There are people who will tell you that practising core
IT in the UK is simply no longer affordable, that tasks such as
coding or systems support should all be sent offshore, and that we
should wave a fond farewell to another UK industry that is "just
not economically viable".
I believe there is another way, one that combines long-standing
outsourcing arrangements with the need to own your own business
processes. As an airline, our business moves so fast and our IT is
so fundamental to it, that we need to retain flexibility and
strategic control.
But this time last year, I was very worried about the
longer-term viability of my "smart-sourcing" model. To manage
suppliers, whether they are in Bracknell or Bangalore, you need
experienced managers who can tell when specifications are not being
met and bug-rates are out of control. This requires much more than
just supplier management skills. Unless you have been part of a
software development team, written code, designed functions, tested
and put a system live, you are going to struggle to understand the
work your suppliers are doing for you.
My concern, shared by many of my CIO colleagues in the UK, was
that if all the "commodity" work had disappeared on a plane to
Bangalore, where would the IT managers of the future be able to
learn these skills? Had we just outsourced the bottom rungs on the
ladder for the whole IT profession in the UK?
BA has recruited graduates into IT professional roles for the
last three years. We give our new recruits a good grounding: six
months building new systems, six months designing them and six
months in IT operations running them. Sadly many other companies
have not been able to afford this investment in the future, with so
much of the work increasingly being done in India.
Something remarkable is happening in IT, which offers real hope
for home-grown IT professionals. It is called "agile" working.
Agile working is one of those new things, which at its heart is not
so very new. It brings together approaches to task allocation and
project delivery that have been around for some time, but in a way
that is new and exciting and involving for everyone concerned; and
which helps to build and enhance valuable IT professional skills in
the UK.
So how do you do "agile"? You begin by bringing the business and
technical people together in one team. You agree on the measurable
changes you want to achieve, compile a list of incremental changes,
which will generate benefits and rank them. The team collectively
allocate their skills to the task that need to be done, and keep
revisiting this.
The ways of working in an agile team are very different to
traditional methods. Members of the team need to be able to turn
their hand to technical design, to business analysis, to
development, to integration and to testing. This is much more
interesting and much more challenging for the IT professionals
involved. If you want to find out more take a look at the
Agile Manifesto.
We are now planning on having six agile teams running across
different parts of the business. The IT professionals we are
currently recruiting can look forward to being trained as
multi-skilled IT experts who are competent in many disciplines and
can work effectively as part of a joint business/IT team. We are
also planning to re-train many of our existing staff to be
multi-skilled. So instead of supervising teams remotely in Delhi or
Chennai they work at the heart of projects delivering business
benefits to the company and its customers every few weeks.
We should not get too carried away. I readily concede that not
everything is suitable for an agile approach and there will still
be large, traditional programmes that require detailed design and
segmented skills. There will still be systems - not least here at
BA - that are built and supported off-shore. But this is no longer
the only way. The really great news is that the agile approach
enables fantastically inspiring jobs for new graduates entering the
UK's IT industry.
So we are working to let the ladder down again, providing a
career path that will produce top IT professionals in the future
who know how to design, code, test and launch real-life
systems.
Paul Coby is CIO and head of financial shared services for
British Airways