The British Computer Society (BCS) was founded in 1956, back when vacuum tubes were still cutting-edge technology. But the organization has undergone a complete overhaul in the past five years, determined to become more relevant than ever to the world of the Web and the Internet.
BCS President Charles Hughes addresses WWW 2006 this month, bringing a message that comes straight out of the headlines--that something must be done about the continuing failure of the UK's biggest IT projects.
The answer, Hughes and the BCS believe, is professionalization. That means giving the IT industry a recognized certification program that not only develops their technical abilities, but hones professionals' business and interpersonal skills.
Hughes spoke to Builder UK about the changing nature of the IT industry, what can be done to keep large projects from going off the rails, and the role of the BCS in helping the industry change for the better.
Q: During the dot-com boom, companies seemed to be hiring anyone who knew a little HTML, regardless of their experience. What kind of impact has the Web had on the need for or interest in professionalization in IT? Has it been a setback?
A. There were a number of effects. One of the most obvious was a paradox--you had a situation where the reputation of the IT industry is poor, media coverage on the whole is damning, with headlines noting all the major disasters, and you haven't achieved any recognition of the fact that nothing that happens today, in government, retail or anything else, that isn't entirely dependent on the successes we've had over the past 50 years.
The numbers of people joining science courses is going down. The reputation of individuals in the industry is not highly regarded. We are also clearly getting to the stage where we need to have a quantum leap in the capabilities of individuals, what with the Web, the Internet, the ability to move things around quickly anywhere, the growth of offshoring, outsourcing. Another of our achievements, in the UK, we do need to be quite clear, is aiming to create a really high quality IT workforce.
The Internet and the Web are relatively recent developments, from the BCS' point of view--you're celebrating your 50th anniversary this year. How central are those technologies to your program? How important have they become for the UK's IT industry?
They are absolutely fundamental. It is amazing that the Internet only became available for general use at the beginning of the 1990s. That was just 15 years ago, and the Web a couple of years later.
I was working in central government in 1995, and the question then being asked was, are the Internet and the Web going to have an impact on business in the UK? Is there anything the government needs to do about it? Fortunately, the answers they came up with were yes and yes. These are serious questions. We do tend to forget the Internet and the Web are really quite recent phenomena, and the rate of take-up has been prodigious.
Why does IT need to have professional qualifications like accountancy and architecture? How does a professional approach make IT workers better able to deal with or implement change?
By virtue of its nature, change in the industry has always been fast. It has been accelerating by its very nature. It has continually led to change, and will continue to do so. From the Society's perspective, it was perceived a number of years ago as being rather introverted and elitist, but it has been undertaking a major transformation program over the past five years. It's changed its governance, its royal charter, its by-laws, its membership criteria, its membership grades, it has added a whole range of services for members... It's become more open, so much so that its membership is growing rapidly. It's now at 55,000 members. Programs like the European Computer Driving Licence (ECDL) in the UK are making a big difference--there are 1.5 million registered for the ECDL across the industry, including private sector and public sector.
We are very much outfitting ourselves for the 21st century. The importance of professionalism in a broad sense, a lot of people regard it as having a single qualification. That's necessary, but far from sufficient.
First off, you need a range of technological competencies, the ability to demonstrate these, and a range of interpersonal communications skills. Secondly, it involves personal responsibility and accountability. It's not sufficient and correct for a professional to say he did something because he was told to do so. An individual has got to make his own decisions based on a code of ethics. You've got to have a set of best practices, and apply them appropriately.
Third, there is a commitment to the public, a duty to do only what is in the public good. Part of this is that you ought to support the development of the industry, and at all times be prepared to explain to the public what you are doing and why, particularly in our case, in a language the public can understand.
Could you explain a bit about how the accreditation system works?
The BCS accredits more than 800 university courses in the UK. Students can join as an associate member then, after some experience, become a member of the BCS, ultimately striving to achieve the gold standard of Chartered IT Professional. That's the absolute top ranking in the IT industry. Having achieved that, there are a range of competencies, skills and experience to back it up, as well as continuous professional development. It is a matter of rolling progress.
Interestingly, because IT is so pervasive across engineering and science, the BCS is the only chartered institution also chartered to award Chartered Engineer and Chartered Scientist--so we are the only ones with the ability to award the top three gold standards in engineering, science and IT.
Science and engineering, it is also not to be forgotten, have a very powerful business context. Software engineering architecture is very heavily dependent upon a successful and sound understanding of the business context.
What would be different in an industry where professional qualifications are widely pursued and are taken seriously?
Our goals are several-fold. As Peter Gershon, the head of the Office of Government Commerce, put it, "It would make my day if somebody brought me a failed IT project that had failed for novel reasons." Of course, nobody ever did, because his contention is that we understand why IT projects fail, and we keep making the same mistakes.
I would contend that professionals would make fewer of those mistakes. If you employ professional people, genuinely professional people, and you also have a professional organization in which they work, then they are more effective, more efficient, much more likely to meet customer needs. That is the track the BCS is pursuing, across the whole of the industry.
If we can pull this off, not only will we see a higher success rate of IT-enabled business change, we will also tackle the issue of the reputation of the industry. The number of women is very low, and there's a similarly low number of ethnic minorities. We ought to be making efforts to attract more women and ethnic minorities.
Everybody ought to have an aspiration to climb up the professionalism ladder. It's the way both for corporate success in the private sector, and in an individual sense. The higher-qualified you are, the more professional people are, the more valued they are. There is a degree of self-satisfaction there as well. It's a competitive world.
Interestingly, without exception, on the user side, the supply side, in academia, government, everybody without equivocation has said it's a great thing to be doing, and how can we help? It's to do with the diversity of the IT profession. It stretches across many areas of activity, stakeholders, corporates, suppliers, users, individuals. We have had, are having, a lot of help from all.
Why hasn't there been a widespread qualifications scheme in the past, as in other professions? Is there something about IT that resists such a program?
There have been one or two attempts before to set industry-wide standards, unequivocally striving to be recognized alongside the accountants and other recognized professions. One of the issues that has made it difficult is the rate of change. Things do change quickly. We have never got round to the stage where there is a defined core body of knowledge for the profession, and built on top of that a competence architecture, with roles and activities that that applies to. Hence it has never developed into a qualifications architecture that matches that.
There are a wide range of qualifications, but there is little knowledge about how to form from that a program for individuals. Many people follow continuous professional development programs, but by no means everybody. There is significant emphasis on tech qualifications, but often significantly less so on interpersonal capabilities and communications skills.
We think we have a window of opportunity now; the conditions appear right. The level of support in the industry, in government, among users, is very high. We are going flat out to make sure it sticks and is developed this time.
We recognize that we've got a big job, and that it's not going to happen overnight, but it's not an impossible job. There are a variety of concepts, language, capabilities, which are common across the industry. Some, interestingly, don't change over time. Systems thinking, problem solving, the conceptual thinking behind architectures and so on – those are areas which are pretty constant, and yes, of course, the technology changes on top of that. Keeping up with that is an important part and we are going to do it, it can be done.
Is this something more for the rank and file, or do you want to get top IT executives involved?
We are going all the way up to and including CIOs. We will work from a double edged or triple edged agenda: People wishing to develop their careers, capabilities, qualifications; and employers on the supply side, or user side, who want to raise the capability of their IT departments and organizations. The program is being strongly supported by government, who see it as important for the overall development of the UK's IT capability. It's crucial that in the IT sphere the UK keeps its leading innovative and creative edge.
We want to see the people at the top of those trees being chartered IT professionals. We believe employers want to see that as well.
What do you see as the next step?
There is going to be a significant number of next steps, and first of all we are going to put those in the public domain, through events like Prof IT [a professionalization conference held at the beginning of May, and hosted by the BCS, e-skills UK, Intellect and NCC]. We, the BCS, and a variety of other organizations, will be working on concert to drive those programs ahead.
We think people will look back on 2006 and say that this was the year when the IT industry moved into maturity. We've achieved a tremendous amount, and have had some growing pains. Professionalism is critically important to us as individuals, to the organizations we work for and to the UK as a whole.
When you say "maturity", for a lot of people that's a code word for "sluggish growth" - do you think the IT industry's days of dynamic growth and change are over?
We have every confidence that the industry will continue to be exciting, changing rapidly, welcoming new developments and deploying them. If we have a mature profession, it ought to be even more capable of applying rapidly changing technology and concepts from academic institutions more effectively, to the benefit of the nation.
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