Interview with Chris Winter

Chris Winter was born in 1952 in Haslemere, Surrey. He is the youngest of three brothers. His mother taught French and English and his father ran the family grocery business which his grandmother and her first husband had started in the 19^th century. Chris’ first part-time job was doing grocery deliveries on a Saturday morning. Chris says: “One of the things my family did from early days in the 19^th century was to deliver groceries in a pony and trap.  … We’ve kind of come full circle now that people have groceries ordered online, enabled by IT and delivered.  We’re in a kind of back to the future moment for groceries.”

His father, having seen the growing challenge to small grocery stores by large supermarkets in the mid-sixties, successfully transitioned the shop into a delicatessen and was adamant that his sons should not follow him into the family business.

While both of his parents valued education, none of their sons chose to go to university. Chris went to Godalming Grammar School where he gained eight O levels two maths and three science and started to study for A levels in maths and science but became disillusioned, he explains: “I became quite disenchanted with school life.  I just didn’t like what I perceived to be a lack of respect for me as a person. I always felt I was being talked down to. I was reasonably successful academically, but it just wasn’t for me.”

In 1969, with little careers support from his school, Chris decided to leave school. He managed to boil his career options down to roles based on his interests, engines and computing. He explains: “I had an interest in engines at the time and that was something I could relate to and the computer industry to me seemed to have a future, which the grocery business didn’t have.” Despite knowing nothing about computers, it was the option that he chose; he adds: “Probably the best decision I made from a career perspective was when I was 16 and said I want to be in the computer industry because it has a future.  With hindsight I completely underestimated the scope of its future. … In all honestly, I have no idea where the idea to go into computing came from. It probably was irrational; it was extremely fortunate.  It’s not a decision I have ever, or will ever regret.  How can a 16-year-old make such a lucky choice, which turned out to be a good decision, it has to be an enormous amount of luck.”

Compugraphics International

In September 1969, Chris got a job as a trainee programmer with Compugraphics International of Aldershot which was a small bureau for doing computer-aided design in manufacturing, mainly printed circuit boards, early integrated circuits. Chris had on the job training, the most formal of which was three months of half-day release at the Guildford Technical College.

However, in 1970, the company got involved in the development of an economics computer game called Ecogame which had been conceived by a merchant bank. The game was launched on the theme stand of Computer 70 exhibition held in Olympia, London with three teams competing for half an hour at a time. Chris says: “They were using video terminals which was a bit avant-garde in 1970.  The terminals were connected to a timesharing PDP mainframe in Switzerland, probably less powerful than an iPhone today. We were teaching people how to use the system. The results were fed back to us from Switzerland and plotted and displayed on our big graphics terminal and our minicomputer with 8k of memory was interfacing with nine 35mm slide projectors.  We had online slide projections, we didn’t have the capability to project graphics in 1970, and it went on to be shown in other exhibitions around Europe.  Our graphics to play was an American standalone graphics display called IDIIOM powered by a Varian 620/i, an early 3G, third generation machine 16-bit machine that used integrated circuits. When I look back at that, that it was quite stunning for 1970; it was quite leading edge.” Ecogame II featured at the inaugural Davos Forum the following year.

Unfortunately, the company’s bank decided that they couldn’t afford the R&D side where Chris was working and so at the age of 18, he was made redundant and was unemployed for six weeks.

West Sussex County Council

Having been made redundant, Chris was offered a job by a company in Monaco who had spotted him while at Compugraphics and he had also just secured a job for West Sussex County Council. Unfortunately, the role in Monaco went from being full time to a three-month contract and so, having had a six-week layoff, Chris decided to take the more permanent role with West Sussex County Council. He says: “I’d just been out of work and had a miserable time for six weeks, and I got a job offer at West Sussex County Council, and maybe I was horribly over-serious but I decided not to head off to the south of France.  I’m kind of quite cool about that because I got into IBM technology which was a much, much bigger marketplace, and my technical skills were far more portable. I think it was absolutely the right decision, it possibly sounds a bit of a boring decision for an 18-year-old to take.”

Chris says he did some of the most interesting projects at West Sussex, he says: “I joined because I had graphic experience, they were using graphics to help design public sector buildings. They were world leaders in that, driven by the belief of the County Architect and his deputy.  Also ahead of its time, we implemented a system for quantity surveyors for estimating the cost of a public sector building, as you completed the sub-projects, it would tell you where you were, and reapportion the budget to the remaining sub-projects.  I did the rules engine for that.  I didn’t design it, I built it. Essentially what we built was a spreadsheet, long before VisiCalc and you could have applied it to anything.” Despite enjoying his work, Chris realised that the public sector was not right for him and he decided to leave.

Altergo

Chris joined Altergo, a growing software house based in London’s Soho, at the age of 21. Altergo was a very sociable company that Chris enjoyed working for and his career grew in-line with the success of the Altergo company. His first consulting contract was as a team leader, a significantly more senior job from his last role at West Sussex. During his five year employment the company grew from about sixty employees to over four hundred. Altergo opened a further three offices in London, branch offices in the Midlands and the North of England, three US offices, established a subsidiary in Australia and a Middle Eastern office in Beirut. The Beirut office was to feature heavily in Chris’s career and in his life as he spent most of 1975 with a major new client in Baghdad where he established their new IBM mainframe as a bureau for other government departments and he led the development and implementation of their first in-house developed application. Back in 1975 few people knew where Baghdad was but that all changed some years after his return with the advent of the first Gulf War. The ex-patriot lifestyle in Baghdad was pretty tough in those days and Chris grew significantly as a person during this challenging period of his life. On his return he spent a happy 18 months at the Bank of England where he was appointed the Chief Programmer on the bank’s online, real time, retail banking system. Few people are aware that the Bank of England has a retail bank albeit very small with only a few clients that includes its own staff. On leaving the bank he commenced a second twelve month contract with IBM at its UK headquarters in Portsmouth. This proved to be his last engagement as an employee of Altergo.

In 1978, having decided that he wanted to leave London and having had the experience with IBM who had a centre on the south coast, Chris finally decided to join IBM. His career with IBM lasted 31 years and he was made an IBM Fellow. On his retirement Chris was offered the position of IBM Fellow Emeritus taking his total time with IBM to 40 years, ending in 2018.

He says of his time at IBM: “I joined IBM and I was arrogant. Having worked closely with them as a subcontractor and as a customer, I thought, well, I’m better than these guys.  I only planned to join for five years, so the big surprise was, I was still there after 31 years.”

 On being a Fellow, Chris adds: “The IBM Fellow programme was launched by Tom Watson in 1962 and it was very much about the research side, very much about hardware, so all the original Fellows were that.  Forty years later, the professional services side of IBM appointed their first Fellow, Maurice Perks; he was one of my mentors.

“A services Fellow is very different, because we work in the IT (see definition of the Computer and IT industries below) industry, to a Fellow in the computer industry. … My primary responsibilities as a Fellow in the consulting business, as their European Chief Technology Officer, was the technical health of our major client projects and the vitality of the technical community of 15,000 professionals. There was a symbiotic relationship between the two; making sure that we had the right skills to go into the right projects and the right projects were there for the people to develop.

“I was also working out in the different industries how to apply new technologies and for this, I created a number of Chief Technology Officers (CTOs). …  For about the last ten years of my career, I owned performance engineering globally for professional services.  I secured the investment, developed the techniques and the training. During this period I was the custodian of the IBM owned intellectual property around performance engineering and professional.”

Chris is the recognised expert in performance engineering. His first encounter with it was in 1970, he explains: “The challenge we had was how do you fit a complete CAD circuit design system into 8k of memory.  The shorter answer is, you can’t, and we had to buy another 4k of memory, costing thousands of pounds. That was the first time I encountered it and it’s never gone away. It’s been a challenge, an interest and contributed to my career.”

While his early career gave him many opportunities to get involved with performance engineering, it was in 1982, as Chief Architect at IBM that he had one of his most significant performance challenges.  He says: “I worked on the materials requirements planning for all of Europe in a single system to remove the latency between the different planning cycles and get a better handle on supply of parts and reduction in inventory.  That went live in 1985.  My challenge was twofold; (1) I had to make the system perform and it was about two orders of magnitude improvement, which was quite significant (2) there wasn’t an approach for performance engineering, so in parallel I developed the approach.  The system went live, very successfully.  It was adopted by the Americans and the Japanese and in 1989 it went live across the world as a global system and scaled a further order of magnitude in terms of performance.”

At the completion of this project Chris presented a paper at Global Computer Measurements Group on designing applications from a performance perspective. He adds: “I was surprised at how much interest I got, because before then most people only thought about the performance of the machine, how fast was the processor, the performance of storage, the performance of the components of the machine and not necessarily the applications.”

He continues: “The concept of performance engineering makes a distinction between whether the computer hardware and software is doing the sums correctly and producing the right answers and so on, and translating that into whether the business process actually works and supports the user in terms of their business objectives.

My realisation was that performance engineering was considered in the hardware and the software, the operating system, by the computer providers but it wasn’t really given enough focus by the people building the applications on top of the computers.  So, performance engineering applies everywhere, but when you’re building applications, which is what I do, it’s everything, it’s all of those things, not necessarily a broader topic and a less popular one.  Even today it still receives, in my own opinion, too little in terms of focus and recognition and often not enough investment until it all goes wrong. Performance engineering is a key issue in making IT projects successful in terms of their business outcome.”

 In the nineties Chris created formal methods for adoption by IBM globally.  A community of a couple of thousand performance engineers trained in the methods.

Towards the end of his career with IBM Chris became very aware of the challenges that organisations were having with the complexity of their aging legacy systems. He led a research project within the latter years of his time as a regular employee and for a number of years as an emeritus Fellow.  The term Brownfield was chosen because the issue is analogous to the term used in the construction industry, i.e. it is much harder and riskier to build on a Brownfield site. Furthermore, building on a Brownfield IT landscape imposes significant constraints when integrating the new systems with the old. Paradoxically, it tends to be the early adopters of IT back in the 1960s and 1970s that are most affected, e.g. banks, government, utility companies, etc. There are some very old systems out there at the start of the 2020s that are 40 or 50 years old. Changing them is a risky and expensive business that is hard for companies to justify. Strangely enough, living with them is also costly, risky and constraining.

Chris takes some comfort that his friends and colleagues that he was working with at IBM are still working on this industry wide issue.

Professional development and professional certification have been very important to Chris throughout his career and have led him to get involved in the professionalism of IT roles working with the BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT and the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET). He was central to the BCS’ Professionalism in IT (ProfIT) programme which was conceived in 2003. Chris was also on the skills professional members’ board for BCS and the IET’s skills board.

With help from Ian Nussey, a Vice-President of the IET and a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, and Geoff Robinson who was IBM Lab Director of Hursley, Chris had meetings with the professional bodies. He says: “One of the things I put up in front of the professional bodies, which shocked them, was a degree will help you get a job but not a career.”

The meetings led to licences between IBM and the individual professional bodies, both of which recognised IBM’s career structures and aligned them with their own structures.  Chris adds: “The Americans came in and did the same thing with the Open Group, with their qualifications, largely based around the IBM things, but triggered from my ideas. I basically ran the IBM side of that to beyond when I retired.”

Chris’ own professional qualifications are chartered engineer and chartered IT professional (CITP), which is separate to him being Fellows of both institutions.  He adds: “I do believe that that is really important. One thing in particular I liked about the BCS was they have a points system to professional membership; if you had a relevant degree then you got some points with the remainder earnt through Continuing Professional Development that included experience.”

 On the subject of the lack of a compulsory licenced IT profession, Chris says: “I think part of it is where computing started. I think those qualifications (CITP etc) are more recognised in what I call the computer industry, which is the people who make computers and systems software, than in the IT industry that use their technologies and tend to exist within banking, retail, insurance and so on. Part of it is also that the IT industry is still only 50 years old, and with that immaturity somehow, it’s just never got traction.  I value it, I think if you’re buying professional services for example, you should have something which says this person is at this level of professional competence. This is what the IBM professions were when they were conceived almost 30 years ago.”

Chris says that there are many interpretations of what the IT industry is today, but his own personal definition is that there is the computer industry which produces computers, computer peripherals, systems software up to middleware while the IT industry produces applications. He explains: “The IT industry is more about developing applications, installing packages for companies and running them. Take cloud computing, to me that fits in the IT industry.  They’re using hardware and software.  You take Amazon, for example, they’ve done some amazing stuff in the area of systems management, which is the software to help you run the applications and infrastructure, and the service management, which is running across that to make sure that the systems are run, that they’re monitored, when they fall over they’re repaired.”

Having completed 51 years in IT, Chris has been part of many successful projects spanning technological innovation in financial services, utilities and billing operations of utilities, traffic management, the application of IT to central government, to benefits, car insurance and so on, he says: “It’s been fifty years of fun and enjoyment, satisfaction and doing some amazing things.  I was just blessed. I am amazed and proud of my industry and what it’s achieved to the betterment of the world.  The world could not run without IT.  We couldn’t bank, we couldn’t fly.  Increasingly we can’t drive without it; it’s everywhere, it’s ubiquitous. The world runs on IT.  If you had a big switch and you turned it off, it would be chaos. Society directly uses IT more and more and that is a trend that will increase. Therefore, the value from IT and our dependence on IT and the requirements on things like performance of IT and availability and security and everything else, increases at the same rate.”

He says that he thinks his unique selling point (USP) in his career has been being able to understand technology. He adds: “Even today, the new technologies, that are not always new, simply recycled and renamed.  I’ve always managed to be able to get a technical insight.”

Chris is currently involved with a group looking at the digitally left behind community. He explains: “My worry at the moment – this is a concern, that it is not for business, it’s more philanthropic – I and some colleagues, are concerned about a community of people called the digitally left behind community. The people who can’t make use of IT.  The popular belief is that it’s just old people and that’s a wrong thing to believe; it’s not just age.  Age is a factor but it’s not the only reason, people say it’ll die out.  It could be physical or mental ability, some of which is covered by things like accessibility. … It can be trust.  Some people do not trust computers, will not trust computers.  It could be affordability. The final one is perhaps a combination of all of those things.  A lot of things that we put out there is actually overly complex for the consumer. Usability is key, good design is key.  Even I, after all these years, come across applications which are impenetrable.”

He points to Government systems which he says should be exemplar but are currently not. He continues: “If you take Universal Credit as an example; it’s a great idea but poorly implemented.  It’s not just the IT either.  It’s a combination of IT and the business practices.  When I started this work, I was quite surprised that you can only apply for Universal Credit online.  You might be lucky and find a job centre or local council will help you with the online bit if you go in.  So, people who may have physical disabilities or mental disabilities, or simply haven’t got any money, they need benefit and can’t afford a computer or computing device of any type, being forced down a digital channel is wrong for me.”

 Chris says the solution is better design, he explains: “The process that IT’s enabling needs to be cognisant of the users, to have those kind of use cases in your head, to ask do people have access.  Not everybody does.”

The group looking at this problem that Chris is involved with, is working with the Digital Skills Partnership and the Alan Turing Institute. Through their work with the Institute, they are analysing where this could lead in the future and have published a paper with the Royal Academy of Engineering. He says: “Our hypothesis is that it is a problem that is not going away, if anything it’s getting bigger as technology gets more complex. Our second observation is that as the whole thing moves forward it’s just going to perpetuate itself in a different way. A lot is said about the need to train the user however, the missing element is training the provider for better design.  There’s a lot of anecdotal evidence around that shows that systems designed well for accessibility tend to be designed well, full stop.”

Chris says he is a big fan of apprenticeships, he says: “I think the increase in the number of apprenticeship schemes is a very positive step forward. … I think apprenticeships are a much better answer to higher education.” They are both better for the apprentice and the sponsoring organisation.

Chris says: “There’s going to be increasing amount of computer interaction between technologies; AI systems, bots and all of that and they’re going to all be talking without humans. It will be interesting as to where it goes.  IT will continue to be a force for good but, there will always be some negative implications, but we shouldn’t stop. The balance of goodness outweighs the badness, but I think the challenge is going to change.  As things progress, the challenge of keeping the negative things in check will increase.”

Interviewed by: Tom Abram on the 9th January 2020 in Tiverton Devon

Transcribed by: Susan Hutton

Abstracted: Lynda Feeley