I am an engineer; working with, not in IT

First and foremost, at least for the purposes of this Blog, I am an engineer.  I need to know how things are made so that I can make them work better for me and whoever else uses them.  As a child, it was my bike; as a youth, radios and "HiFi"; and as a fresh graduate it was aero-engines.  And it was around that time that I realised what I really love to do is make models.

Not models of the Airfix, Mecanno or Lego® kind (much more on these later!), but mental models – imaginings of the parts that make up the whole, and how the whole works as the sum of the parts (yes, I have a “Cartesian”, rather than “emergent” mind!).  So it was natural for me to exploit the newly available PDP11 in our department to build FORTRAN models of the insides of engines…

Then in my late 20's I joined IBM and discovered I could help others get more from their investments in computing than just payroll and accounting.

And there's something critical here – Since joining IBM I have not worked in IT, I have worked WITH IT, using it to do stuff for businesses. Yes, I have written code, but I intend the emphasis of this blog to be “how to think about using IT”, in no different a way than that of a building architect, as they “think about using” the talents of builders and suppliers, as those specialists give the architect the parts needed to design (and then oversee the creation of) our built environment - elegant, functional and maintainable buildings, bridges, towers and tunnels.