Interview with Sian Cleary

Sian Cleary was born in Frimley, Surrey. She grew up in Yateley, next to Sandhurst. Her mother was a stay-at-home mum, and her father was a car mechanic and ran his own business having started as an apprentice at Citroen. Sian has two sisters.

 Sian loves football and started playing when she was six. She played in the boys teams and says: “I was the only girl in the team and often the only girl, in the whole league, so there was a certain amount of adversity to overcome. I used to play up until about 11 for a boys’ team.  And then at 11 you have to join a girls’ team, so I found a local girls’ team and I’ve played all the way up to university and afterwards.” Unfortunately, injuries have meant that Sian has had to slow down her playing and has now joined a team playing walking football, she adds: “Walking football is a way to play without getting so injured, so I’ve really enjoyed being able to play again.”

Sian encountered computers at primary school, she says: “My age group was the Computers for Schools vouchers.  in the late 1990s early 2000s, Tesco and all the big supermarkets would give you vouchers at the till and you would give them to your school for computers, that was definitely a big thing.  We had one or two in the whole primary school and then when we got to secondary school, there was a computer room and where you’d do all of your IT lessons and if you needed to use the computers afterwards, you’d be able to go into there.”

Sian also studied IT at GCSE which she says she did with one eye on the future as she could see computers were becoming important, she adds: “I’m not going to pretend it was my favourite subject at that point, it was definitely PE and history, but I did take IT because I didn’t want to feel left behind going into further education.”

Having gained a C grade in IT, she says: “It’s one of those things that if you looked at my results at that point in time and looked at my interests, you wouldn’t necessarily predict the career or the route that I’ve gone down, but that’s life.”

Sian attended the local primary and comprehensive schools, says of the experience: “For me, school was good, I really enjoyed my time there and particularly studying history which was one of my favourite subjects as well as all the sports that I got involved in outside of the classroom.”

Sian gained a number of GCSEs, including German, graphic design, science, maths, English literature and language, IT, PE, again, history. She says of her choices: “I had a broad range of interests. We had to take a certain number of options, and then there were some that you could pick yourself.  …  For me, I liked the arts and humanities and if I could have taken more of those, so essentially, I picked my favourite subjects and also the ones that I was excelling in prior to the GCSEs.”

After her GCSEs Sian made the decision to study for her A levels over the option of pursuing a career in football on the playing or coaching side and she elected to go to Farnborough Sixth Form College. Here she studied A levels in psychology, physical education, history, general studies. She chose psychology because it was a subject which had not been available at her school at GCSE level. She describes the college as a “almost a mini-university” with 3,000 students and a wide range of curriculum options.

She says that the subject has been helpful in her research and career, adding: “You have to establish methods of research, when you’re writing a dissertation,  The one thing I would say that is different with  history in comparison to psychology is that with history you’re not necessarily coming in with a hypothesis that you’re trying to prove or disprove,  , rather you’re looking at the evidence and then forming a conclusion based on that evidence that you see.”

 “I think also in your professional career having that social science side is also helpful. I’ve gone into a career of IT and software development where you’re very much having to test theories  and various methodology, so I think those things do lend themselves to that psychology or scientific study approach.”

Sian was the first person in her family to go to university and  into higher education, a decision which took some time for her to make. Her mother died when Sian was 12 and she helped her father a lot, taking on responsibilities looking after her younger sisters, so going to university felt like a harder choice. She adds: “And, to be honest, the fees had started to come in, and obviously the living costs were a big consideration at the time.  So those were a couple of things that made me slightly reluctant, but on balance I had good grades, I was interested in the subject and wanted to pursue it, wanted to pursue it more.”

After completing her A levels, Sian applied to Queen Mary university in London to study history. It was her second choice of university after Birmingham for which she didn’t quite make the required grades. She says: “That decision to move there has become a defining decision in my life that had I gone to Birmingham, the opportunities and people I’ve met would be entirely different, so I’m very glad that that actually turned out in that way.”

Sian worked her way through her degree with part-time and evenings roles at Waitrose to help pay her way through her studies on top of her student loan.

 Her three year history degree allowed Sian to select a wide range of different eras of history to explore, she explains: “What I was trying to do is study all of the periods of history and areas that I took interest in that weren’t necessarily things I’d previously studied at school or college, and then as my time went forward, I specialised in what I found interesting.”

In her first year, she chose Britain since 1945, in her second year she studied Cabinet and Premiership. She says: “It was first pioneered by Professor Peter Hennessy (now the Lord Peter Hennessy), and latterly my mentor Professor Jon Davis to teach you how government really works, everything from Cabinet government, the constitution, the Civil Service, and that’s where my interest really peaked in that topic, and I continued down that path in my final year and studied Tony Blair and New Labour under Professor Davis.” Part of her course included visiting speakers from the government of the time, she adds: “That’s where my love of contemporary history, but also oral history and interviews grew from. It was very, very interesting because we would read someone’s memoirs or read a book, or study that topic and then have that person come into the class and almost cross-question them and examine areas of ambiguity.  That’s also a lot of what I’ve been able to do in my recent dissertation is to interview the people who were really there to try and understand first-hand some of those challenges that they had at the time.”

Sian’s dissertation examines the effectiveness of central government in the UK between 1992 and 1997, it includes a focus on the Department for Trade and Industry in relation to IT. She explains: “What I was really trying to get to the bottom of is the timeline of where digital policy starts and ends.”

In writing her dissertation, Sian drew heavily on the Archives of IT. She explains that she was recommended the resource through Ashley Sweetman in the Mile End Group (now known as the Strand Group), a forum to bring policymakers from Westminster and Whitehall together.  She says: “What really helped was grounding my research in the history of not just the internet and not just digital policy, but going back into computers and telecoms, and that’s what Archives IT was really helpful for.  The other person that recommended Archives of IT highly was Ian Taylor who was the Minister for Science, Technology and Space the in the period that I studied (1992 to 1997). He sat within the Department for Trade and Industry.”

“The wealth of information in the Archives was invaluable to that section of the dissertation because one of the key themes of the dissertation is talking about how the DTI essentially bucked the trend of the rest of Whitehall and recognised where it needed to bring in expertise from outside of the government. Professor Stephen Temple, as well as Professor Jim Norton and many others, but those two were the ones I focussed on in that team at that point, were expert outsiders that were brought in at a level within the Civil Service that allowed them to be really influential into the direction of the DTI and for the very early stages of digital technology at that time.”

Sian also looked at the work that Professor Temple did before 1992 and adds: “A lot of that work that Professor Temple did was slightly before that. It was 1987, around the idea of formation of single market and European ideals for a European digital mobile phone network standard (GSM) and one of my arguments on why he’s so crucial is essentially that by having him as an expert at director level, he had great understanding of the technology required to make a collaborative plan for Europe, but he also understood the context that he was in, he understood that we would need to really scale this in order to make a mobile phone affordable.  That’s a really important concept, because without that scale across Europe, you don’t get the handset for £200.

Asked if she believes there is a fundamental difference between the people who build networks and people in telecoms, Sian says: “As well as that telecoms knowledge, you need to understand the network, and I think Temple and Norton transcend their industry and that’s where you get some of these major breakthroughs, because without the networking you don’t have the internet, you don’t have these key concepts that we rely on today.  People just think the internet works and that’s the end of it. This kind of knowledge across domains is really, really crucial for the advances of the time, but also a lot of those principles are still quite key to the internet we still have today, even though we have so much more connectivity and speeds and performance, those broad concepts are the same.”

Sian also found Charles Hughes’ contribution to the Archives of interest through the role he playing in building digital policy with the DTI. She says: “At this point in time Stephen Temple, with mobile networks, and Jim Norton with the radio communication agency, were really leading the way.  So by that point the Department had the expertise at the right level to influence the direction of the policy on the infrastructure pieces, but what they didn’t have was knowledge of the internet and that’s really where Charles Hughes comes in and brings that strand of expertise into government.  He was seconded from ICL to work on a series of initiatives.  At the time, people didn’t know what the internet was, they knew it was important, and Ian Taylor recognised that they needed expertise.”

Charles helped to shape the policies around the UK’s Information Society Initiative which involved explaining the information society and internet to businesses and educating the public.

Sian believes the scheme was a success in educating smaller businesses and the general public, but that there was a missed opportunity in terms of investment to allow the UK to grow some of the larger IT companies that have emerged in other countries. She says: “It’s the difference between educating people on what the internet is and also investing. That policy was about education and I think you can measure that in its own way.  I don’t think we don’t have (large IT) companies because people aren’t educated on what the internet could do, but I do think there were opportunities missed where companies could have potentially been formed in the UK.   I think that is a missed opportunity.

“If we look across at things like Silicon Valley, the level of investment that was made by the government, the tax breaks that were introduced by the government, were all things that allowed America to really build out that start-up community and those new companies.

“From my research I felt that despite the improvements and successes that the DTI had, they were often a lone voice in that government, and I think it’s always important to situate why things did and didn’t happen in the context of that period of time.”

She highlights that under John Major, after losing his majority, the government were a “bit rudderless” and plagued with scandals and crises. She also notes that John Major himself did not see the value in the digital policy that the DTI were pursuing. Sian adds: “Had he seen it as a Prime Ministerial priority, perhaps he could have had more of  more co-ordinated digital policies which we don’t see in this period and that we’re still grappling with today. If we are shaped by our Prime Ministers and if we could have come up with tax cuts or encouragement to industry to start their technology companies here back in the late eighties and early nineties, perhaps we could have really fostered that community here and had more growth.  ARM still has its expertise and it has been a highly successful company, so it’s not that we have had no success, however, I don’t believe the government has had a huge amount of influence over the success of ARM where they could have, like the US, on a smaller scale, put more investment in and encouraged that kind of innovative culture here at that time.”

Having completed her degree, Sian joined an IT graduate scheme straight out of university at Waitrose and John Lewis Partners. She says: “At this point I knew that I liked the company, I’d worked for them part-time, so I understood some of the business processes that they had.  I looked at all the graduate schemes on offer, I knew I wanted to do a graduate scheme because I wasn’t entirely sure what I wanted to do, but I knew I wanted to work for a company.” She chose IT because she was interested in the systems such as stock systems that she’d seen while working at the stores but did not understand where all the information was going. She adds: “The other thing about the John Lewis graduate scheme is they wanted to take a mixture of people from IT and non-IT backgrounds ply, which was quite unusual.”

The scheme started with the graduates experiencing different work including learning COBOL and DB2 databases, she says: “I thought I’d made a grave mistake at this point.  I was just about old enough to remember Teletext and I was looking at these black screens with green text and thinking, what have I signed up for?  I had no concept of how COBOL programming related to a job that I could possibly be qualified to do.  So that was quite a rude awakening.”

Things settled down for Sian when they started a business analysis secondment, she adds: “That’s where I really felt that I was able to take it and run with it.  My knowledge of the store processes was always an advantage that I had throughout.  I understood what it was like to be on the shopfloor when things go wrong, so I had a fairly good feeling for some of those and I think as a business analyst, a lot of what you’re doing is trying to empathise with the person that’s trying to use the system, and so I was able to learn a lot in the business analysis space and that was the area that I decided to progress in.”

Sian started as a junior business analyst and progressed to a senior level. She adds: “  “Waitrose was great in not letting your age matter, as a graduate they were keen that if you were keen, you could be leading on pieces in projects, and so I got to work in the supply chain team, I worked on forecasting systems, ordering systems, you name it, and that gave me a really good start.” Sian later gained experience across the Retail Technology sector as a Senior Business Analyst at Marks and Spencer, working for their international department, and Primark, where she was the Lead Business Analyst for Warehouse Management Systems. Most recently Sian was a Senior Functional Consultant for Fluent Commerce, an E-Commerce Order Management Start Up Company.

Asked why the Manchester Baby does not feature as much in our IT history as the Cambridge computing, Sian says: “I was surprised in my own research where I’d understood that we’d had a big contribution towards the history of the computer in Britain, and Alan Turing’s role, but I had not seen Manchester too much in my basic understanding.  As I dug deeper I realised that Manchester and Cambridge are on par with each other, so why that one’s been forgotten, I don’t know.”

She highlights the need for more research to understand it, highlighting that Manchester as a city, has embraced much of its cultural and historical identities but its significant role in the development of technology is not an area that has focused on as much as it possibly could have been.

Asked about her attitudes to AI, whether she believes AI is going to allow us to bloom or bring doom, Sian says: “In life I tend to be more of a bloomer, but I do work in software, so I’m not sort of a naïve bloomer.  It has the power to do great good, but it also has the power to do some terrible things in the wrong hands and I think the challenge will be how can governments and other organisations provide governance to  AI to effectively bring out the good in it.

“We’ve already seen with the internet what happens if it’s not policed at all.  The power of AI is much greater than that. We’re already seeing things where very powerful technology leaders are having an impact on our own country and society.  I do think it needs to be policed because it’s so powerful and many in the AI industry are saying the same.  So the internet was interesting, nobody wanted it to be policed, so anybody that was leading the way in a company wasn’t asking for regulation, interestingly, with AI they’re all asking for regulation, it’s just to what degree of regulation that’s up for debate.”

Asked who should be the regulators, Sian says: “I don’t claim to have the answer to that, and I don’t claim that the government is necessarily the best person to answer that question, but what the government should be able to do is form some sort of global forum which represents citizens’ views. It would need to be assembled to manage those discussions. Those conversations are already happening, but I think rather than at an individual country level, there could be a better outcome if those things were discussed at a more global level, as they affect everybody.”

Asked about the AI initiative organised by the newly formed Department for Science Innovation and Technology, at Bletchley Park, Sian says: “I think it’s great that they are taking AI seriously and that they brought a huge amount of people in a community together, however it is not yet clear what the tangible outcomes of the summit will be, so let’s wait and see.”

She highlights the fact that the UK has only a few small companies working in AI, adding: “We’re still very much dependent on massive companies in the US and their CEOs and we’ve brought them together but how much influence do we have when we’re talking about things like regulation and things like that. It is quite hard for the British government to lead on that policy, so as a minimum, getting people together and talking about it I think is a good thing, but I think we are beholden to those larger AI companies.

“The reason why these companies in the US have the ability to be leaders in the AI industry is the previous investment that’s happened during the Silicon Valley start-up phase way back when. They’ve continued to grow and they’ve continued to be platform leaders and we are playing catch-up.  We do have some good companies in that space, Darktrace is one of them, we are trying to do things, but traditionally the role in British government is to be the penholder in creating legislation and policies and things like that. I don’t think we’re a leader in this space at the moment, so there’s a lot more work to do.”

Asked about quantum computing and its potential impact on the internet, Sian says: “I think it will come. The scalability that we’re seeing with the likes of AI, which uses a huge amount of compute, and the trends that we’re seeing in this space, I think it’s inevitable that it will come along.  The ability to solve complex problems quicker and quicker, it’s inevitable.  How it’s used and how it works alongside the internet, that I do not know at all.  Again, this is an area where we have the ability to use this for the power of good, like we do for AI, so these are some of the key challenges.”

Sian also highlights the need to educate people about new technologies as they start to emerge adding: “The basic levels of understanding of these things that are coming along need to be taught, people need to be educated on some of these things coming in because these are going to be the things that basically change our whole working culture.  What does a job look like in 20 years’ time, ten years’ time?  All of these things have a massive impact.”

Sian plans to go on to her PhD to focus more on the full history of digital policy in collaboration with the DSIT.  She says: “What’s interesting is that this is such an under-researched area. My Masters is almost the first chapter.  … I’ve learnt, very quickly, that there’s so many topics that you want to cover and there’s not enough room in a Masters. You think 15,000 words is plenty, but once you get started in this area, there’s so much context. What I’d like to do is to almost  rework it as the first chapter of a full history of digital policy and work very closely with DSIT and the policymakers to bring it all the way up to the present day.”

“The reason for doing a PhD and taking a bit of a change in my career is to try and use what I’ve learnt so far in the IT industry and apply it to this area of digital policy, not just for the PhD, but the opportunity to teach other people about this, because I think understanding the roots of it, and this is where Archives IT comes in, understanding the roots of how we came to be where we are is really important context for future decisions. I think some of the lessons that we have learnt along the way would be useful to teach to students, especially students who have grown up completely in the digital age. I have somewhat been in the digital age in my life and actually reading some of the advances as part of this research and studying it have been a massive eye-opener to me, so I think somebody who’s even more kind of entrenched in kind of having digital technology at their fingertips it’s important to understand that context and maybe why we don’t quite have full internet regulation now, why are we only just seeing Online Harms Bill come through, why wasn’t it there before, why are those decisions made, why hasn’t it been a Prime Ministerial priority before this point, etc.”

Interviewed by Richard Sharpe

Transcribed by Susan Nicholls

Abstracted by Lynda Feeley