Laurence Kiddle, head of data and technology teams at professional services firm S&W, knows more than most about what compromises a good IT strategy. He gives HENRY CARPENTER the lowdown on the fundamental pieces which need to be in place to maximise its potential.
It’s a fascinating time to be involved with tech at the moment.
That’s the opinion of Laurence Kiddle, who runs the technology and data services team at S&W and has therefore had access not only to the latest ‘kit’ – much of it AI-related – but also to a wide spectrum of businesses.
And this is rather the point: yes, AI and tech in general are advancing at an extraordinary rate with the power to take on tasks unimaginable only a few years ago, but the nature and direction of the business employing it is the fundamental driver to its use. One size most certainly does not fit all when it comes to businesses’ IT strategies.
“It’s true that tech is amazing and travelling at near light speed, but what’s important is right-sizing the strategy for the size and shape of the organisation,” says Kiddle, who has been a partner at S&W for two years.
“And the strategy has also got to support through future growth as well. So, what’s right for, say, Cisco isn’t going to be right for the guy in the corner shop, and vice versa.”
Kiddle has almost ideal qualifications which enable him to take an all-angles viewpoint when assessing the right strategies for the right businesses.
Having graduated in 2000, part of his career was spent with massive professional services firms such as Arthur Anderson and then Deloitte where he was a partner and consultant. Significantly though, he has also worked in industry with software companies. At one end of the scale he ran the European tax and accounting business of Thompson Reuters, but he has also had roles at much smaller companies scaling up.
Therefore, not only has he advised, he’s also been the recipient of advice and gone through internal transformation programmes with organisations of varying sizes.
So, not to put too fine a point on it, Kiddle knows what he’s talking about.
“We get asked to talk about tech and AI strategy quite a lot, and the policy is only ever there to service the wider goals of the business,” he says.
“It’s utterly meaningless without a sense of what the business is, what it’s trying to achieve, what its ultimate goals are and how effectively technology can be a tool to support it.
“There are some great bits of kit out there, but they only work if you’ve got the full support of the business behind it.
“It’s that classic diamond effectively, where you’ve got technology on one side, the data that the kit’s using on another, then you have the business process and the people actually using it on the other two sides.
“Those are the four components critical to making anything work and serve the business strategy.”
Back to the tech itself, arguably the two biggest talking points at the moment are cyber security and the seemingly unstoppable rise of AI. On both themes Kiddle comes back to the same point – you can have great systems in place, but people have got to know how to interact with them.
Taking cyber security first, human involvement is key.
Getting cyber defences in place is obviously very important with the installation of basic tools such as multi-factor authentication, and ensuring the security is fit for the organisation it’s servicing.
“The weak link generally is people,” he says. “A lot of the high-profile business hacks are not because firewalls have been breached, it’s that bad actors have found a way in through some kind of social engineering, of getting an individual within the business to click a malicious link, give up a password or do whatever else through what is basically human frailty.
“We come back to integration of people, systems and processes. If the individuals in the business aren’t trained on how to spot a suspicious email phishing attack then doesn't matter what you've got.”
But on the capabilities tech – and specifically AI – can provide, Kiddle is effusive.
Where it works very well, he says, in when there is a good bank of data already in place for the tech to work with. As just one of any number of examples he could use, he refers to a large recruitment company which receives roughly half a million CVs every month. Sifting through them is job too far for even a team of humans to assess effectively, but when a form of AI can filter it for humans to then check is a massively helpful tool.
And this is what Kiddle and his team at S&W do – significantly reducing manual time and effort used by businesses by installing automation and setting up processes to ensure that machines can do the ‘heavy lifting’.
“The machines are designed for letting a highly qualified professional focus on actually doing the things they are trained to do, rather than drowning in a sea of Excel spreadsheets and data reconciliation which nobody signs up to the job to do,” he says.
“But I come back to the same point. The process has to be managed. There has to be human involvement checking that the output is reliable, impactful and making commercial sense.”
*S&W are a sponsor at Birmingham Tech Week and Laurence Kiddle is a speaker at the Scale-up Summit.
