Interview with Charles (Charlie) Ewen

Charlie Ewen was born in 1965. His parents owned and ran a pig farm in Okehampton, Devon. His father, who was originally from Scotland and was known to all as ‘Jock’, moved to Devon where he met and married his wife Joyce who’s family operated a haulage firm from Widecombe-in-the-Moor. Charlie is the youngest of five siblings.

He says of his parents: “My father was very disciplined, hard working and was very aware of the privilege that, over time, they generated. They came from very humble beginnings, but at the end they owned the farm completely. Anybody that grew up in the seventies will say that it was an okay upbringing, we certainly weren’t privileged but neither were we hungry, which many people were back in those days. My parents were very conscious that hard work and discipline had got them to that place.  My mum was very bright and able and kind of lamented the fact that she’d never had the opportunity for education and was very encouraging to all my siblings and myself.  So there was nothing but support from our fantastic parents.”

Charlie adds: “Success in my parents’ minds was always about success as defined by you, it was never success by the measure of wealth or academic achievement or any other external measure. I suppose that ‘you’ve got one life and live it’, would be the contemporary phrase. That’s very much the way in which we were all brought up.”

He continues: “I used to say that I had an unprivileged background, but, as you get older, you realise just how privileged it was.  The only way in which it was unprivileged was it lacked cash, but it had everything else, emotional support, a place to go back to, there was a safety net always there in knowing that if all else fails you can always come home and work on the farm. Going through life with that kind of security and support was the biggest privilege of all.”

He adds that this is what he and his wife of thirty two years have tried to do for their three now grown-up children, adding: “that’s the same thing that we try and do for our kids is to encourage and support them to go out and do the best that they can so that they can reflect on achieving something with their life, but knowing that there’s always a safety net and nobody else, apart from you, is ever measuring you.”

Charlie attended the local schools in Okehampton. The comprehensive he attended had been a grammar school. He says of his education: “I was the beneficiary of a very good education because of going to something that had formerly been a grammar school. I absolutely loved school. I’m not neurotypical, and I struggled a bit with that because I did not know and had not been diagnosed. I was a bit of an oddball, a bit of a loner, but I was good at maths and very intrigued by science and a very active sportsman.”

Charlie describes how his next brother in line to him, Colin, was the first in the family to go to university and set the role model for Charlie to see what was possible. However, he, unfortunately, was expelled from school during his A levels. He explains: “I haven’t got many regrets in life but one of them is that I was expelled from school whilst doing my A levels, which explains, to a large extent, my strange journey through life to the place that I’ve got to. My intention was to go to university and do maths or physics, the two things that I love most of all.”

Charlie never told his parents that he had been expelled, instead he came home from school and declared that he had decided to quit school and join the RAF. He adds: “The real motive was because I’d discovered the only place that I could get both an education, or at least, an education without A levels. It was the RAF via the equivalent of a modern degree apprenticeship, but the driver wasn’t actually self-motivating, it was because I’d messed up badly at school.”

At the age of forty-five, Charlie discovered he was autistic. He says: “I was diagnosed quite late on in my life and accidently! As I was growing up, I had traits such as an almost obsessive focus and, at the same time, an inability to focus on things that I knew I should be focussing on at the time. I’m quite easily distracted.  I don’t have much in the way of social empathy. … Over time, if you’re perceptive, you see these things and you develop strategies to overcome them, which I’ve done very successfully.  I’m not in the ‘neurodiversity gives you superpowers camp’, but it’s made me very self-aware and somewhat well-planned in terms of what the outcome is and how I achieve the next outcome. … So, it’s all about developing strategies really.”

 Charlie says that he accepts that sometimes these strategies don’t work, but being clear about targets and outcomes helps him move forward, adding: “In life, it’s important to recognise that the route to a given outcome isn’t always a straight line, in fact it almost never is, and figuring out over time what good looks like for you in terms of success or outcome professionally or achievement or technological breakthrough. I always work very hard to understand what the next outcome is.”

“So, right now I’m the Senior Responsible Owner for a 1.2 billion programme, GMPP (Government Major Programme), to deliver the next-generation compute and storage platform for the Met Office in partnership with Microsoft, and in that I am super-clear what my outcomes are!

So long as you’ve got that north star, that guiding light of super-clarity about what the outcomes are, then by and large, you’re going to be okay, because despite twists and turns along the way, you know what good looks like.

Joining the Met Office was very different for my life. Until that point, I’d only worked in the private sector where organisational outcomes are typically a straight line to the generation of money, fiduciary responsibility and to generate value for shareholders.  Moving to the Met Office gave me a brand-new perspective that I sit with much more readily. The outcomes are very lofty in terms of improving the world within which we live, keeping people safe and so on but are still very tractable and deliverable in our mission.

“I can’t describe how much of a north star the Met Office is for me to do my little bit, largely to help others, research and scientists and so on and so forth, to achieve better outcomes in a way that actually does make a difference to the world that we live in, that’s a fantastic privilege.”

Charlie adapted quickly and more easily than he expected to life in the RAF. He says: “I was a bit of a wild child, and the RAF describes a very clean set of rules and given my neurotype, that’s really helpful.  You know what’s going to happen, what to expect, what you’re being asked to do. Being told what to do in a formative period of my life was helpful for me.”

Charlie was a boy entrant working on an apprentice programme which covered several disciplines including avionics and electronics, radios and radar as well as systems theory.  The experience was challenging, and the attrition rate was high with around fifty percent of entrants completing the course. Charlie adds: “We saw significant attrition rates because it was academically testing, but it was also militarily testing, physically testing, and somewhat psychologically testing, especially for young people away from home at 16 or 17 years old. You had to pass all three aspects of the test: militarily. It was tough but for me it was the perfect start in life, and I was actually good at it. I look back on those times with nothing but fondness. I learnt a lot about discipline, resilience, and I learnt a lot about myself. I also learnt a lot academically. It was a fantastic academic grounding.  Of the thirty of us who ultimately graduated at least ten have gone on to very high-level roles in research, military, government, or industry.  It was a very solid grounding.  In the end, for reasons I still don’t understand the sponsoring university didn’t award a degree, but I walked away with an HND in electronics and avionics having had to do some extra time in workshops to extend the practical elements.”

 The training was all on the principle of the link between mathematics to analogue electronics. Learning how to do the maths to link Ls, Cs and Rs, (inductors, capacitors and resistors) with transistors to do useful things.”

As Charlie reached the end of his training, he and his cohort realised that what they had learned had probably been superseded by digital electronics and microchips which were becoming increasing common as the digital world developed at pace.  He says: “Nonetheless, I’m very pleased that I was educated during that time. I’ve never regretted not understanding the fundamentals of electronics and the links to core mathematics.”

 During his time in the RAF, Charlie saw the world and worked on Tristars (Lockheed L1011) as part of  216 Squadron at Brize Norton. He says: “One of the things that plane did was monitoring using the Aircraft Integrated Data System (AIDS). It was an early manifestation of the ability to do things like proactive maintenance based on observation and data from what we now call the Internet of Things, digital twins etc,. It was the birth of putting sensors in unusual places on aircraft to pre-emptively monitor and detect things that might go wrong before they did, and it was a change of generation. It was the first hybrid fly-by-wire and fly-by-cable plane and it was the first commercially viable wide-bodied jet which was then re-engineered to undertake a military role.

“The RAF did some interesting things, which were great for me as an engineer. I got to fly around the world for five or six years; it was a fantastic period of my life. I loved it, however, there was increasing pressure for me to take a commission. I got posted to a research establishment in Wildenrath, in Germany. By the time that came around, the wall had come down, but I didn’t know that at the time. I resigned because I was getting married and didn’t want to live as a military family overseas.  It was with much lament and regret that I resigned, not really knowing what I was going to do next.”

After leaving the RAF, Charlie joined Racal to work in an engineering position; a role that would see him use his apprenticeship skills. He says: “I landed a position with Racal, who were subsequently acquired by Thales, the defence contractor. I was working largely on electronic countermeasures and communications gear, cutting-edge stuff. I loved it because it was hardcore engineering. They supported innovation very well at the time and they were very quick to take up on anything that had any traction.”

“Racal were a great company at the time and I got involved in all manner of things however over time, mistakes were made in my view, such as the sell off of Vodafone.”

The company was run by Sir Ernest Harrison, who received the first ever mobile phone call in the UK from his son on New Year’s Eve 1985.

Despite enjoying his role, Charlie decided to leave as the company became more fragmented.

He says: “That was a sad day, I was tangentially involved with some of the innovations that Racal developed.” He adds that the company’s innovations contributed to the birth of the mobile phone, adding: “I’m sure I’ve not got my history right, but I’m pretty sure that that sale of that technology was the birth of the mobile phone. I’m not saying it didn’t happen in parallel elsewhere, but they were a big contributor to that technology. I specifically remember working on the Voice Operated Gain Amplification Device (VOGAD circuit), which means that, for example, you don’t need to shout at your ‘phone on a train, they’ll hear you, trust me, the microphone will become more sensitive!”

It was at this time, that Charlie realised he ‘was never going to be a world leading engineer’.  He explains that he subscribes to Daniel Pink’s research on human motivators which are identified as purpose, autonomy and mastery. Charlie says: “They’re the three things that I need and I was never going to be a master as an engineer.  I was an okay engineer, but my forte really was in systems engineering, including all the real-world and human aspects of a complex system.  So I was an okay programmer, but I was much better at the higher-level systems stuff and technical leadership”

After leaving Racal, with a growing family and suffering from what Charlie describes as his ‘first mental hiccup’, Charlie took a sales job with Farnell Electronics. It was an organisation that Charlie would stay with in various guises until he left to join the Met Office.

Charlie explains: “So it was initially a sales job but you did have to be an engineer, you had to use your knowledge of the stuff that Farnell sold, (test equipment, components etc), to go into industry and convince them of the merits of using that particular device or system.  Sometimes that involved a free bit of design or technical support, and I used to do quite a healthy dose of that. Subsequently they’d buy the component from you, and everyone was happy. That was the model and it’s the most uncertain step I’ve ever taken in my life, I literally did it because I was going through a bit of a mental health crisis and I knew I had to do different”

Employed precisely because he had no previous sales experience, Charlie was sent on a six-week course to learn everything about the company. Following the training, he took over a sales patch in the South West where he identified potential companies and followed through with sales and support.

“I was successful, grew that area quite well.  The thing that was happening alongside those early days was the birth of e-commerce and the internet.  I was ‘fast-tracked ‘in a talent development scheme and as such, I was fortunate to have the ear of the boss and I presented him with a proposition of the potential for e-commerce.” The potential identified by Charlie was to look at ways to automate the organisation’s catalogue operation and use emerging technology to increase reach and reduce operating costs initially with a CD catalogue and a modem based transaction system.

Charlie continues: “I ran that very small part of the business. I spent time in Leeds, time with tech firms understanding how to develop the technology, learning how to write things like Windows help files, which was quite tough at the time but taught me a lot about what we would now call, UX (User Experience).  Finding people that could undertake the necessary development. In doing so I came across some interesting and impressive people including Dr Ian Levy who’s now the Chief Technology Officer for the National Cyber Security Centre. I also worked with a bloke who was a direct descendant from Logie Baird who invented TV, they were all brilliant. That was a fantastic time in my life.”

As the internet matured, so too did this element of the business with Charlie and his team writing programmes in C++ and deploying Windows applications to allow people to place orders directly to some servers the team had set up. Charlie adds: “Some of that used the internet, some of that didn’t, it was all nascent stuff.  Ultimately, that ended up with what I believe to be the world’s first plausible transactional website that was safe to use for the full transaction including payment”

Success saw the company grow to a 1.2 billion dollar business with a listing on the Nasdaq and it became a FT top 150 company, grown explosively by improved profitability in organic growth which paid for growth by acquisition.

At this point the internet was gaining traction and at the same time the company moved to expand its organic growth with acquisition. Charlie says: “Those two things are somewhat related and so I got involved with both. I’d been with that company for a long time I was involved with a number of of mergers and acquisitions.

“I learnt a lot about corporate finance, strategy, planning, legal. I don’t profess to be an expert in any of those fields, but I can certainly hold my own at a board table when the topics come up.

“I was doing the assessments and subsequently the integration programmes. That’s pretty brutal because ultimately you’ve got a very limited amount of time to identify, at a technical level, the bits that you’re going to integrate, and the bits that you’re not going to do any more, and the process areas where you’re going to ask people to stop using the system they’ve used for fifty years and start using your system because they’ve been assimilated by the mother ship. I learnt a lot about change; the execution of transformation programmes, leadership, and change”

It was during this time that Charlie used his leadership skills to deliver the necessary information to employees affected by the acquisitions. He says: “I found that as a leader, the authenticity and honesty with which you act will engender trust, and that’s a big maxim for me from a leadership perspective. I always try to be honest with people.  Moreover, I always try to be authentic about the logic, drivers and strategy that underpin that maybe somewhat unpalatable to some.  Doing that with empathy is also important and I’ve learnt ways to do that.”

Regarding the success of the acquisitions, Charlie says that they were relatively successful, in part due to the leadership of John Hirst who was Chief Executive at that time. Charlie says: “John was always very clear about his outcomes and always careful to make sure that the companies of acquisition were a good fit, so they would be characterised by high volume, low value, transactional.”

Despite the success, Charlie believes there was a missed opportunity for the UK to have the equivalent of an Amazon. He says: “In my personal assessment, we were very, very close to Amazon for quite a long period of time. We didn’t quite make the brave pivot that Jeff Bezos made from books to other things when we could have done. I often tried to but never quite won the strategic battle of ‘it doesn’t really matter what you’re flogging, if it sits in a warehouse, if it’s relatively low value and it is high service.’ There was always a sense that somehow, shifting outside of engineering wasn’t ‘core’.  I think that Amazon have demonstrated that if the model is right, it will translate to different product groups.”

Charlies spent 8 years doing acquisitions, building the e-commerce and IT capability and saw Farnell become a global organisation that was running in twenty-three languages in nineteen countries across the world. As a senior leader, Charlie was playing a bigger and bigger part in the organisation, however, he realised that he had lost his motivation. He says: “I was earning a lot of money, spending a lot of time in the US in the ‘tech’ scene’, but it became less compelling for me for various reasons. This included changes of faces, new staff, new chairmen and new chief executives from 2000 to 2008 where I felt the company lost its way and desire to innovate.  Because it had become more global, unknowingly at the time, I spent more and more time isolated in a purpose-built office and a lot of time travelling for business. As a result, I got into my second big mental health problem, and I had a much worse time than before.

Realising that Devon was where his family and heart was, Charlie decided he could do much more of the work remotely, but he realised he had ‘lost his mojo’, he continues: “That came to a crisis point about 2006/2007, at which point I mentally made the decision and decided I was going to do something else, but again I just didn’t know what.”

Charlie joined the Met Office in 2008 after John Hirst, who had also moved to the  Met Office as CEO, invited Charlie to have a look around.  Charlie says: “John said, ‘Charlie, you won’t believe this place, you need to come and have a look’.  So, I went for a visit one day and got the tour and it was indeed fantastically impressive. I had no idea, as many don’t, the sheer technological endeavour that goes into something like the Met Office.” Charlie was particularly impressed with the supercomputers. It was six months later that Charlie received a call from John to let him know that they were advertising for a role that might be of interest which involved transforming the Met Office’s endeavours on the internet. The role was at a lower level than he was used to and much lower pay.

Charlie says: “I didn’t do it for the money. I went along to the interview because I was interested and walked out thinking that I performed well and thinking, I’m going to get this job, how am I going to explain this to my wife?”

Contrary to Charlie’s worries, his wife encouraged him to accept the role when it was offered it, despite the change of lifestyle it would lead to. He adds: “It’s the best decision I’ve ever made. At the time I didn’t know all the Daniel Pink purpose stuff that I talk about. I had no idea it existed when I said yes to the job.  I said yes to the job because I was in a bad place and what I would now call, a lack of purpose.”

Charlie says of the culture at the Met Office: “It is a privilege in whatever job you do at the Met Office, to work for an organisation that ultimately can and does make a difference to the world that we live in. This is recognised by all our staff and very much by me.  It is a privilege, the work that we do in climate, in attribution, mitigation and adaptation and in the more short term in weather and the avoidance of risk, and the realisation of opportunity. It’s a supreme privilege to do that kind of stuff and everybody’s aware of that.  That’s the driving force.”

Charlie highlights that the Met Office has over 2000 employees, of which around 900 have PhDs. He adds: “This sounds elitist, but the privilege to work amongst such bright people is a revelation for me, it’s just fantastic to work amongst such a purposeful organisation.  That’s definitely a characteristic of the culture, it’s very bright and enthusiastic!”

Like any organisation, there is employee turnover, however, there is also a culture of employees returning after leaving, Charlie says: “Often, the reason they come back, is not for the money, but they understand when they go into a different role and different organisation, they don’t get to work at the scale, with the purpose or innovate to the degree that they ever could at the Met Office.”

Looking at the culture through Pink’s theory, of purpose, autonomy and mastery, Charlie adds: “There are big ticks for purpose and mastery but there is work to do in autonomy.  Have we got those structural boxes right: do people feel that they’re autonomous, understand their team outcome and feel able to do whatever they need to do to achieve that outcome?  Not quite in my view. In some areas, like our scientific research teams maybe, but from some other perspectives, probably not. We’re working hard on that currently in enterprise and organisational design to try and create ways to make sure that people can innovate, create and deliver more autonomously. Of course, we are all proud to be civil servants but that also comes with some constraints, but we will continue to work hard on that dimension.”

Over its history, the Met Office has been at the cutting edge of technology leading with some of the biggest contemporary powerful computers from Ferranti, KDF9, English Electric, IBM, to supercomputers. At all times, the Met Office has owned and run their own computers. The future model of technology for the Met Office, which is currently being developed in partnership with Microsoft, AWS and others, will see a shift towards the cloud. The project is called Supercomputing 2020+ and is in generation one delivery with a generation two in the future.

The shift is the result of a great deal of consideration of some complex trends in technology and science. Charlie says: “So what you’re asking from the supercomputer are two things now, it needs to be a laboratory, to continue to develop mankind’s understanding of the workings of the atmosphere, in the short term in weather forecasts, in the long term in climate predictions.  It also needs to be a big data factory to support decision-making effectively and efficiently as the models, simulations and projections develop.  Everything from observations of the atmosphere to the data produced by the simulations is growing exponentially.  Our contract with Microsoft, certainly in generation one, is that inside and under the covers there will still be a very recognisable supercomputer, the only real difference being that we will no longer host and operate it and that it will be tightly integrated with the wider Azure fabric and services.  Our partner innovation and learning from generation 1 will be a springboard for generation 2, broadly timed for the late 2020’s”

Among the many reasons the decision was taken to move to this model, was consideration of the availability of power in the south-west to run supercomputers in-house. Charlie adds: “We didn’t have that fairly big power station at hand in ways that we could get requisite power from the grid in a resilient fashion; we need it to be resilient, because of its growing role as a factory.  That just wasn’t available to us in the timescales and costs that we had available to us, so, there was no other choice, but to put this out to market.  This is one of many examples of the implication of exponentially growing scale.”

 Charlie continues: “Generation one will be an HPE Cray EX generation supercomputer, fundamentally the same supercomputer that’s been implemented at Oak Ridge National Labs in the US for example, and at similar scales.  In this case though, we do not own it and we do not operate it.  Microsoft will do that on our behalf, and we will consume the services it provides.  That affords a new opportunity to further this general trend in IT in a way not seen before.”

Charlie says that he very proud of the ability of the Met Office and their teams to keep their infrastructure safe. He adds: “I’m very, very proud of the degree to which our teams keep our operation infrastructure live, resilient, cybersafe, physically safe.  Is that sustainable looking forwards?  It’s part of that sum that says it’s becoming too much of a thing when you start to think about the power station that drives it, about the physical space it would occupy, and so on and so on, it all gets exponentially bigger and more complex.

“Do I have any concerns around security with Microsoft?  Of course, I do, I am paid to manage risks!  Are they very transparent about their resilience characteristics in terms of availability, security, cybersafe?  Yes, they are.  Do those stated, committed terms of engagement, contract if you want, pass our bar?  Yes, they do.  So, again, in any partnership, this is about do these people pass the bar, which they do, and it’s not a question of whether I’m happy about it or not, it’s not a question of whether I stay awake at night, it is about understanding the risks and making sure that they are acceptable in a complex balancing act with other factors.

“When I hear there’s been an Azure outage, I wonder what’s happened.  Did we used to have outages in the past?  Of course we did.  You build resilience tactics and so on to make sure that those outages, which are inevitably going to happen, don’t affect your throughput of workload, that’s what we’ll seek to do.

“Who are the masters of that domain – the cloud companies. I’m not suggesting that our teams don’t do anything but a fantastic job, but we are not a Microsoft and we don’t aspire to be a Microsoft. It’s not our job.  Our job is to do the fundamental and pioneering research and to convert that into models that represent the future state of the atmosphere, to turn those models into useful data that can be used by operational meteorologists for advice and guidance to our users, and in datasets that help people make better decisions.

“That’s changing too, increasingly we live in an automated world, so increasingly our customers are things like other people’s machine learning algorithms.  The whole world’s changing on the supply side, it’s no longer the two users of our models; the meteorologists and our scientists but a wide spectrum of people and machines that need our data. These days we’ve got billions of consumers or users all trying to do different things, some of whom are not people, a lot are machines, and in the future I expect that ratio of machine users to people users to become ever more because if you think about it, few people really want the weather forecast.  What people have been trained to do is to accommodate weather as a part of wider decision-making. Few decisions are wholly about the weather or climate, but it is important in a lot of real-world decisions that we make as it is a changing part of the world within which we live.”

He highlights that these decisions can be from the trivial of when to mow a lawn to where best to locate a nuclear power station. He adds: “They are specific decisions that need to have answers to and the Met Office and the information, the guidance that it provides are part of that decision making process.”

Asked about quantum computing, Charlie says: “It is as much a mathematics,  algorithm and engineering endeavour as technology.  In my view the application of quantum in our space and many applied spaces is at least as much as dependent upon development of mathematical algorithms as it is on the development of a quantum computer.” He points to the Shor’s algorithm, the factoring of prime numbers including large ones, adding “There are many applications in cybersecurity because of how encryption uses prime numbers.  That’s a hotspot for quantum computing because Shor’s algorithm is also something that’s been mathematically described in quantum.  There are other algorithms that are successfully being described.  Until such a time when the balance shifts to enough of the mathematics being able to be applied, then for us, for me, quantum is interesting but a bit way off down the horizon.

That said, there is a specific thing we (the Met office) do is the most computationally demanding part of our process which we call assimilation, and this is the act of, if you like, setting the physical simulation models up with the current state of the atmosphere and then in short term evolution correcting how that model evolves with a known state of the atmosphere.  That process is called assimilation and that assimilation process fits mathematically very, very well with quantum computing.  So it may well be that in a few years’ time, we’re back talking about how we’re working with somebody to apply quantum computing to assimilation, as part of the NWP (Numerical Weather Prediction), process.  In terms of resolving the Navier-Stokes equations, you’re solving quite different mathematics, when will that happen?  Probably not in my career, but who knows?  Never say never.”

Charlie highlights the collaborative approach that the Met Office takes to achieve its aims. He says: “One thing we recognise very clearly at the Met Office is our need to partner and collaborate.  There is no way we can do this stuff on our own and our science programmes have traditionally been super-good at collaboration. We work under the auspice, in part, of the World Meteorological Organisation, part of the United Nations, United Nation Treaties, alongside 192 other organisations that do much the same work that we do, that’s an example of collaboration that dates way back. We were sharing observations and predictions around that network and have been doing so for many decades.  Similarly, our researchers are very, very active nationally and internationally with all the research councils and with other academic institutions in relevant scientific fields of endeavour, and that’s been going on for as long as the Met Office has existed.  So we’ve got some great places to look to how to do it well.  We’re in the process right now of figuring out how all this big data stuff, the exploitation, production and exploitation of the work that we do computationally, what are the right places to look, who do we need to strike up new and forge new collaborations with.  Something that we’ve already got is a long-term relationship with AWS. We’ve been working with AWS for over a decade, we use their technology in a lot of areas on the front end of our organisation.  And we’ve now signed a strategic partnership with Microsoft.  There’ll certainly be two of them on that list and we’re working with them very closely on what’s next for IT.”

Looking at how organisations make change today and the fact that IT tends to end up being blamed when things go wrong, Charlie says: “A mistake that many contemporary digital transformation programmes make, is (a) they’re not clear about their outcomes, (b) they don’t face up to the somewhat unpalatable systems engineering changes that are often needed, which are often process and organisation structure based, not technology based, (c) they blame the technology when all that goes wrong.

“I’ve seen that pattern repeated over and over and over again, and they end up labelling it as a failed IT programme. Actually, that’s not true, it’s a failed change programme which has a healthy dose of IT. The problem is that they were never clear, at systems level, about the overall complex system that includes things like people and the physical world. At some level, somebody somewhere must recognise that organisations and change within organisations are an amorphous blob and you have to find ways to unpick that using systems thinking; what are the people impacts, the process impacts, the reward impacts, the motivation impacts, part of that are the systems and infrastructure, the IT aspect.  I personally have refused to ever label any major programme that sits outside of the IT department, function, directorate, whatever it might be, as an IT programme, because it never is if it affects a wider business.  It’s a change programme.”

Charlie says his biggest mistake in his life was getting himself expelled from school during his A levels after an altercation with the head boy around the laying of a wreath for a memorial service. He also wishes that he had had the chance to go to university and simply enjoy studying. He adds: “However, with the benefit of a bit of wisdom and hindsight, maybe it was for the best. The other big mistake was probably at the point where I’d spent eight years of my career where I knew what I was doing wasn’t fulfilling me, but I had this false sense of obligation to be some kind of big fish and earn more money and have a bigger reputation as a CIO and so on.  I wish I’d had the guts to have the conversation that I had with my wife at crisis point that led me to join the Met Office eight years earlier, and I had done something else sooner.”

Charlie says there will come a natural point to hand the baton over but it’s not yet. He says: “Our supercomputer implementation programme is divided into two generations simplistically: generation one and generation two.  We’re very familiar with generation one and it’s going to be a supercomputer, we’ve done it thirteen times before, it’s with Microsoft, there are some very new aspects and some new challenges and opportunities, and we’ll realise those.  The generation two there is much more scope for invention and innovation. For me, it is very exciting to think about what it might look like in partnership with others, including Microsoft, and that’s going to be a very compelling part of my career which I’m in right now and will be for the next few years.  When that co-creation is done and we are in delivery of generation 2, I think that might be a natural break point.  I’ll be led by my north star, I’m going to find it difficult to find something that motivates and drives me as much as the Met Office has done, but never say never.  …. Maybe, maybe I will get away and do a PhD, that would be lovely.”

Interviewed by Richard Sharpe

Transcribed by Susan Nicholls

Abstracted by Lynda Feeley