IT Life: Managing In Financial Times

Christina Scott has worked in IT for eighteen years at places including BT Vision, News International, ITV Digital and the BBC, with several years as a consultant at Accenture. This month she joined the Financial Times as chief information officer, and talked to TechWeekEurope about the journey so far.

What has been the best project in your career so far?
Working with a small team at the BBC looking at IPTV apps.  The team were creating innovative ideas well ahead of platform readiness, but it showed what the future might hold.

A monkey ahead of its time?

What technology were you involved with ten years ago?
Ten years ago I was at ITV Digital, but the company had just gone into administration (in May 2002).  I was pregnant with my first child and stayed and worked with the administrators helping to close down the business.

The main technology in my area at ITV Digital was a customer care and billing system.  It was actually not too different to those around today, except it was before customer management systems were really Internet enabled.

When I think of some of the products we were trying to implement at ITV Digital I think we were ahead of the technology. We released both email and web on TV, but the experience wasn’t brilliant.

Bring on the self driving cars!

What tech do you expect to be using in ten years’ time?
I’d be rich if I had ever really got this question right!

The face of TV should be completely different.  IPTV will have transformed television from an entertainment/gaming centre to a wider remit including an interactive educational agenda and practical usage.  For entertainment I would expect a life-like holographic experience.

Mind reading technology is suggested as a possibility in that timeframe, but that’s too unnerving to consider. I prefer to believe voice recognition software will develop to a point where you could pay your bills safely by just talking to your phone.

In other areas of technology, I would expect to see progress in things like self drive cars, real alternatives to oil and gas and advances in biotechnology around bone regenerations, cancer and degenerative diseases.

Who’s your tech hero? Who’s your tech villain?
Hero: Alan Turing – his deciphering of the Enigma code during the second world war was critical to the final outcome. I’ve always found it sad that having done something so good he was driven to suicide by views held on homosexuality at the time [Or was he? – Editor].

Villain:It’s a bit unfair and I’m sure they are really nice people, but Leonard Baum and Lloyd Welch invented an approach to voice recognition that is the blueprint for the IVR systems we have today.   When I have spent several hours of my life waiting to get through to talk to someone and I am then put through a myriad of options and ‘I’m sorry I did not understand that’ my blood boils.

What’s your favourite technology ever made? Which do you use most?
It’s almost too boring to admit, but I am surgically attached to my iPhone. Previously I had no interest in phones,. Beyond making phone calls and texts, I didn’t think about any further usage.

Apart from your own, which company do you admire most and why?
Burberry – a company that is over 150 years old, but has managed to stay at the forefront in their use of social media and a customer centric approach to become one of the fastest growing brands in recent years.

What’s the greatest challenge for an IT company/department today?
With the rapid pace of change in our industry, the main challenge is balancing the delivery of new technology while supporting and evolving existing products.

To Cloud or not to Cloud?
Cloud.

What did you want to be when you were a child?
A vet. Until I found out you needed to study for 7 years.

Do you share Christina’s regard for Alan Turing? Try our quiz!