The IT industry is certainly the place to be if forward thinking is your passion. Such has been the pace of change in digital technology over the past few decades, you start to wonder if the tech community has left any innovators and ground-breakers spare for anyone else.
The flipside, of course, is that there is always a pressure to push boundaries and be on the verge of something new. Nothing stands still in the world of IT and telecommunications. If your business does, it loses the race.
Adrian Thirkill, chief executive officer at GCI, came into IT from the world of management consultancy. "I was assigned to do some work at Colt," he said. "I found that I liked the industry and that was clearly the case on both sides, as they invited me to stay afterwards."
It was at Colt, the London-based telecoms and data centre services company, that Adrian first started to realise that IT was the place to be if you wanted to mix with the innovators and forward thinkers.
"I've been fortunate enough to have had some great managers and worked with leaders both in technology and beyond. Lakh Jemmett, the managing director at Colt, was a brilliant visionary, as was David Rowe who started and created Easynet."
Removing the silos
As a lifelong Leeds United fan, Adrian has had plenty of opportunity to witness what bad management can do to an organisation. In his professional life, he has taken on board the lessons his mentors taught him, and sees his role very much as that of an enabler of success.
"My job is to sit at the bottom of the organisation helping all of the people above me," he said.
From the bottom, looking up at the whole structure of the company he now leads, Adrian has never forgotten the lessons of innovation he learnt early on in IT.
GCI provides managed services in four areas - Unified Communications, the Cloud, security and compliance and network and infrastructure. It is easy to view these as separate disciplines under the business technology banner, and have separate departments running as distinct entities to run each. Indeed, this was how Adrian found GCI operating when he took over.
