I joined Shell because of the excellent salary - £7,200 a year! – and because it offered me a chance to travel.  I was based at  the main Shell UK data centre in Manchester, which housed some of the most powerful computers in the world at that time, including a Cray, several IBM 3900 mainframes, some large Sperry Univac machines, and loads of minicomputers.  The data centre was a huge, hanger-like area that blinked and hummed.  The personal computer was still in the future.

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During the mid-1980s I moved from Shell to work with Arthur Andersen as a management consultant and learned Method/1, Andersen’s proprietary systems development methodology.  It didn’t seem much like computer engineering to me and of course it wasn’t – it was a new thing called ‘IT’.

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In 1989, I left Andersen with some colleagues to set up the DMW Group. This was my first experience of running a small business and it was exhilarating and terrifying.  Towards the end of my time at DMW, I worked at Glaxo, the pharmaceutical company, implementing its Information Highway – a large telecommunications network to connect remote locations to head office. Later I worked on the merger between Glaxo and Wellcome, one of the largest corporate mergers at that time. 

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By this stage of my career, I knew something of how IT worked in large enterprises.  I also understood how hard it is to get it right.