What does your job entail?
I’m responsible for the IT department serving Taylor Wessing’s UK offices, which accommodate around 700 lawyers and their administrative staff. We primarily provide helpdesk support, customer services and training, but there is a strategic element as well. A project team looks to add new applications and enhance existing ones, for instance.

What was your first job?
Washing dishes in the canteen at Woolworths.

How did you get into IT?
I’ve been in legal IT for the past 10 years, but prior to that I worked for the Foreign & Commonwealth Office (FCO) for 13 years. Towards the end of my time at the FCO, just about the time when PCs first started to emerge, I learned MS-DOS at night school, though more by luck than judgement. I then applied for a role as a network manager and got it.

Do you have any other IT qualifications?
Apart from the MS-DOS night school qualification, I became a Novell certified administrator back in the days when NetWare was widely used. I have since done a law degree because I wanted to know more about the industry I am in. At this stage of my career, I am less hands-on and more strategic, so I wanted to look at parts of the law that affect IT, like data protection and retention.

Which IT-related problems keep you awake at night?
Things have improved in terms of system and application stability over the past couple of years, and I very rarely get disturbed [outside office hours]. That said, if there is a single thing that must always stay up it is email – I would sleep very soundly if I could guarantee it would never go down.

What would you most like to see happen in the IT industry?
I’d like to see the industry step back a bit and let technology do what it is supposed to do, which is make life easier for the people using it. Also, it would be great if we could identify all the areas of software applications that never get touched and then de-bloat it for users, so that what is in front of them is what they actually use – that way we could train them in the right areas. Unfortunately, the trend with software developers is to just add more and more features. I’d like to see something like that reported back to you in the press.