IT departments in the UK have a strong pedigree of innovation,
creating new revenue streams and business opportunities. Given our
rich computing heritage, why should this surprise us? Ross Bentley
gives UK IT a pat on the back
For IT workers the past 18 months have been undeniably tough. This
period of retrenchment has offered some industry watchers the
opportunity to decry the lack of innovation coming out of UK IT
departments. But scratch the surface and you will find plenty of
examples of IT professionals not only producing top-quality work
but creating new revenue streams and opportunities for their
businesses and themselves.
One example is information management company Kalido, which was
spun out from global oil giant Shell as a separate software company
in 2001. Since then Kalido has licensed its product to a number of
blue-chip customers, including Philips and Cadbury Schweppes
.
During the mid-1990s, Shell was having difficulty measuring
business performance across its global business centres due to its
vast range of incompatible computer systems. "For example, the
Shell lubricants division had 35 separate computer systems across
45 countries," says Andy Hayler, who formerly worked within Shell's
IT consultancy division and is now the chief executive of
Kalido.
"There was no consistency of product definitions across the
business - we were always adding apples to oranges."
Hayler and his team received funding to build an information
management system in 1997 - a project that resulted in "1.7 million
lines of code and some very clever algorithms".
After success within Shell, Hayler produced a business plan to
develop Kalido as a commercial software program. "The problem that
Kalido solves is a pervasive business problem - one that exists in
every big company. Within the business plan we had to show market
revenue projections, human resources and geographical issues and
the potential return for shareholders."
Another £15m was raised for the new project. "There is a big
difference between an application used internally and one produced
for commercial use," says Hayler. "The code has to be far more
bullet-proof, the documentation has to be far more ordered and it
has to be customisable because there is no knowing which systems it
will run on. In the end we spent 10 times as much on the commercial
release compared with the internal application."
It was at this point Hayler went out to recruit a team of people he
felt could take Kalido into the commercial world. He hired
developers from Oracle and ICL and later when the company was
incorporated he brought in a sales director from business
intelligence supplier Cognos and a marketing director from IBM. "To
make Kalido viable in the commercial world I had to bring in
different skill sets - people who had lived and breathed the
software industry," he says.
Not to underestimate the jump that has to be made between a smart
piece of software for use in-house and one that is ready to go to
market is a point picked up by Simon Johnson, vice-president and
co-founder of remote access technology supplier Aspelle - a company
that spun-off from the IT department at the London branch of
investment bank Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein in June 2002.
"A lot of work is required to take an in-house product and build it
into software of commercial-grade robustness," he says. "You have
to take into consideration a much wider range of customer needs
beyond what your own company has. There is also a huge amount of
testing involved."
Johnson was previously a vice-president in DKW's IT department.
Despite scouring the market for a remote-access product that would
allow staff to telework from various locations, he could not find a
suitable product.
His dilemma came to the attention of Microsoft, for which DKW had
acted as a beta site over the years. Members of Johnson's team were
invited to work with Microsoft in Redmond, which enabled them to
accelerate the development of their Secure Sockets Layer virtual
private network product.
"After a great deal of market research and a lot of support from
within the company we were able to spin Aspelle out. It is the best
thing I have ever done in terms of career development and it has
been a fascinating journey," says Johnson.
Working with a software supplier to develop commercial software is
a strategy that several UK IT departments have pursued.
In January 2003, Computer Weekly reported that Woolwich Independent
Financial Advisors had partnered with Oracle to develop a customer
tracking system. Alan Keegan, commercial development director at
Woolwich, says, "Our partnership has enabled us to create a
best-in-class technology solution while the cost of the software
was very reasonable."
In what is a win-win situation Oracle is now selling the system to
other financial firms with the same requirements. Keegan says the
Woolwich staff who worked alongside Oracle are now occupying senior
positions within Woolwich. "Our people have grown with the system,"
he says.
Another example is Yorkshire Building Society, which last year
teamed up with Hewlett-Packard to turn its mortgage and savings
system into an application service provider service for other
building societies. Rob Jackson, operations director for YBS, says
the system was developed three to four years ago to run YBS'
business operations. "We built the system ourselves because there
was no suitable off-the-shelf package," says Jackson.
The hosting deal will help the building society recoup development
costs of £21m. "We now have a [software] asset that can bring in
revenue," Jackson says.
Another approach is to license your application to a specialist
software provider that will be able to bring to bear a greater
expertise in developing your software. Proctor and Gamble did this
last year when it licensed its software to product lifecycle
management specialist MatrixOne. The application, which is based on
the MatrixOne eMatrix product, provides a database of the technical
specifications necessary to run a consumer package manufacturing
business.
Steve David, chief information officer at Procter & Gamble,
says, "We do not want to be in the software business," adding that
it would be too costly to continue developing upgrades for the
application.
The company no longer wanted to support the application and sees
the licensing agreement as an opportunity to maintain the product's
development while driving technical specification standards in
consumer packaged goods and pharmaceutical industries.
Eureka! What are your intellectual property rights when
you have a brainwave?
Unlike physical products, intellectual property can be copied
and distributed very easily. This is why companies where
intellectual property is a main asset, such as software houses are
keen to protect it - to guard all their hard work.
Most workers are governed by a contract that will contain
clauses stating that anything they produce at work belongs to the
company that employs them.
Things may differ if you are working as a freelance consultant.
Generally, unless you sign a similar contract to that mentioned
above, which many consultants are asked to do, your work, whether
it be software designs, architectures or code, belongs to you.
One grey area when dealing with intellectual property rights is
"know-how". This refers to working methodologies, eg some
consultants will have a unique methodology or approach to projects
etc.
Of course, if you work at home after hours there is nothing
stopping you from working on your own projects and developing your
own programs. Usually in cases such as these the fruits of your
labour belong to you and you will own the intellectual property
rights of anything you come up with. However, beware, some
employment contracts say work you do at home is also owned by your
employers.
If you work on your own stuff during the lunch hour or stay late
after work - the intellectual property rights to anything you
produce will remain the property of your company. After all, you
are using your organisation's IT, office equipment and
electricity.
To ensure the intellectual property rights stay in your hands
there has to be a clear delineation between work and home - and
check your contract does not stop you owning them.
It is a complex area, and the above is only the basics. As with
all such areas of the law, make sure you get your own independent
legal advice. You do not want to lose the benefit of your work on a
legal technicality.
Andrew Lucas is senior lawyer at law firm Simmons &
Simmons 'www.simmons-simmons.com
Why the Brits are best
Five great UK technical universities
There is a lot of leading-edge development work going on inside
academic institutions in the UK. Last month a contingency of 18
universities from around the UK demonstrated their technologies at
the CeBIT exhibition in Hannover, Germany
1. Among their number was the University of
Kent, which showed a system that chooses which biometric technology
to use (iris, voice, fingerprints, handwriting or face recognition)
in any given situation, depending upon the level of accuracy
required.
2. A form of magnetic storage was presented by
the University of Plymouth. Called magnetic random access memory
(MRam) the technology could double the density, increase access
speeds tenfold and lower the complexity and cost of data
storage.
3. The University of Leeds demonstrated a
computer simulation model, which could enable 3G network operators
and equipment manufacturers to maximise available bandwidth and
guarantee quality of service
4. Another technology on show was real-time
signal analysis developed at Anglia Polytechnic University in
Cambridge, which could be deployed to locate underwater wreckage,
heat sources in nuclear power stations, leaks from pipes and
seismic activity.
5. Using a new 600:1 data
compression/decompression (Codec) system developed by Umist in
Manchester, visitors at CeBIT were also able to see high-motion
video for mobile phones.
Five good reasons why the IT revolution couldn't have
happened without Blighty
1. The dawning of the computing age can be
pinpointed precisely. On 21 June 1948, shortly after 11am, Baby,
the first device we would recognise today as a computer carried out
its first successful program run. This epochal event took place,
not in Silicon Valley, but at Manchester University, more than
seven years before Bill Gates was born.
2. Colossus, developed at Bletchley Park for
use in code-breaking during World War II, started work in February
1944, and was instrumental in winning the war for the Allies.
Though it was not programmable in the modern sense, having to be
rewired each time you needed to run a different job, it was still a
recognisable ancestor of the modern computer.
3. The first company in the world to
appreciate that the computational power of early computers had
applications in business administration was tea company J Lyons
& Co. Lyon's computer, Leo, ran the world's first commercial
calculation in September 1951.
4. GI Joes may have created Arpanet, and
fellow Americans Bob Kahn and Vint Cerf may have developed TCP/IP,
but it took British super-brain Tim Berners-Lee to create the World
Wide Web. Without Berners-Lee, there would be no HTTP, no URLs, and
therefore no global information space where the world can exchange
data. The millions of teenagers now able to call up images of a
scantily-clad Kylie at the press of a button owe him a debt of
gratitude.
5. You will have to indulge us here, but
Computer Weekly became the world's first newspaper for IT
professionals when it opened in September 1966. "A computer is not
a magic box," its launch editor wrote, and "software is not a pack
of cards which, shuffled into the right order, can cause something
to happen. They are an integrated package dependent upon each
other." We have been offering thought leadership to the computer
industry, home and abroad, ever since.
Five UK IT greats
1. Charles Babbage 1791-1871
Known as the "father of computing" 19th century politician,
philosopher and inventor Charles Babbage is remembered for the
designs he drew up for an analytical engine. The machine was
designed to employ several features subsequently used in modern
computers, including sequential control, branching and looping.
But although Babbage worked on this project from 1830 until his
death in 1871 it was never completed.
2. Alan Turing 1912-1954
While he is best known for his Enigma code-breaking exploits
during the Second World War, Alan Turing's legacy is far wider
reaching. His Acer machine was one of the first attempts at
creating a true digital computer. He was also one of the first to
come up with the concept of artificial intelligence and algorithms
for digital computers.
3. Adam Osborne 1939-2003
Computer pioneer Adam Osborne had a brief stint as a computer
mogul when in April 1981 the Osborne-1 computer was introduced. The
Osborne-1, which was the first commercially available, reasonably
priced (IBM introduced a $20,000 portable machine in 1975) portable
personal computer, was a huge success but soon fell back to
competition from another portable computer made by a new company
called Compaq.
4. Clive Sinclair 1940-present day
Clive Sinclair is one of the best-known contemporary British
inventors. In the 1970s and early 1980s, he applied solid-state
electronics technology to produce the UK's first electronic
calculator, a handheld personal computer and a digital watch. He
is perhaps most fondly remembered for his C5 electric vehicle,
which hit the streets in 1985. It is rumoured he is planning a new
electric speedster hybrid - combining the C5 with that other
classic British auto the Robin Reliant
5. Tim Berners-Lee 1955-Present day
The father of the World Wide Web is London-born computer
programmer Tim Berners-Lee. After graduating with a degree in
physics from Oxford University in 1976, he went on to join the Cern
physics research centre in Switzerland as a consultant software
engineer where he developed the World Wide Web as a global system
to assist collaboration through hypertext.
Around the UK
South East - R&D expenditure here makes up
almost a quarter of the UK total
Wales - more than 2,000 inward investment
projects were secured into Wales between 1983 and 2000 - many in
IT
Belfast - top-class universities, home to
leading technology companies
Scotland - Sun, Motorola, Agilent, HP, IBM,
Microsoft, Oracle, Cap Gemini, Wind River, Cadence, 3Com and Adobe
all reside in "Silicon Glen"
Cambridge - leading-edge since the 1960s, many
IT companies are Cambridge University spin-offs
West Midlands - Rapidly expanding e-commerce
and software centre with more than 1,800 IT companies
North West - Liverpool is the fibre optic
gateway to the US and Ireland, while Manchester is one of Europe's
best shared service centre locations
South West - tradition of defence and aerospace
know-how now directed at IT
London - regarded as the e-commerce capital of
Europe
www.invest.uk.com