Richard Sarson

Wimbledon

One foot in the grave

Great initiative. But it has been tried before and petered out.

One example was the early days of e-commerce when the buying departments with lots of business experience launched EDI (Electronic Data Interchange), and did their best to keep the IT dept away. The result was that the UK dominated the e-commerce market in Europe for several years.

Unfortunately, the teen-age techies from California took over during the dot.com boom, and because of their lack of commercial sense, created the crash. E-commerce has never been the same again.

But the real golden age of business/techie partnership was in the 50s and 60s, when the industry was new, and the people who joined it had nothing else than business or public sector experience. Then there were few computer cock-ups despite the technical limitations of the kit - like 100 words of store and punched card input. The guys then, giants compared with today's pygmies, had the practical knowhow to work around the technical problems

This golden age came to an end when Harold Wilson poured money into "computer Science" departments at Universiities, and the pure techie was born. Since then the computer cock-up has become the norm.

Anyway, good luck to the BCS, Intellect, NCC et al, to redress a half century of techiedom.