Interview with John Poulter

John Poulter was born in Orpington in Kent, in 1940. His parents were mental nurses working in Dorset when they met. After marrying, his father continued working as a mental nurse until going to work servicing American bombers near Leicester. His mother became a housewife. After the war, his father worked as a fireman and then a postal worker. He was chairman of the local branch of the Postal Workers’ Union and a governor of three schools.

John attended his local schools in Caldecote Road, Leicester. Having passed his eleven plus he then attended Alderman Neutons Boys’ School, a grammar school, in Leicester. John says his earliest influences were the teachers at his grammar school: “The teachers there were highly idiosyncratic, a most unusual bunch of teachers, and a lot of the kids were very individual too. I think that growth of individuality has been perhaps a hallmark of how I’ve gone through life.”

 John enjoyed all subjects but his main interests were the scientific subjects. After gaining his A levels, John went to Imperial College, London to study aeronautical engineering.

It was during a summer job in 1960 with the Sir WG Armstrong Whitworth Company in Coventry, that John encountered his first computer; a Ferranti Pegasus. John says of the experience: “My experience involved some programming.  The programs were fed on paper tape, which I had to type myself using the language for Autocode or Autocoder, which I thought was very, very easy to follow, I learned it in ten minutes. I thought it was very well designed, it was very clever.  It was like stating a formula which the computer then went through. However, you had to type  the program and any data on a typewriter with punching paper tape, and if you made the slightest mistake, then when it ran overnight, it would come back as an error the  next day and so you’d wasted a day and had to repeat it. I learnt to be absolutely perfect in the creation of data. I learned a lot, learned how to program, I learned roughly how to get things run on the computer and it was useful.”

In 1963, having completed his degree, John taught mathematics and mechanical drawing for two years at Lancaster Royal Grammar School. He then decided to change direction and started looking for jobs in engineering and ended up applying for a programmer role at Stewarts and Lloyds, a steel company in Corby, Northamptonshire. He says: “I went along, passed the aptitude test, and was offered a job as a programmer.” However, having been bored by programming during his summer job, he turned the role down and the company asked him what would interest him, he continues: “I told them I was interested in the analysis side, looking at what the requirements were to program the computer.” As a result, they offered John an analysis role in Glasgow where he spent nine months “churning out systems analysis for the programming that was being done in Corby on their IBM.”

John says of Glasgow: “It is great city there.  I learned a lot there.  The head office of Stewarts and Lloyds was in Oswald Street and I was working there with some really great people there, they were doing wonderful jobs there.  It was a pleasure to work with them.”

 After nine months in Glasgow, John was offered a role managing a computer at the company’s Corby site. John says: “It didn’t turn out that the job was anything more than installing the computer which was going to be managed by one of the research people.  So, that led to really my looking round and seeing where else I could go.”

In 1967, John joined Unilever as a system analyst working in the laboratory at

Colworth House in Bedfordshire. He stayed with Unilever for eleven years.

He says of the role: “My predecessor had come up with this concept of a database of data which could be analysed in different directions; I think this was before Ted Codd invented the term database.  I then had the job of designing it. I was working with a programmer called Anne Penn who was fascinated by writing code in the new IBM language, PL/I; we were using IBM 360 to do the processing.  We worked together for about three to four years steadily building this database, and I must say that when it went live it was perfect, it never had an error. Right from the start, and I believe, right through its life, it never had an error.”

As the laboratory did not have its own computer, John and Anne worked on the computer which belonged to Unilever’s computer services based in Port Sunlight on the Wirral.

John explains: “Every day we’d get the data or the programs punched up into punched cards and then they’d be taken to the computer centre that afternoon or evening, then they’d be processed and then next day would come back the printout saying whether you’d got anything wrong or right or it had been processed correctly. You had to have it absolutely perfect, no errors anywhere in the data or the programming.  If you did, then it would come back next night, next day, error, waste of time and you’d have to send it back again.  So you could lose days if you made errors.

“The computer department had punch ladies who punched the data onto these punched cards which were then passed to a verifier machine, where a lady would punch exactly the same thing and the verifier would then come up and say error or otherwise if there was any difference between the two.  That was a system to try to eliminate any errors in punching before it went to the computer.  It’s very important, very expensive, because you were employing twice as many people as you needed, but it was the only way to do it.  That went on for two or three years, and then my boss managed to get a telephone line arrangement so we could feed the cards in at the lab and they would go down the wire to the computer at the computer centre and then the answers would then come back on a printer which we had in the laboratory.  Gradually the lab did eventually get its own computer on which we could start our own programming.  It was a Harris computer, most unusual, with a word length of 24-bits.  It was a very odd computer but it had a Reality operating system, which was a database system, which was very good.

“In 1975 when I was still at the laboratory, microcomputers hadn’t arrived, so all the scientists had to come across and bring their sheets of data to be punched there and then fed into the computer and next day they’d turn up and see what the answers were on that. I noticed that some of the scientists turned up every week with rows and rows of data and I thought there could be a way of processing this, so effectively I invented a spreadsheet program which was very like Excel. It was more sophisticated because you could do statistical tests on the data as well. That seemed to go down very well.”

In 1978, John took a role at H Leverton & Company, a caterpillar tractor dealership in Spalding, Lincolnshire. It was a subsidiary of Unilever and had six dealerships in Africa, known as the Unatrac division of the United Africa Company.

John says: “It was, I believe, the largest caterpillar dealership outside of the United States. Leverton’s had developed an excellent centralised computer system and what they wanted to do was to try to get the same system implemented in Nigeria. Unilever were running an IBM 360 in Lagos in Nigeria and so I was sent out there several times to advise as a visitor, because I wasn’t officially allowed to work, and help to make sure that system was working and applied correctly in Nigeria.  It was good fun.”

John became a consultant for Logica working on the Post Office Counters automation scheme under Dr Alan Shepherd initially and then Steve Maltby.

 Two years into the consultancy, John was appointed an acting line manager for the Post Office. He says: “So I had two jobs.  I was being paid for by Logica but being employed as a line manager for the best part of two years in the Post Office.  It’s a very strong loyal culture and I enjoyed it.”

After four years with Logica, John felt that he needed a change, he explains: “The reason why I left Logica in the end was that as an analyst I was doing more strategic studies, developing information strategies, and I felt I needed to be in a boardroom to be at the most effective. Logica are a very technical organisation so they were never going to get me in the boardroom, so I left then to join CAP, which is Computer Analysts and Programmers and became part of the Sema Group there. With them, I did manage to get into boardrooms, which was where I felt I ought to be to have the biggest impact on things.”

John spent six years with Sema (CAP) and then set up as an independent consultant. He says: “It was during that time that I became involved with Soft Systems Methodology, which Professor Checkland had been developing with colleagues at Lancaster University.”

His involvement came after bidding to do an information strategy for a small district hospital in Hexham, Northumberland. The hiring manager asked him to work with the Soft Systems Methodology.

John explains Soft Systems Methodology as a way of thinking about thinking.  He explains: “You enter a problem situation, which could involve the whole organisation, it’s not necessarily just somebody’s requirements.  If you can, it’s best to involve the senior people in that problem area and ask them to design a way of doing something that their organisation’s supposed to be doing.  Then you compare that design with what’s going on in reality and then they start to realise why things are not working correctly or why they need improving.”

During the project with the district hospital, John worked very closely with Peter Checkland, he describes it as “a wonderful experience”. It led to Peter and John writing ‘Learning for Action’, the definitive guide for Soft Systems Methodology, which was published in 2006 and is still a best seller today.

 As a result of gaining the project at Hexham, which was part of the Trust of the Royal Victoria Infirmary in Newcastle, John was called in to develop a strategy for them too. He adds: “We did a joint strategy study for the two hospitals in which we tried to bring together the people in the hospitals and the different ways of thinking.”

Working with Steve Clarke, the client, and Professor Checkland, John adds: “My job as consultant was essentially sitting back, making sure it was all going to happen and it was going to stay within budget.”  Professor Checkland has since written up his account of the study in a book, called ‘Information, Systems and Information Systems’, under a chapter called ‘Experiences in the Field’. In 2012, John was invited to speak at a colloquium in 2012 in honour of Professor Checkland which is now available on YouTube (Checkland Colloquium 2012 Poulter).  John has also lodged a complete set of strategy reports with the National Museum of Computing in Bletchley, thanks to Professor Campbell-Kelly, a trustee of the museum.

John joined the WCIT in 1990, he jokes that it was before it became ‘worshipful’ which took place in 1992 when it gained its livery status.

He says: “The reasons why I joined are quite simple.  One; I felt I had the ability to give something back in terms of experience and connections. I thought maybe I could give something back to the IT industry, the world.  Two; I really wanted to see how the really senior people in the IT industry operated.  People like my old boss in Logica, David Mann, Roger Graham, the chairman of BIS, Stephanie Shirley, with F International and so on. Everything I did with WCIT was done in parallel with my working career.

“I think I helped in a number of ways.  I was elected Secretary of the IT Industry Development Panel at the end of 1992 and carried on as Secretary of the Panel till 2003.  I was on Court for a couple of years as well and then I was able to help out on a governance task force which John Carrington was leading to try to rethink how the livery company was being managed. After that I was then helping out to get the Royal Charter.  I was working with Charles Hughes, Michael Grant, Michael Webster, now all past Masters, and one or two others as well.  We got the Charter in 2010 and had a big banquet in the Mansion House where the Earl of Wessex presented the Charter to us.”

John acted as the archivist of the WCIT from 2009 to 2021 having assisted Joan Smith in the 2000s with some of the archives.  He says: “Joan Smith, a very determined lady, did a grand job setting up the archives which was all hard copy to begin with, nothing digital.”

John had gained insight into archives, their value, what researchers wanted and how they wanted information organised, through his studies into Roman roads and own research with the National Archives and the Bodleian Library in Oxford. In 2009, Jo Connell, the Master at the time, appointed John as the Honorary Archivist of the company. He adds: “I developed an information strategy for the archiving which accounted for digital and hard copy records. I think it was one of my best strategy studies.  I’m pleased with that, and we’ve been implementing it ever since.”

The WCIT archive originated with material donated by Peta Walmisley who had been clerk from the early days. When John took over from Joan, he says the question became how do you keep channelling the material coming in. He explains: “I asked most of the panels who were generating a lot of the work done by the livery company to post copies of the minutes onto the company website and then I could download them from there into the archives and keep them in perpetuity.  One of the problems about digital archiving is how do you ensure it’s going to be still readable in a hundred years’ time.  So the strategy was for me to try then to capture these things and put them away so they could be secure for the future.” Since John took over the system of capturing material has become mostly digital, however, hard copies of other materials are still collected and archived.

As a liveryman of the Worshipful Company of Information Technologists John received the Mercury Special Recognition Award from the WCIT in May 2022. He says of the honour: “I’m not, not a person to be in front of anything, it doesn’t suit me, I’m a person who works in the background. I think a lot of members of the livery company felt that I’d been doing great things behind the scenes and they felt it was perhaps important to recognise this.” He was presented with the award at aBusiness lunch by Master Alistair Fulton.

In the early 1990s, while acting as secretary of the Industry Panel at the WCIT, John realised that there was an opportunity to capture anecdotes and instructive stories of leaders in industry for others to learn from. The idea continued to be discussed over the years by various people but no one had the time to take it further.  John explains what happened next: “Some years later Roger Graham got hold of the idea and he thought maybe there’s something there we could do. It wasn’t quite the same as what I’d imagined. Roger and I then worked on the idea. My role was trying to help Roger grasp what it was that he really wanted to archive, what was he really after.”

The pair set up various meetings with the British Library, the Science Museum and Sally Horrocks from Leicester University as they tried to find out what everybody else was doing. John continues: “Roger eventually came to the conclusion that really it was stories about the business side of things that weren’t being told.  People told stories about the IT side, the science side, but not the business side. Roger thought people in the present and in the future ought to learn from the mistakes we made in the past, as well as all the good things.  So his ideas were crystallising onto that.”

The pair then made a visit to the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, the Internet Archive people in San Francisco, and the Babbage Institute at the University of Minnesota, all of which helped Roger to determine what he wanted to achieve. John says: “What I’d been doing in the meantime was learning about how a top person thought, how he worked on things.  It took Roger a year or two to get his ideas firmed, he wasn’t going to jump in, but essentially I was just watching him focus and focus in on an idea until he was really sure that was what he wanted to do. I learned a lot doing that, and that’s one reason why I went to the livery company.”

Roger invited John to become a trustee of the Archives of IT but John preferred to remain in the background. He adds: “I’m not the person upfront, I was quite happy to sit back at that stage. I had other things I wanted to do, particularly with archaeology.  So, essentially I’ve really watched the Archives of IT develop from the sidelines.”

John says that there are several things that have pleased him during his working life, including the development of the database for the Research Laboratory and his work for the WCIT. He adds: “One of the big things which I’m pleased with is the work I did in preparation to the WCIT gaining of the Royal Charter.  The Royal Charter heads up a set of regulations which guide you working in the company. Underneath the Royal Charter, we have the By-Laws, the Ordinances, and then the rules and regulations of the company itself.  The Royal Charter can only be changed by the sovereign, the By-Laws can only be changed by the Privy Council, the Ordinances can only be changed by the Court of Aldermen of the City of London, but we can change the Working Practices. Because we were starting with a Charter we never had before, we had to get everything into line and that meant the whole lot had to be rethought completely.” John set out to speak with each of the chairs of the different panels within the livery company and to review the Working Practices. He adds: “I didn’t do it on my own, but we managed to get the whole lot into one coordinated structure which then could be used and as far as I know, the Working Practices are still carried on being used and developed ever since.”

John says of the future: “The point I’d stress here is the need for the industry itself, or the users, to establish proper fall-backs. If the technology goes wrong these days, somebody interrupts the internet etc, the whole thing could stop, therefore we need fallbacks so that we can still carry on and operate in some way or other.  That needs to be thought through and I don’t think it has been thought through.”

As a poet, John wrote a poem shortly before the WCIT’s Royal Charter and assigned its copyright to the Livery Company.. He says: “It seemed to me to epitomise the spirit of the livery movement.  It’s called ‘Liveryman’ and it goes:

Old portraits peal out from a vanished age:

How much has changed, page by page?

Now dead men’s faces peer at us

And mark our own mortality:

“Where you are is where we were,

And where we are will you soon be”.

Thus, their endeavours, over now,

So ours, so soon, will slip our span.

And we have sought to make this world,

For all, a better place:

In all the cosmos, negligible,

And yet a cosmic faith.

You who now may read these words,

You of the livery’s grace,

Remember always the eloquence of truth

And mark the margins of your days.

Interviewed by Elisabetta Mori

Transcribed by Susan Nicholls

Abstracted by Lynda Feeley