s bought into it.

In the early days, I did create the vision that we could have a very large company here and be doing a lot of diverse projects. That’s come to pass. The vision now is to sure all our systems have high levels of availability and quality. And at the same time, seeing if we can bring higher quality jobs to the table. And we’ve been looking at a number of models here, where we can become centres of excellence for particular technologies here that are going to add a lot of value back into the business in the US.

Increasingly we’re getting involved in the R&D stage of projects now, which is a vindication of everything we’ve done so far. They’re coming to us at the beginning of projects now and asking for advice, rather than half way through and saying, “can you help us out?” That’s great.

As well as that, we’ve diversified the business substantially. We started off in a software maintenance, support role, then we got into the whole software lifecycle, and we’ve done that very well.  But now, in addition to some helpdesk and call-centre activities, we’re providing accounting expertise back to the parent company, actuarial expertise, doing analytical work, providing telecoms specialism. Now it’s great that we can do that from Belfast, from Strabane, those are all good signs.

And if we look across the whole Allstate enterprise, there are very few elements that we are not touching in some way. In some cases, we own the whole piece; in other cases we make a big contribution. So, with our 2,000 people here, against the whole IT organization in Allstate of around 5,000, we’re a substantial proportion of that.

Gary: Does being part of a US company have positive effects on you, on the company here?

Bro: We took the template of a US organization and we shaped it into a Northern Ireland based, US organization. We’ve taken the best of what was created there and we’ve used it to good effect. But we haven’t been afraid to change things that need changing. We’ve been substantially left to our own devices; we’ve taken a blueprint and made it our own flavour. We went through a big education exercise early on to help people understand they weren’t working for an IT company, but rather an insurance company. So we’ve started thinking about the end-customer – the people buying insurance – so that we can think about how to develop systems better and improve our existing systems.

And the US folks also see that we have a big role to play in certain technologies, e.g. mobile, where we in Europe would be perceived to be ahead of the curve. So we’ve got involved in a lot of mobile R&D projects; we’ve delivered some of the first mobile apps for Allstate. So that is something where Allstate sees us a having a key strategic advantage.

But there is a North American culture which runs throughout the organization here. That is, yes, it’s an easy company to work for, but at the same time, we set fairly exacting standards. But we’ve a beating heart at the same time.

Gary: Is what you’ve done here the thing you’re most proud of, looking back on your career?

Bro: It’s very hard to point your finger on a single thing. I remember always harbouring a notion, going back into the ‘70s, that Northern Ireland was a place that was ripe for the development of the right sort of IT projects, particularly inward investment IT projects. I suppose, being part of the 1^st major inward investment here after the Good Friday Agreement, which has turned out to be an outstanding success – and it’s not me who did that – it’s everybody who has worked for this organization – and being part of that band-wagon – does give me a warm glow. It’s something I can look back on with satisfaction.

But that’s not a personal achievement, that’s a collective achievement. I could look back on my career and ask, what is the most formative thing that happened along the way? – there have been so many things, a collection of serendipitous events that put me here. And there’s nobody that would be more surprised than my mother and father, if they were here now and saw the position I was in.

I remember looking for a bit a career advice from my father and he said, “It’s like this son – you pass your Junior, you’ll be a bookie’s clerk; you fail your Junior, you’ll be a bookie!” And to a certain extent, I’ve made it being a bookie, I’ve done the bookie’s clerk bit and I’m now the bookie. Or whatever the analogy would be in the IT business, whether you’ve been the computer salesman and now you’re running the shop, so to speak! But it’s been great, and as long as I keep enjoying it, I’m going to keep doing it. Whenever the fizz goes out of it, I’ll hang up the boots!

Gary: What are you best at?

Bro: Maybe, being a bit of a fixer. In some ways that’s what you need in a business like this. You have to see everything as a
challenge and everything as possible. That there is no obstacle that stands in the way of you accomplishing what you need to do. That is, being capable of doing every job in the place and being capable of engaging with anybody you have to, to make sure things get done. So, I suppose, being able to do all of the above is what I’m best at. And not being afraid to do it. I wouldn’t say I’m a great leader, apart from the fact that I’m prepared to take anything on.

A guy I used to work with, used to talk about the inevitability of gradualness! This is what has basically characterized my whole career – a very gradual process, but with a certain inevitability. And that’s just that you have to believe that no matter how big the obstacle is you can fix it somehow.

In PART II, Bro will be talking about the IT skills situation in Northern Ireland and the education system.

Alastair: Well, I started as a deer farmer! my father was the first person to commercially bring deer into Ireland. I was brought up in a farming family just outside Cookstown in Tyrone.

This helped put me through University at Jordanstown. I did Computer Science there, and got a student placement with Relay in 88, I did some more work for the company in my final year  and then I joined the company full time in 89.

I was in the software development team at first, I got more involved with customers, and so I eventually moved more into sales. Then, whenever Greer [McKenzie, the founder of Relay] retired in 99, I led a management buy-out with two other mangers Michael Harding and Jackie Conn. That took a few months to put together, but we got it sorted out. So that’s been, what…twelve years now owning and running Relay.

Gary: So, Alastair, you’re in the unusual situation in this industry of having worked for the same company your whole career. There aren’t that many people do that – IT people tend to chop and change.

Alastair: Well there was a good opportunity here for me and I enjoyed my work and working with my colleagues. I got a buzz out of it – that was the important thing. Most of the people I’m working with now, I’ve been working with for twenty odd years. That’s a strong testament to Relay – we’ve got really good employee retention. 50% of our people have been with us at least 5 years.

Gary: That’s quite remarkable in this industry.

Alastair: Most of our management team have been with us over ten years, a lot of key developers have been here with me for long time, many for 15 years or more.

Gary: So in all the phases and changes that Relay has gone through over the years, what is it that produces that level of interest and commitment from people?

Alastair: Part of it is we’re always re-inventing our technology, we’re always going forward. And another part is that we’re strong advocates of Investors in People. And that helps us keep the communication going, right through the company, so that everybody knows what we’re doing, trying to achieve. That’s been key. When I took over as MD, that was one of the first challenges I took on – Investors in People – we went for it, got it and that’s been a strong element this past twelve years. So everybody’s involved, everybody’s engaged – sure, we’ve had some turnover in staff, but it’s small, lower than most other IT companies.

Gary: So how long had the company been going whenever you took over as MD?

Alastair: The company had started in ’85, so…about 14 years.

Gary: Tell us a bit about Relay. First of all, what is it that Relay does?

Alastair: We provide an end-to-end, one-stop shop solution to enable an Irish insurance broker to sell both online and through a call-centre. This includes full-cycle trading with the insurance companies. And we have a full panel of insurers in the Irish market that provide motor, home and commercial vehicles. We also provide commercial lines of insurance and are having good success there with some underwriters as well.

Gary: And how are things for the company right now?

Alastair: Very exciting times for us. Acquisition is our main growth thrust at the moment – we’ve just completed two acquisitions within the last twelve months. One was Spike Technology, a specialist in household insurance – and then just in the last few weeks we completed acquisition of Brokersoft, who specialize in commercial vehicle insurance. So adding those two products into our portfolio means we’ve a more complete offering to the market.

This combination means Relay now has a 75% share of the Irish business that’s traded through the intermediaries, in motor, commercial vehicle and home insurance. So we’re pretty strong.

Gary: How is the insurance business in Ireland, with all the turmoil in the economy?

Alastair: Insurance premiums are up and policy numbers are down. Overall, there’s still a need for insurance. Of course they’ve had to manage their costs. So their incomes are being sustained.

Gary: In the UK, the broker market has been dramatically affected by aggregators like comparethemarket and so on – is that a trend you’re seeing in Ireland?

Alastair: Ireland is still very traditional. People like to buy from people. And brokers still close the majority of sales off-line. So there’s still a need for the high street broker.

But you could say that Relay essentially provides an aggregation solution. But here it’s seen that the broker is the aggregator; we put the panel of insurance products together for them. So Relay, effectively is the Irish aggregator.

Gary: Thinking back over your time at Relay, Alastair, you started off as a developer – so you’ve been into the technical detail of Relay’s products – now you’re the MD. Do you still get involved in the technical aspects of the company?

Alastair. Every day. I’m constantly involved – don’t write programmes, but every day I’m involved at a technical level.

Gary: So all your people know that, in the end of the day, Alastair knows what’s going on at a fairly detailed level?

Alastair: Yeah! But because the guys have worked with me for so long…they sometimes listen to me! But seriously, I let them run with it…they lead it technically. We have a very strong architecture team, and they lead things… they know where we want to get to, so it’s a team working together. We have a very strong team environment at Relay.

Gary: So how would you describe your style of leadership?

Alastair: Well, it’s all around open doors, good communication, but with a strong organizational structure. That way of approaching things seems to work well.

Gary: What sort of people typically succeed in the Relay environment?

Alastair: We like people who understand the business, the need for hard work… take a pragmatic approach. And have an understanding that a business has costs and that there are opportunities. On occasion, we’ve recruited seemingly high-flyers, but they don’t fit, because they have no commercial awareness.

Gary: Are you talking about technical staff as well as those involved in marketing?

Alastair: Yes. Our recruitment is very thorough and we look for people with some kind of commercial ability.

Gary: I guess that isn’t always easy – it can be hard enough getting technical people, but to get that combination at times must be challenging.

Alastair: We’ve found it very straightforward to get the sort of good people we want. We have a very strong benefits package. We’re competing against the FDI companies, but we’re one of the largest indigenous software companies. We pay well and we retain our people. And if people perform for us, they get rewarded. And people get to enjoy that.

Gary: Looking back over the last ten years, what is the biggest challenge that you faced?

Alastair: Well, I take a very planned approach to life and to business. And if you plan things, you don’t really have significant challenges. Here in Relay, we plan for the next five years; we know where we’re going. In terms of our customers, the average length of a broker being a customer is over fifteen years! We haven’t lost a customer in over five years. And a lot of that is down to careful planning. That planning process means we can anticipate what’s happening in the market…traditionally the insurance market is a slow-moving vehicle…so we plan and we manage our business accordingly.

Gary: Sounds to me, Alastair, you’re bringing your systems engineering background to bear on the way that you manage.

Alastair: Maybe…or maybe it’s the farming background!

Gary: What’s been your best achievement? What are you most proud of?

Alastair: There have been a few things. Being first to market with the eQuote product which allowed comparative quotes online back in 1999 – that was a key milestone; also prior to that we had launched the first Windows application to our market; more recently we’ve developed self-service functionality to allow end consumers to manage their policies themselves. And moving forward we want to continually innovate in our market and help brokers significantly reduce their costs.

Gary: So what is it that you’re really good at? And how did you get good at it?

Alastair: Well, I’d say I’m a good delegator – but then everyone would disagree with that! Multitasking & delegation are probably my two strengths. I don’t think these were things I learned, I think they’re just the way I am.

Gary: So is a good manager born or can they be trained?

Alastair: I think either someone is built for a management position or they’re not; I don’t think they can really learn it. People can learn by their mistakes, but you’ve either got it in you or you haven’t. In our business, just because you’re great technically strong, doesn’t mean you’ll be good at management. Management is all about having good organizational skills and being good with people – but some people who are good technically find all of that difficult. So we provide an alternative career track for those people, where they can succeed and be rewarded – but not as a manager.

Gary: How do you make your people more effective?

Alastair: Give them ownership and responsibility. That’s really worked for us. Allow them headway to make decisions; certainly give advice, but leave them to it. And keep the communication going. It’s a simple process and it’s worked really well for Relay. And praise, when someone’s done a good job – that’s a big thing. Positive strokes!

Gary: You said earlier that you have this long relationship with customers – what’s the key to that?

Alastair: Good customer service. We’ve a very strong team in Dublin that is a main point of contact and they’re very strong technically. People who understand our products and even more important than that, they understand the customer’s business. And so they really do understand the frustrations they have if they have an issue. When people call Relay, they don’t get a graduate in a call centre – they get experienced people who know the customer’s business, the Relay product set and can deliver what the customer needs.

Gary: So what’s in the future for Relay?

Alastair: Continue growing the business in Ireland, providing the most advanced and efficient solutions available.

Gary: Finally, Alastair, what would your advice be to someone starting up a new technology business?

Alastair: Stay out of Ireland! Particularly if you’re selling insurance software!

Find a niche – that’s been the secret to our success; we did try one or two other markets along the way, but sticking to a niche and becoming really good at what you do in that niche – that would be my advice.

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