Interview with John Higgins CBE

John Higgins was born in Salford, in 1954. His father was a draughtsman. He designed for a small company in Radcliffe in the North West of England which made measuring instruments. John adds: “The measuring instrument they were most famous for was a wheel with a counter on it that measured the distance between things. You can still see surveyors and people marking out the roads and so on, using them today.”  His mother was a housewife and stayed at home with the John and his younger sister and brother.

John’s parents were keen for their children to do well at school, pass the eleven-plus, go to grammar school with the aim of getting office jobs rather than a shop-floor jobs.

John grew up in Whitefield, between Bury and Manchester and attended his local primary school of which he has fond memories. He enjoyed football and says: “We used to go out at the end of every day and play football until dusk when you couldn’t see the ball anymore.”

Having passed his eleven-plus John went to grammar school where he sat his A levels in maths, further maths and physics at the age of 16 almost 17. He chose to attend the University of East Anglia in Norwich to study for a degree in maths and physics. His choice of university came down to the images of the campus in the UCAS booklet, he says: “I wasn’t examining what the job prospects were of the students who went to different universities.  It was probably more what the pictures of the campus looked like and whether it had a lively student bar, and that was it far enough away from home as well.”

He goes on to say of his time there: “I enjoyed studying but I probably enjoyed the rest of university a bit too much. I ran the student bar. I enjoyed my time at university so much that frankly studying was a bit of a second-order hobby.”

While at university, John secured a part-time job settling bets at Ladbrokes, something that he’d done as a Saturday job while he was at school. He says: “It was well-paid. I worked on Saturdays, I worked all the way through my holidays.” Occasionally, John would be asked to stand in when the Ipswich shop manager was off sick. After college, while he decided what to do next, he continued working at Ladbrokes back in Manchester.  He adds: “It was well-paid, you were your own boss, you ran your own shop, you paid the staff out the till. It was the easy thing to drop into and I did that for a few months. As a Saturday job, being well-paid, working with numbers, settling the bets was quite a fun thing to do.”

In 1975, after completing his degree, John joined the North West Regional Health Authority in Organisation and Methods. John explains: “Organisation and Methods was systems analyst but without the computer.  The other common title for a similar sort of job but more in the manufacturing sector at the time was called Work Study, or Management Engineering. It was really all about how to improve the efficiency of systems in the round. It was really analysing a lot of data.”

One of John’s projects was to look at where to efficiently site ambulances in the North West of England to respond to emergencies in the shortest possible time. Another was to look at what the traffic flow in car parking at a major hospital should be in order to make it efficient to allow people to drop off at A&E. John says of the role: “In many ways it shaped my thinking from then on because I’ve always been interested in how the systems work from one end to another and how can you improve their effectiveness.”

After two years at the North West Regional Health Authority, John moved to London Brick into another organisation and methods role. He stayed with London Brick for five and a half years.

It was here in 1977 that he saw his first computer. He says: “I quickly realised that the interesting systems work was being done by the people in a different building who had something to do with computers.  I got to know what was then called the data processing manager quite well, and he more or less created a job for me called a systems analyst. We had a computer room in that building where you went up to a hatch and presented them with punch cards.  When it was quiet, the operations manager would let me into the computer room to see the flashing lights and stuff. It was a Univac 9030; the Univac mainframe was the first computer that I think I saw.”

The machine was used initially for payroll. John says: “The payroll computer system was the first one that came in and it didn’t immediately replace all the people who sorted the complicated procedure manually, but gradually, it did.” John adds: “It was quite common that payroll was the first application.  Interestingly, in BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT, we still have a payroll software group, so, it’s still an active field.”

After becoming a systems analyst, John moved on to become a project manager implementing an accounting system which was written by the company’s computing department in COBOL.  John explains: “As a project manager, I had a couple of systems analysts and a junior accountant on my team, and we built an accounting system from first principles.” In order to do this, John studied a one year certified diploma in accounting and finance which he says “has stood him in good stead ever since”.

While at London Brick, John witnessed the launch of the PC and persuaded the accounting team to buy a couple with a spreadsheet. He says: “I can’t remember which spreadsheet it was but that made more difference to the accounting team than the big underlying accounting system we were putting on the mainframe.  That ability was transformative.  Up until then, there were handwritten ledgers at head office in London, which were beautiful things. They had this system for checking the adding up in them which was called Remainder 13; you put in an extra column, next to whatever the entry was, what the remainder was if you divided that number by 13. At the end of the day when you added up the columns, you also added up the remainders and the sum of the remainders should have equalled the remainder of the sum if that makes sense.”

On his management style, John says: “One of the most important jobs of the manager is just to make clear what everybody’s job is and how they work together. … I was always very focussed on making sure everybody knew broadly what their outputs were and then tell me how you’re going to do it and let’s just run through if you’ve got any concerns about how you’re going to do that.”

 When it comes to removing people who do not fit in with the team or making redundancies, John says: “It was always part of the job. If someone wasn’t fitting in the team, then you had to remove them from the team in the best possible way.” He points to the Netflix culture and says: “They make it very explicit that if you don’t meet the performance targets, they expect you to be gone but with a better than average pay-off.  It is part of the deal, you know that if you join us that you’ve got to perform, and if you don’t perform it’s not going to be a horrible failure, we’re just going to say, sorry that hasn’t worked out, here’s a decent pay-out, while we go and look for a person that does have the attributes that we want.”

In 1982, John moved to Triad Computing Systems of London, based on Kingsway, as a business manager. The move was prompted by a desire to work somewhere a little more modern than the very traditional London Brick company. John explains: “By keeping in touch with friends, I realised there was this whole exciting world of systems houses in London developing. Although I had had fantastic opportunities at London Brick and was in my mid to late 20’s running big teams putting in major systems, affecting business, I just hankered after catching up with where all my graduate friends had gone. I saw this opportunity for a job at Triad and it was an absolutely classic London systems house with smart people doing interesting project work for a variety of different clients, working on a whole different range of computers.”

John describes his new role as business manager as similar to that of a project management but with more commercial responsibility; shifting from being a user to the supplier. He says: “You learn different things from doing both (user and supplier).  … The best people I have met are where those two parts of the picture fit together.”  John spent five years at Triad.

In 1987, John moved to Wilkins Computer Systems in London, an IBM agent. John, as the general manager, worked alongside the owner and founder, Jeffrey Wilkins. He says: “It was his business and I did the day-to-day operations. I learned a lot from him.”

He explains the difference between IBM agent and dealer: “Wilkins was both an IBM agent and an IBM dealer. As a dealer for their PC-based systems, the basic business model is that you buy them and sell them on.  The agent model is where IBM sells it directly, but then they pay you a commission.

“The agent model was for the System 36 and 38, which were the bigger mini-computers of the day.  Being an agent was an attractive way to work because IBM stayed in control of the configuration and also the agent didn’t have to layout money buying a wide range of IBM system 36 and 38 stock.

“Typically, we would work with clients to do the specification … then IBM would check it over and suggest anything additional that might be needed. IBM would deliver the kit and then the agent would be paid 10% or 12% of the purchase price. This was good income for a software company in those days, because you could also sell your software and services at a fair margin as well.  Typically, we used that agent income for our R&D pot, so that we could invest speculatively in research, in developing the software.”

John adds: “We put systems into quite big organisations. The Institute of Mechanical Engineers which was one of our big applications. We had a lot of reasonable sized clients and these systems were ideal for them.”

John left Wilkins and moved to SSA, a medium sized software development company which was developing for the IBM AS400. The headquarters of SSA was based in Chicago, but John remained UK based with travel to the US. John ended up working for SSA after it acquired Softwright Systems.

John explains: “SSA hired a technical director who had this vision that the AS400 was a thing of the past and the Linux-based client-server model was the way forward. At Softwrite, we had developed our own object request broker and SSA acquired the company and that technology with a view to re-writing their very successful application. It could have been a competitor to SAP, but they chose to re-write it to take it off the AS400 platform and onto this new client-server approach.”

Unfortunately, the re-write did not go well. John continues:  “They went from having happy, contented clients that were running on AS400 quite merrily to this object-oriented Linux-based thing, a techie’s dream, but it never worked as reliably as the AS400. After that, they were forever chasing their tail, trying to pretend with clients that it was working when it wasn’t.  It was during the period when somehow computer hype got carried away and people were prepared to believe very strange things when the evidence, right under your nose was, this isn’t working.”

Asked what lessons can be learned from SSA’s experience, John points to the Gartner hype curve which came out not long after this and says: “People realised that there was this hype thing. So the lesson is wait until you’ve got over the top of the Gartner hype curve and things are settled down.  I’m not sure there are any businesses that need to be taking those big technology risks.  By all means, do it in a bit of the computer department at a university where you want to see how these things work out, but don’t bet the farm on that sort of stuff, bet the farm on it when it’s right down the flat end of the hype curve and you know it works because it’s worked for lots of other people.”

In 1996 John was invited to join a Res-Rocket, as CEO based in the US. The start-up company, which was venture financed, aimed to allow musicians to play together over the internet. The company wanted someone who understood tech, business, numbers and who could have a bit of fun with them.

Asked if it worked out, John says: “Not in the classic sense. We raised several rounds of funding and eventually got acquired by Cisco who incorporated the technology into something else. We knew what we were doing technologically, but in terms of what the business model would be, that was completely cutting-edge.

“We predicated our approach on the idea that people would pay a monthly subscription for this service and in those days, everything on the internet was free. We were trying to push a model that was completely untried.  We then switched the model to try to tie up with music equipment providers and that was beginning to get some traction.

“Once we got the thing built and up and running, which was no mean feat, the main thing we discovered was that the business was a music business and the network that you needed to run it was the music industry business, and I had a tech industry network.”

With a need to commit to living in the US and his eldest daughter starting at |Oxford University, John and his family decided to return to the UK.

In 1998, upon his return to the UK, John became the director-general of the Computing Services and Software Association. John explains how the offer came to him:  “Someone that I had worked with in the past called me one day and she said, “The CSSA are looking for a director-general,  had you thought about applying?” and I said, “Hang on, I’m a West Coast US entrepreneur, running an association doesn’t sound like my sort of thing.” She recommended that I should talk to the guy (Rob) who was then running and see what sort of time he has had and just explore it.” That was brilliant advice because Rob said, “Come and do it for 4 or 5 years, you’ll meet some amazing people, you’ll get to know all the leaders of the industry, and it’s just a fantastic thing to do.” He was quite right, it was a fantastic thing to do.”

Speaking about the balance between networking and lobbying done by organisations such as the CSSA, John says there is a need for sectors to have people to lobby government on their behalf, adding: “Somebody asked me if CSSA was a lobbying organisation or a networking organisation before pointing out that ‘lobbying organisations tend to be better funded but networking organisations are more fun. In fact, national associations for software and services, throughout the world and certainly throughout Europe, are much more focused on networking and self-help, how can you learn from colleagues in the industry, how is the industry doing. The lobbying of government was quite immature, largely because it was a non-regulated industry that government didn’t really have a lot of impact on.”

CSSA merged with the Federation of the Electronics Industry (EFI) to create Intellect. John says: “This larger organisation did have a bigger advocacy requirement, but it still did an awful lot of networking. When I run the Brussels organisation, that was 99% advocacy and 1% networking.  So, there is a big transition in these organisations and CSSA was very much at the networking, mutual benefit end of that spectrum.”

“One of the things I’ve come to realise over the years is these organisations are very much a fabric of our society.  They are a place where the lonely CEO can talk to another lonely CEO of another company, in a way that doesn’t risk any sort of cartel issues or competition issues. They can chat to other people doing things like them and realise they’re not alone in doing that, they do have the same HR and other issues.  All this is a really valuable part of the structure of a sector and society generally.”

Looking back at his achievements at CSSA, John says, “We moved to new offices, we definitely modernised ourselves, we built a good, young enthusiastic team that really did help facilitate that networking and we started to build a reputation with DTI who were beginning to pay a little bit more attention to our sector.”

On the subject of public sector IT, John says that while at Intellect he spent a lot of effort and time “working with the public sector, with government department CIOs,  with the Office of Government Commerce, really trying to improve the public sector’s use of IT.”

He adds: “The whole ecosystem was one of not really understanding the end-to-end nature of what they were doing.  I’m sure there were problems with faulty engineering but I don’t think that was the major cause of it.  I think the major cause often was trying to specify some end-to-end thing that was massive and unproven, and nobody-nobody really knew what they wanted until they’d got it. That’s why things like agile computing, doing things a bit at a time, came about. …We produced codes of conduct that we worked with. We also created new roles, for example, the government had a senior responsible officer for every project and so we developed a senior responsible industry exec role; we matched the roles out, the SRO and SRIE etc.”

John next became Director General for Digital Europe, an organisation whose members include forty national associations, like Intellect, across Europe and around seventy of the world’s big tech companies.

John explains how he came about applying for the role, saying: “Intellect was a member of this organisation and the director-general there had come to the end of her time so I asked the president if I should apply and he encouraged me. I was quite interested in doing something a little bit different, broadening my knowledge of Europe and so on.”

John adds: “Digital Europe and similar bodies for other industries, they’re much more integrated into both the policymaking and the research spending agenda than such organisations are in the UK. The reason is that European institutions need to deal with European bodies, because otherwise who do they talk to, what are they going to do?  They get input from the member states, but when it comes to understanding the impacts on the chemicals industry or the car industry for example, who do they talk to? These European representative bodies are very much part of the fabric.”

John was also appointed President of the European Commission Strategic Policy Forum on Digital Entrepreneurship. He says: “The role was to look at how we can

get European industry to adopt digital technologies more quickly and more effectively to become more globally competitive and efficient. I  was delighted to have that opportunity to be able to work with the commission bringing together people from all over Europe, to look at how we could accelerate the uptake of digital technologies across Europe’s industrial base.  It was a fantastic opportunity and fitted in exactly with what I was trying to do in my day job, representing the industry.  So, I really did enjoy that, and I still do things today that are spun off from that.”

Asked why Europe is not one of the technological leaders of the world, John says: “There are any number of reasons, but if you were to pick out one reason above all others, to me, it is to do with the fact that Europe is not one market. People will tell you that the huge advantage that the American companies have is one big English-speaking market that they grow quickly in and then are able to quickly move into the other markets. …  take for example Phillips, they explained it was so much easier to expand their business in the States than it in Europe, because of the fragmentation of the European market with different rules in different countries, different ways of doing business. It’s enough of a burden to slow anyone down.

“So, above all the other things, you can point to infrastructure, skills, venture funding, you know, but I think all those are secondary to the fact that the US is a single market.

I think that is borne out by the advances in China, where China is a single market.

“In Britain, we look at Europe the wrong way, rather than defining us we should see it as a useful group to belong to where things that are bigger than one country can get dealt with on an appropriate scale – and an opportunity to sell more easily into a bigger market . … I came away from my few years in Brussels thinking it does a pretty good pragmatic job on a lot of boring stuff and thank goodness it does.”

In March 2021, John was elected President of BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT, a role he will hold for a year. Speaking about the role of the Institute, he says: “The big opportunity for the BCS is to build trust in computing and show that IT professionals are fundamental to that trust.  We carried out a survey very recently following the 2020 A-Level fiasco, asking the public if they trust algorithms to make decisions about their life, the majority answered no.  Would you like the people who write these algorithms to be professionally qualified?  Yes, we would.  We, as a sector, as a community, we’ve got away for too long in not being professional enough, i.e., not thinking through the sort of ethical and societal implications of what we’re doing.

“The CEO of a consumer electronics business once said to me a few years ago, ‘You know, the trouble with this business is too much engineering and not enough consumer.’  I get his point, we have an engineering mindset in our community, and we haven’t thought enough about in the past is the ethical and societal implications of what we’re doing. BCS has a real opportunity to drive home the need for and benefits of professionalism to be part of the drive to increase trust in what we can do.”

On the subject of Y2K, John says: “A lot of people rode that tide to basically maintain and improve their systems.  I don’t think any of the people on the supply side were going in and pretending to do stuff and not doing it. They were using that opportunity for system upgrades. Who knows what would have happened. It was the dog that didn’t bark. A lot of money was spent investing in the infrastructure which probably stood us in good stead to this day. If we look at the pandemic today, it has done the same sort of thing; people have invested massively in the infrastructure and it will stand us in good stead.”

Asked what mistakes he’s made in his career, John says: “I don’t think in terms of mistakes that I have made but things that I’ve spotted on the way. For example, we had a time in Wilkins where we nearly ran out of cash and that made me very conscious of having a sound financial footing. I’m sure I’ve made loads of mistakes but I haven’t picked them out and said, oh, that’s a mistake, I won’t do that again. I genuinely hope that what I do is just learn new things all the time and don’t really categorise them into successes or failures. Somebody once said to me, you should do win analysis just as you would a loss analysis; I agree.”

Interviewed by: Richard Sharpe

Transcribed by: TP Transcription

Abstracted by: Lynda Feeley