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Monday, 4 November 2013 00:00 - - {{hitsCtrl.values.hits}}
The BCS is also known as the Chartered Institute for IT, the foremost customer-service oriented professional body for the IT and Communications profession. BCS consists of over 70,000 members, over 20,000 Chartered IT professionals and adds over 1,000 new members every month. It is also one of the world’s largest IT examination institutes, holding more than 30,000 examinations a month around the world. Following are excerpts:
Q: What did you hope to accomplish during your visit to Sri Lanka?
A: BCS has been in Sri Lanka a long time, over 15 years to date. At the moment, we are looking at what we need to do invest in and develop our presence in the country. After the UK, it is our next biggest market in terms of numbers. But there’s always more potential in what we can achieve. We have a royal charter, so our goals are not just financial but aim to develop the profession globally. We are also the world’s biggest professional IT body, and develop global standards.
We need to understand where we invest internationally. I wanted to be clear on what the opportunity was right now, as situations change all the 
time and see for myself. It appears as though this is as good a place as any.
We have access to the Government and are speaking to ministers and people as to what the possibilities are. There’s huge potential in IT and a desire to become an IT hub here, along with entrepreneurial spirit and start-ups.
We also have some 7,000 members here that can help make this happen. Putting all that together, it’s the right place and time to invest.
Q: What has made Sri Lanka your second highest market?
A: A number of countries have their own professional bodies, although none of them are of the size of BCS. While we also work with other bodies such as the Computer Society of India, they are much more academic. We accredit and approve over a thousand academic corps in the UK and have global distinguished fellows such as Bill Gates and Tim Berners-Lee.
We also have a much more practical side to us, of raising the standard of IT professionals as they do their job. When we started off in Sri Lanka, we had an incredibly enthusiastic group of people who wanted to replicate what we do in the UK here, from the people who volunteered to the membership committee.
A lot of the work is done by current working professionals who want to get involved and make a change, with a staff to support them. We also have a chartered professional IT standard and several other standards below that.
You need to have that level of capability and commitment; a certain standard that people operate to and codes of professional conduct. We developed and re-launched that in 2004, and have received a lot of acceptance in the UK and we want to widen that out.
It’s easier in countries in which the British education system has already been in place, because the word “chartered” carries the same meaning.
Q: During your tenure as head of BCS, revenue, membership and awareness have multiplied internationally. How did you achieve this?
A: Firstly, we had the ambition to make it happen and started focussing on the opportunities available. We looked at the possibilities for a chartered IT body in the UK and the professional scene. At that time in 2002, it almost seemed as though the IT profession was like the Wild West; there were no real standards and products weren’t delivered to time or budget.
If we were ever going to succeed, we had to change that. So we launched this program called ‘Professionalism in IT’, which revolved around a real code of conduct that everyone had to adhere to. We got a lot of people on board, including large IT and end-user companies, and so the movement snowballed.
Q: How did BCS start its global push?
A: Initially, our presence outside the UK was really driven by the people within those countries themselves who wanted to be a part of what we were doing. If enough people got together within a country and came forward requesting to establish a branch locally, we would enable it. In terms of global standards, it really evolved out of the ‘Professionalism in IT’ program.
A couple of years later, we really started when we realised that none of our existing standards were really UK-specific. We then decided that our standards, such as the chartered one with broad status and current competence in nine different areas, and assessment for competence in a specific IT field, had to be globally relatable. So we started to licence our standards and drove them internationally.
We also have a tremendous skills framework, called SFIA (Skills For the Information Age), which we worked on for 30 years and was initially called the Industry Structure Model. This has become the standard comprehensive skill architecture for IT. IBM amongst other companies have adopted this and woven it into their framework, along with the UK and Australian Governments.
Q: In what specific terms do you plan on investing in the country?
A: We want to get our existing skills architecture mapped with the Government and introduce more certification and our programs around accreditation in order to model what we’re doing in the UK. But we also need to ensure that the components are necessary or introduced at the right time. For example, Green IT is thriving in Sri Lanka but our lowest skills management certification may not work here.
There’s huge potential in IT here. It is no accident that in our professional graduate diploma, the winner has come from Sri Lanka for the past four years. The quality is here. I think the opportunity is tremendous as it is a global market. The issue is how to get companies to develop products and services here and get them to the market.
If we can help with the credibility of the brand, that’s important. But there’s an existing quality, attitude and mindset that is already prevalent in Sri Lanka. Work ethic and family support, along with a drive for quality are intrinsic here.
Q: Speaking of potential, what could be improved in Sri Lanka’s IT field?
A: There’s a real problem that’s mirrored in the UK in terms of the way that IT is taught in schools. It used to be taught only as a potential office tool and that too only from secondary school onwards. In reality, IT careers can be very exciting; ranging from building the technology for F1 cars, to game development.
We have helped develop the curriculum for this in the UK and train teachers with the competence to teach tech-savvy students. The idea is to ensure that everyone leaves school digitally literate, which is a large cost-saving measure in the long term for governments wishing to provide services online or digitally.
We plan to bring the same plan to action over here in Sri Lanka too, by creating career paths and computer literacy from a school level itself.
