About Me

I studied Information Management at UCL: the greatest strength of the degree is the range of subjects covered; information dissemination and control are skills that require a broader understanding of the operating environment to recognise and develop all areas of organisational strategy.

After five years in logistics, I chose this degree as I could build on the real world business experience I had gained but it would provide me with the additional skills, tools and knowledge that one needs in today's business world.

Information Management

My degree course was based in the established area of knowledge management but focussed heavily on the developing niche of pure information control and dissemination. Following the boom in IT expenditure throughout the latter part of the twentieth century, organisations started to realise there was much more to gain from their information technology than merely word processing and number crunching.

With the diminishing returns of IT investment, organisations needed to leverage greater value from their expenditure. There was tacit understanding that enormous value, in terms of company knowledge and information, was stored within employees not the systems. A paradigm shift in strategy was adopted by front-runners to amend their IT strategy to concentrate on what was retained, disseminated and produced by the technology in use. Gainingcompetitive advantage is the key driver behind appropriate, effective information usage.

Organisational Change

The Management Studies part of my degree was geared to developing a broader understanding of the business world, how to gain and maintain market advantage and how best to adapt, transform and change to suit the prevailing trading climate.

Using business leaders such as Ricardo Semler, Michael O'Leary and Richard Branson as examples, I developed a long-held interest in both leadership and organisational transformation. The two are intrinsically linked, with many companies suffering when a leader or management team either stay on for too long or quit too early. A long-term, strategic plan for managerial and leadership change coupled with tenacity and an organisational vision are the most common factors in the successful organisations.

Information Systems

The nuts and bolts of systems aren't really my speciality. I can, do and will code but I'm much more interested in the first two strands of my degree. Having said that, there is no doubt that the knowledge I have of coding has benefitted me tremendously in my career since graduation and the computing skills aspect of the degree was one of the attractions.

There is a popular misconception that software implementation can be ad- hoc. The backbone of my criticism of the UK's Identity Card scheme (which was my dissertation topic) is that the scope of the scheme is poorly defined and ill thought out. The history of Government IT scheme failures is nearly always down to poor planning and not actually understanding how a system works or where the functionality should stop.

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