Interview Neil Holloway, UK head of Microsoft, expects the impact
of IT on business to continue to grow, and the introduction of new
technologies to maintain the pace of change.
There are busy times ahead for the IT industry, if it is to prove
the benefit of IT to businesses, according to Neil Holloway,
managing director of Microsoft UK.
"There is a crisis of confidence. Businesses spent a lot of money
on Y2K and the dotcom revolution. They are now asking questions
about the value of IT."
According to Holloway, IT directors today spend as much as 70% of
their budgets maintaining and managing existing IT systems. "Only
30% is devoted to new developments," he said. Yet it is these new
developments that will allow IT directors to prove that technology
can add business value. While ripping out legacy IT may not be
viable, "IT directors need to reinvest in new systems to reduce
complexity and take cost out of the business," Holloway said.
Reducing complexity
Complexity will be reduced as the IT industry moves to a position
where users are given the option to have a more integrated platform
that supports both new and existing systems, said Holloway. Clearly
there will need to be an underlying software architecture to
achieve this goal but a broader set of industry partnerships is
equally important, such as the industry's collaboration on XML web
services, he said.
But for the average user, web services are bogged down in a
conflict between two competing architectures: Microsoft's .net and
Java 2.0 Enterprise Edition. "It is important to connect these
architectures together using XML web services," said
Holloway.
Greater collaboration is also needed in security, where a single
user name and password should provide authentication across
multiple IT systems and websites, he said. "A user may log into his
Windows PC then skip through many websites, and should not have to
sign in again."
This will require a federated approach to security where a trust
partnership is formed between organisations, so that if a user
signs on through any of the organisations in the partnership they
are authorised to access any other without a further sign-on.
"At Microsoft we embrace the federated security model," said
Holloway. "As an industry we need to work together and with
governments on the technology and policies needed for security," he
said. But to achieve a completely federated approach to security,
every organisation requiring authentication would need to
participate in a trust relationship.
Business-savvy IT directors
Holloway said IT directors need to understand how IT will affect
the business.
Companies are looking to reduce costs, generate shareholder value
and make staff more productive. While the traditional IT director
had an operational role, Holloway said modern IT directors need to
adopt a business transformation role in their organisations.
"There is a new breed of IT director who is aligned with the
business and can add value by connecting people and processes," he
said. "For example, in the NHS there is awareness at a senior level
of how to achieve electronic prescriptions and electronic patient
records." NHS IT directors need to understand both how much time it
would take to complete these projects and how the role of doctors
will change.
Holloway has some sound advice for aspiring IT directors. "At
Microsoft I look for people who have a broader range of skills and
are able to work outside of IT, inside business departments," he
said. In many businesses, the career path into senior management
starts by gaining experience in other departments in order to
understand the business thoroughly.
Holloway urged managing directors and chief executives to manage
the career paths of their senior IT staff in a similar way.
Working with high-level technology, Holloway sees the benefit of
immediate access to information wherever he is. Since his employer
is Microsoft his desktop is a Tablet PC; he uses a smartphone and
his car is equipped with a datacard providing Wi-Fi and cellular
data access.
But there is a problem. "Many people would benefit from mobile
technology but billing and security need to be seamless," he said.
"Take away 2.5G, 3G and 802.11 [mobile standards]: I should not
have to decide which protocol to use." He would prefer service
providers to remove this unnecessary complexity and provide a
single point of billing for mobile access, irrespective of the
underlying mobile networks.
But he affirmed the success of mobile technology, which is already
helping in some areas of work, such as in social services where
social workers are using Pocket PC handheld computers to fill in
electronic forms when they visit clients.
One axiom of the IT industry, known as Moore's Law, suggests that
processing power doubles every 18 months. Holloway does not see
this rate of progression diminishing. "The growth in disc capacity
will not slow down, nor will the quality of our computer screens,"
he said. The computing platform will continue to evolve and the
software industry will find increasingly more sophisticated uses
for the new hardware," he said.
"I have never taught a computer to learn to recognise my speech.
But at some point, the technology will offer speaker-independent
speech recognition." More powerful computers would also provide the
necessary processing power for improving the accuracy of
handwriting recognition systems and spell checkers, he said.
Next generation IT
Users' experience of modern software has shown that as it gets more
sophisticated, software becomes more buggy. "The industry is a long
way off from being able to build bug-free software," Holloway said.
But there have been moves to make patches easier to track and IT
systems are becoming more manageable he said.
One of the difficulties the industry faces is tracking errors in
software once it has been released. He urged any user who comes
across an error in Office 11, which is due out in the summer, to
use the Dr Watson agent software to send Microsoft a bug report.
Bug reports are "incredibly useful" to the support team, he said.
And it is not just Microsoft that benefits from bug reports - the
same technique could also be applied to bespoke software supported
internally, said Holloway.
Greater industry collaboration, robust security models and tackling
costs and maintenance overheads incurred by the IT department are
the immediate challenges confronting IT directors, he said.
For mobile services to fly, Holloway said service providers will
have to tackle billing, by providing a single bill for all forms of
mobile data access.
And he advised IT directors to gain operational experience in
business units so they have a holistic view of the business.
- Holloway takes on a new role at Microsoft, as vice-president of
sales, marketing and services for the EMEA region, in
July
CV: Neil Holloway
- Appointed vice-president Microsoft EMEA in April 2000
- Appointed managing director of Microsoft UK in July 1998
Since joining Microsoft in 1990 he has held a number of strategic
posts in the UK subsidiary including two years as deputy managing
director and director of the Organisation Customer Unit
- Managing director of Migent UK
Business development manager, Ashton Tate
- Master of philosophy degree in operational research and control
engineering from Cambridge University and a BSc hons in mathematics
from Bath University.