Senior IT management is about
being a jack-of-all-trades and master of none, believes Bill
Parslow, head of ICT and e-government at Brighton and Hove City
Council.
In his role of
translating Council strategy into IT terms and working out how
systems and technology can best serve business goals, he finds that
being an all-rounder who is equally comfortable with right and left
brain activities is a definite bonus.
“I’m an arbiter
and an in-between person whose role it is to understand both ICT
and the business. So in this type of job, although you need a
logical side to understand the technology, you also need to be a
good communicator and grasp things quickly. It’s about having an
ability to ask idiot questions no matter who you’re talking to and
to have the enthusiasm to use it to best advantage,” Parslow
explains.
But it also helps
having had a colourful background and “being on my fifth or sixth
career”. Parslow started his professional life as an industrial
chemist in the 1970s before going to the University of Sussex to
study English and Drama. After a stint in marketing, he got himself
a teaching qualification and went off to instruct the budding
Letharios of the East End of London.
Finding that such
a vocation was not for him, however, he moved on to pastures
related, if not new. “I blagged my way into a job doing painting,
decorating and plumbing training on a Youth Training Scheme,
working with 16 to 17 year olds who had left school and had nothing
to do. I didn’t know anything about all that beforehand so used to
read up about it in the Readers Digest before I went to work. It
was a great job,” Parslow says.
This eventually
led to a five-year long career in social work dealing with youth
offenders, but by 1989, Parslow was off again. “Rather than do a
Masters in social work, I did a very crammed 13-month MSc in
information systems. It was partly because a friend of mine was a
lecturer at the Poly, but it was also partly a money thing - people
were being poached from the course and were getting more than I was
as manager of the whole youth offending team,” he explains.
The conversion
course he took was aimed specifically at arts graduates, with the
intention of creating a hybrid breed of people that could both
understand technology and explain it in a non-threatening way to
the lay-person. “It was desperately needed a that time and still
is, probably,” says Parslow.
His first IT job
in the corporate world of KPMG, however, was “a huge culture
shock”. But the “change from being a scruff to a knowledge engineer
and systems analyst in a pinstripe suit” was to last for only a
couple of years before Parslow took voluntary redundancy when the
office moved from London to Watford.
His next move was
to spend five happy years heading up the IT department for the
Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority, but by 1997, change
was in the air again.
After his wife and
two of his sons were struck down with ME, it became clear that a
radical lifestyle change was needed and this involved a move back
to Brighton from London. Parslow saw a job advertised at the
Council for an ICT consultant and took it.
“When I moved to
Brighton, there weren’t any immediately sexy projects to do, but
there was some disaster recovery impact analysis stuff lying
around. Everyone else thought it was boring, but I thought it would
be a great opportunity to get myself known across all the different
departments. That’s why I’ve popped up here after doing a variety
of technical and support jobs – because I got to know everyone in
that first year and it paid off,” he says.
And it is
networking that he feels is key to any career advancement. “It’s
very important. Too many people don’t go and talk to other people
that are doing different things, but it’s really valuable to get
yourself known and to try and get a sense of where you can add
value. It’s about networking and communicating all the time,”
Parslow explains.
And it is this
theme of communication that has been a recurrent strand throughout
all of the various careers he has undertaken, but is as valuable a
skill now as it ever was.
“About 95 per cent
of my job is people management and at this level, it’s about
managing the managers that manage the managers. But it’s also about
working with people and being able to listen in quite a humble way
to your technical staff. You have to have confidence and trust that
they’ll understand and plan and deliver technical projects that you
couldn’t do yourself,” he says.
On the other hand,
being able to talk to members of the business, whether that means
other senior managers, lawyers, end users or support staff, is also
crucial.
“It’s pretty
important that you can be trusted not to pull the wool over
someone’s eyes and that people feel confident you’ll put things to
them in everyday language so they don’t feel taken for a ride.
Integrity is one of the key attributes of any senior manager, but
it’s also necessary to have a sense of humour in this job,” he
concludes.