Interview with Lory Thorpe

Lory Thorpe was born in 1970 in Canada. She explains: “I was born in Canada and I was adopted as a baby. My adoptive parents were from Italy, they were immigrants who had left Rome and gone to Canada.”

As a child, Lory was fascinated with how things worked. She says: “This translated into taking all sorts of things apart at any given opportunity. My parents saved up for a microwave and armed with a screwdriver I proceeded to take it apart. My father was an engineer and engineering has always been something that has been a passion.  I was always very interested in maths, physics, and chemistry; they were the things that At the time the gender roles were a lot more defined than they are today, but my parents were absolutely fine with me doing something that I wanted to do and that ultimately I was very good at, they always supported me, which I’m very grateful for.”

Lory attended her local primary school, Summit Heights, in Toronto. She explains that she really enjoyed her education and learning, and adds: “I was very fortunate that I had some amazing teachers.  Our school bought what was probably one of the first computers in a primary school in the day; it was a 4k TRS-80. One of our teachers had a passion for computers which he transmitted to all of us, showing us what the computer could do.  I was probably eight years old at the time, so it was really such a fascinating thing that you only saw in films, you didn’t see computers anywhere else, just at the movies. We could earn keyboard time if we got good grades in maths and we used cassettes to load programs, and that would really be the beginning of a passion that persists to this day.”

Lory’s education continued in Canada until the age of 17 when she and her parents moved to Rome. She says: “I continued with my passion for scientific topics.  When I moved, I knew Italian, but I didn’t know Italian enough to write fluently, so in some ways that was a challenge and I think I gravitated to more scientific topics. The topic that I liked most was physics, and that’s still true to this day.”

At college, Lory spent two years studying information technology and computer science and a further year studying telecommunication engineering, a switch which she explains was ‘accidental’, adding: “In engineering, at that time, the first two years were common and we studied different topics. However, there was a lot happening in telecommunications, this was as mobiles were just starting, and I was interested in radio frequency engineering, there were a few things that I was interested in and I thought, why not.”

After leaving college, Lory became a freelance simultaneous translator.

In 1998, Lory joined Ericsson in Rome, a company she would spend thirteen years working for. Lory explains: “This was when mobile was really starting and it was an absolutely fantastic experience to be part of that.”

Reflecting on the impact mobile technology has had on society, both the good and bad elements, she continues: “If we think of how it’s changed society, changed how we interact, changed what’s possible, it really is incredible to think that this has happened throughout my lifetime. … I really feel that I was part of a journey that has really changed the world.”

Lory started her career working on a project to develop prepaid intelligent networks. She explains: “Intelligent networks were all of those services that were being built on top of the connectivity itself.  Prepaid was one of the most famous intelligent network services.  Mobile phones were really expensive, they weren’t something that everybody could go out and buy. Prepaid is one of the services that democratised the use of phones because you didn’t need a credit card any more to be able to go and buy a phone.  Prepaid offers were generally more affordable than having a monthly contract, and at the time the concept was completely new. We were looking at how we could do it and how to build that capability that still exists today.  It was really revolutionary concept at the time, and it was one of the first projects I was involved in.  It was much more of a start-up mentality than you would find in telecommunications today. We used to do the development of the service, then we would go and test it, then we would do support.  So it was very, very intense, long hours, but it was hugely satisfying.”

After thirteen years, Lory decided to leave Ericsson. She says: “Ericsson gave me a lot of different opportunities. I did different roles within the company, I moved to a more global role as part of a global network expert design team and we worked in different places so I got the opportunity to travel. My role evolved over time and it also evolved as the industry was evolving.  Standards came into the picture more prominently, so we moved away from proprietary protocols and deployments to more standard based deployments and I became involved in standards.

“I also moved to the UK during my time with Ericsson, and I started looking at opportunities outside. It was about personal growth, but it was also about understanding what was out there.  I wanted to experience things outside of Ericsson.

“It was probably one of the most difficult decisions I made in my career, because at that point I wasn’t even sure that there was anything outside of Ericsson, I wasn’t sure whether I’d be able to be successful outside of Ericsson. Looking back with 20/20 hindsight, it was definitely the right decision, but it was a hard decision.  Ericsson was definitely a very formative time in my career, my personal life, and personal development.”

In 2011, Lory joined Huawei where she stayed for three years. She says: “Huawei at this point was just starting out in Europe, it was a Chinese company that was trying to break into a new market. Looking at what’s happened since and all of the challenges that Huawei are going through, it is quite sad that things have come to what they’ve come to.  I had an absolutely fantastic experience working with Huawei.  It was a completely different culture compared to Ericsson. … It was a completely different way of doing things, completely different mentality and it was a huge and difficult learning curve, but ultimately really very, very satisfying and I had a really good experience working with Huawei.”

Lory highlights some of the difference which included the decision making process, company organisation, and language challenges. She says: “They implemented something that they used to call ‘one plus one’. When I was hired, they gave me a plus one; this was a Chinese person that worked with me, and he did the internal aspects and I worked on the more external aspects of the role. I was very lucky to have a plus one that I am friends with to this day and that ultimately taught me a lot about Chinese culture and how things worked. I was really very fortunate to be able to have somebody help me to navigate the organisation.”

She adds of joining the company: “It could have gone really badly wrong. I knew I was making a bet, but I also knew that it was something that would allow me to challenge myself. Fundamentally, it’s a very, very good engineering company, from the R&D, the fact that they’re so customer-centric, the fact that the decision-making process means that once they’ve committed to doing something, that is what everybody does.  I think it has some really unique aspects that were very positive.”

Speaking of the quality of the company’s technology, Lory adds: “What I think sometimes we now lose sight of now is that it was very, very good equipment, it was very good technology. While I was there we set up the Cyber Security Centre, working with the UK government.  That was a very good concept. Looking back I feel could have been better leveraged and maybe it would have avoided some of the things that then happened, because that is really what you want as part of the security process, you want all vendors to be able to scrutinise what is going into our networks and making sure that what we’re deploying is secure.”

Asked if she feels that the suggestion of security problems with Huawei are scare tactics, Lory says: “The way to find if there’s anything buried is to put the right framework around it, if there it will surface through the testing.  So I don’t believe that banning a company on political grounds means that the network is now secure.”

In 2014, Lory joined the Vodafone Group as Head of Internet of Things and Innovation Strategy. Speaking about its culture, Lory says: “It’s English but it’s multinational.  As part of the Group, I had the opportunity to work with all of the other countries that form part of Vodafone; it was very multicultural.

“It’s a very large and complex organisation. I was working in a role that was pioneering some of the most exciting things that were happening at the time. I was working with an ecosystem of partners at the cutting edge of technology. It was the best job in the company because I felt that I had exposure to all of these new ideas and new things that were happening and that, even today, they’re still in the process of materialising. Such things as intelligent transportation systems, connected cars, non-terrestrial networks, these were all things that we were looking at as part of the innovation and strategy and they were all things that are now slowly coming to fruition.”

.Asked about the time that it has taken the concept of the Internet of Things to evolve, Lory says: “It’s been coming slowly. We could argue that things can always go quicker and often with any new technology we underestimate the time that it takes to deploy capabilities at scale. It’s one thing doing a proof of concept or something in a lab, it’s another getting to adoption at scale.  I do believe that Internet of Things has delivered a huge amount, if we think today that our cars are all connected, our meters are connected, etc.”

Asked about the early predictions of the Internet of Things and the prospect that we would have fridges that told us when we had run out of something, Lory adds: “Just because you can connect something, it doesn’t mean you should, and it doesn’t mean that it’s particularly useful.  If you think of road infrastructure, of parking, of the cars themselves, and the fact that your car will tell you that you have a problem and you need to go to the mechanic because the brakes need to be looked at, these are the sort of things that are actually potentially a lot more useful than maybe being told that you’ve run out of milk or that your washing machine cycle has finished.”

In 2019 Lory joined Nokia Software as Global Head of Enterprise Products.

She says of Nokia Software: “It was branching out from Nokia and at the time it was a separate company and it had ambitions in the software space. It was not focussing on the traditional Nokia infrastructure piece, it was very much focussing on the future of software. I was part of a team that was looking at different aspects of this and including things like security, analytics and automation.

“The focus for Nokia was selling to the operators, but one of the things that over time had also evolved in the telecommunication industry is that more and more enterprises were using effectively telecommunication services, and in some cases they were using them working with the operators, in some cases they wanted to source them directly. This is where things like private networks were becoming more accessible.  The role that I took on in Nokia was to look at of all these capabilities that we were traditionally selling to the operators and work out which ones it would make sense to sell to the enterprise directly and how we could work with enterprises and with operators in parallel to really progress the digitalisation across the different sectors.  This was working in transportation, manufacturing, and energy and utilities.”

When a new CEO joined, Nokia Software was incorporated back in to Nokia. Lory adds:  “Effectively the strategy of Nokia Software disappeared at the time.  I was a little bit disappointed that that happened, but obviously the overall strategy of Nokia changed at the time, because they needed to adapt to what was happening in the market and needed to focus on certain things.”

In June 2021, Lory joined IBM. Asked about its culture at that time, Lory says: “For those of us that have been involved in computing it’s just such an iconic organisation that has evolved over the years, but has ultimately produced some of the most extraordinary technology that we still use today.”

She says that moving to the large and complex organisation that IBM is was  challenging. She explains: “This was in the aftermath of Covid, so the added challenge was that a lot of the initial work that was being done was still being done remotely.

“The shock for me was that it’s the first time I’ve worked for a non-telco company, telco is one of the sectors that obviously form part of the strategy, but I’d only ever worked for companies that only did telecom. The breadth of the work that’s done within IBM still surprises me.  Generally the challenge in IBM is that you know that someone somewhere is doing something, you just need to find them, and it’s not obvious how you do that.”

Over the last three years with the company, Lory has been building a network, she says: “You need to build your network, you need to understand how the organisation works, and that’s always a challenge in a big organisation. I was very fortunate that my manager, Steve Goetz who was based in New York and had been in IBM for a long time, was very much, not just a manager, but a mentor and somebody that really helped, enabling me to do a good job and to be effective in the organisation.  The role I started out in was very interesting with a new team that was created from scratch at the time, and I had the opportunity to work with some really clever, really interesting people.”

 Talking about her work in quantum computing at IBM, Lory explains that the company has published a roadmap and is currently hitting every milestone on the way to achieving a quantum computer.

She adds: “There is huge progress being made in the development of quantum capabilities.  There is lot of research ongoing, and what we’re seeing now is a series of breakthroughs, things that get published, things that then get scrutinised, some are true, some are not true, but undoubtedly, progress is being made. If we look at some of the more recent announcements, and some of the new machines that IBM now has working, we can see that even over the last couple of years, some incredible progress is being made in terms of the scale, the performance, technologies around error mitigation and error correction.  There isn’t going to be necessarily a date where all of a sudden we’re ready, it will be an evolution process.

“We’re already seeing that with some of the work that’s being done that quantum computers are becoming more useful and becoming more able to support the resolution of certain problems.”

 Asked if quantum computing will break the cryptography of the internet, Lory says: “We know that quantum computers can do a lot of great and useful things.  One of them is solving mathematical problems that underpin some of the cryptography that we use today.  Exactly when they’ll be able to do that, there isn’t a date that we can pinpoint.

“In this case, first of all, cryptography is not all created equal, so the ability to break cryptography will also depend on what cryptography we’re referring to.  But there are also a number of things that can happen that can accelerate that. If we think of the algorithms that we have today, there’s a lot of work optimising some of those algorithms that we’ll be able to break, for example, RSA, so Shor’s algorithm.

“The scale and the performance and the speed of quantum computers is progressing.  Error correction techniques are being studied, and a breakthrough in error correction could actually accelerate when a cryptographically relevant quantum computer will appear.

“So without having an exact date, my advice is it’s better to be prepared, to start preparation. It’s not even obvious how and where we’re using cryptography today. Cryptography is pretty relevant to our everyday lives, pretty relevant to our digital society, digital economy, so I’d like to think that people will take that seriously in preparing the right timescales and not leave it till the end.”

Asked if AI will take over, Lory says: “It’s a very powerful technology and as a society we need to look at responsible use of technology.  That is something that is true of any powerful technology; it will be true of AI, it will be true of quantum.

“AI has huge potential for good. It has huge potential of being incremental in terms of the capabilities that it brings and allowing us to do things more efficiently or better than we do them today, but it also does have the potential for misuse and that’s where responsibility comes in.  There is potential to do harmful things, as with any sort of powerful technology, but I think it’s up to us as a society to ensure that we put the right framework in place to avoid that.

“I don’t think you can pause AI, you can only correct the course and there isn’t an option to stop for a minute. The genie is out of the bottle and things will progress, but it’s really up to us as a society how we manage and how we use new technologies in general.”

Asked about the issue of AI technology being ‘black box’, Lory says: “There are ways to deal with it.  IBM has taken a very ethical stance to AI to ensure that it’s not a black box.

“It’s a black box if we want it to be and if we don’t control the data that goes into it and we don’t have visibility of how it’s coming to its conclusions, but it doesn’t need to be that way. It’s about the implementation rather than the technology itself.  It’s a very powerful technology and left unsupervised or left in the hands of people that don’t have these ethical concerns at the top of their mind, it can definitely go badly wrong.”

Asked about her management style, Lory explains that for a long time she operated as an individual contributor and only went into management reluctantly. She explains: “I didn’t want the responsibility of managing a team, but I started on my management journey when I was in Vodafone.  It was a difficult transition, because when you’re used to being an individual contributor there are a lot of things that you don’t need to think about.  My time in Vodafone was one of the best of my career and I built a team from scratch, so I was able to recruit people into the team, I didn’t just inherit a group of people. I believe I created a very good collaborative environment in which to work. It ended up being a very positive experience, possibly because I wasn’t expecting it to be.”

Speaking about her experience of being a woman in IT, Lory says: “In the early days I think the roles I took were probably given to me in spite of me being a woman.  Telecommunications in the nineties was a very male-dominated environment, the women that were part of telco, were very, very few and far between.  There was very little diversity.  There was no talk of inclusion.  I’d love to be able to say that now things are completely different but I don’t think they are. However, there is a lot more awareness and, certainly on the surface, every company now has a diversity and inclusion agenda, and depending on the companies I think that they believe in it and really act on it, more or less.

“Things have moved on, not as much as I would have liked, there’s a long road ahead to make sure that we are able to really leverage the potential of the diversity of people that we encounter in the workplace. It’s not just about having fifty per cent females, it’s also how do you support, for example, women that are going through the different stages of life, are having children and having to either take time out or need more flexibility etc.  Those are the things that really it’s important to look at as part of the policy. How do you accommodate that flexibility to ensure that you don’t disenfranchise some of the people that could really contribute to the workforce and contribute to the objectives of the company.”

Asked about Y2K, Lory says: “In Y2K, a lot of people say nothing happened.  Nothing happened because there was a lot of preparation done for Y2K.  I was in the emergency handling centre in Rome for Y2K, because we weren’t quite sure what was going to happen with services.  We had done a lot of work to try and mitigate any potential threats, but we weren’t really a hundred per cent sure that everything was going to go to plan.  There was a whole team of us ready to address anything that came up; nothing came up, so it all went very, very well, with the exception of the usual congestion and things like that that happen on a network on New Year’s Eve.  But I think the preparation that was done for Y2K enabled the impact to not be as widespread as it would have been.”

Interviewed by Richard Sharpe

Transcribed by Susan Nicholls

Abstracted by Lynda Feeley