Last week I met with Steve Clayton who runs the Microsoft Blue Monster campaign and is CTO of Microsoft UK’s partner programme. Steve and I had previously exchanged emails, the odd phone call and he’d been kind enough to send over a Blue Monster T-shirt in time for me to wear at an SAP analyst dinner. -:) All of which is a long way around to discussing a post he wrote entitled The UK doesn’t get IT.
He refers to the growth of the Knowledge Economy and a quote culled from David Brain’s Sixty Second View:
In less than three years time, more than half of UK GDP will be generated by people who create ‘something from nothing’
In other words, people will build services based on how they imagine the world might be rather than as it is. However, if the report authors are correct, there are plenty of challenges. For instance, the UK is not training enough computer scientists to feed the anticipated growth in the knowledge economy. Even so, Gordon Frazer, MD Microsoft UK is optimistic. He believes that by 2015 (see report):
The City of London will have overtaken New York as the world’s financial hub, also rivalling Silicon Valley in the number of internet-based start-ups being launched. The revolution in information technology will have transformed the world of entertainment. London’s Soho will have the biggest movie digital effects industry outside Hollywood and the convergence of television and the internet will bring about a renaissance in visual entertainment. The UK will lead the world in the production of video games.
I hope he is right. If my recent excursion to London is an indicator, the UK appears to be well on track. Wherever I went, people are enthusiastic about the future of internet technologies, are keen to try new things and are invigorated to succeed. There is an atmosphere of sharing that I have never experienced before and an eagerness to provide positive criticism.
I hope that the profession is at least watching these trends. My sense is they are largely ignorant of the sweeping changes that are impacting the businesses they advise. I have yet for example to hear of a firm that is gearing up to provide advisory services for knowledge workers and contractors. Instead, I continue to hear the same tired discussions around marketing that have dominated professional business development thinking for more than 20 years. The world is changing and it is no longer about ‘me, me, me’ but about ‘us, us, us.’ To me that’s a much more powerful and interesting environment.
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