Finbarr Joy: Advisor, CTO / CIO with leadership experience of Technology Product, and Operations.
International technology executive, with an established record for transforming global organisational performance through digital innovation. From software engineer to board member, via start-up co-founding, global consulting, and FTSE 100 executive. A career honed with senior leadership roles at Superbet, Lebara, William Hill and BT.
What are your top 3 priorities in your most recent role?
1. Continuously optimising coaching approaches to help teams develop a coherent digital strategy, underpin customer connectedness, and achieve high-value short term outcomes that validate long term plans.
2. Benchmarking organisational performance and capabilities. Assessing metrics and capabilities for how teams compare vs the best of the Consumer Internet. After years of exploring many frameworks, I have found the ‘four key metrics’ described in Accelerate by Nicole Forsgren et al. to be the most comprehensive. While deceptively simple, in combination they set a high bar for performance - for me, the best at driving and measuring technical excellence (eschewing the standard IT KPIs: “watermelon” measures, so often green on the outside but burning red at the core!)
3. Ensuring Digital strategy is focused and situationally aware. Making sure the feedback loops exist to ensure the strategy is constantly evolving and not ending up following some form of “cargo cult” belief system.
Which previous role had the biggest impact on your career?
A ridiculously long time ago now, but I must guiltily acknowledge that the time I spent at Netscape continues to inspire the benchmarks I use for product mobilization, talent development, and company culture. It was a truly formative experience, and I can point to specific challenges in all roles I’ve subsequently held where the Netscape model pulled me through.
How do you see the role of the Technology Leader changing?
I hope we’ll see at least the beginning of the end of ‘Enterprise IT’ – the form of organization where ‘IT’ is a support function- and that the role is liberated to join the rest of the exec team in developing company growth opportunities. This will transition the role from ‘mediary’ between an ‘IT function’ and ‘the business’ to become a catalyst for growth, accountable for commercial Digital outcomes, comfortable with multi-disciplinary responsibilities.
What are the 3 most important issues confronting the technology industry?
Fairness/equality: availability, access and open-ness of technology; As the current pandemic conditions illustrate, access to technology is not consistent across all societies / all sections of society; In the developing world for example, still less than 50% of people are connected to the internet. Establishing global connectivity, providing fair access to tools and the ethical use of data are key.
Security: As a CTO, this was the single biggest issue that kept me awake at night. From the adoption of nation-state cyberweapons by ‘domestic’ opportunists, to the rapidly proliferating IoT ecosystem with widespread vulnerabilities. This used to be the domain of dedicated, isolated hackers but now, whole communities of amateur attackers are swapping tools on the dark web. Meanwhile, too many surveys seem to highlight widespread ignorance amongst the general population of even basic online safety practices.
Education: from better public awareness (preventing dumb govt policies) to dealing with the technology talent crisis through better resource access and more diverse outreach scholarships. This has to be resolved if the UK is to succeed in a global digital market.
What 3 technology trends are you most excited about and why?
Trite I know, but Machine Learning is surely the biggest advance in tech since the web itself, or certainly cloud - especially if you are in software development. Increasingly, machine learning IS your content / context, whatever the domain / application. This used to be restricted to high academia/ specialist (expensive!) proprietary domains, but now there’s a full open source ecosystem out there providing abundant tools and frameworks. If you are building software and not using ML, you should be asking yourself WHY?
Cloud: Also trite, but still surprisingly ’new’ in the ‘Enterprise’ / corporate environment; The sheer pace and exponentially multiplying capability of public cloud services is staggering – it can genuinely propel IT initiatives on a tsunami wave of productivity and evolution, especially in tandem with #1. Do not believe we are anywhere near reaching the full potential of cloud
#Tech4Good is a growing tech adoption trend that I think is truly exciting, and globally transformative. While the mainstream media continually foments the ’techlash’, there are world-changing tech pioneers hiding in plain sight (in the UK!) such as GiveVision, beam.org, Feebris, and onourradar.org.
What new product or company is having the biggest impact?
It’s not ‘new’ to either us or the industry, but without doubt the AWS cloud capability the team have evolved stands way above any other product in terms of impact; From entirely automated deploy pipelines (release on demand), to multi-region disaster recovery, elastic scalability, and a raft of service APIs that have taken swathes of ‘grunt work’ off the backlog. It’s now less than an hour of cycle time from ‘code commit’ to ‘live’ and that sustains rapid momentum and go-to-market speed as well as powering the teams’ ability to continually ‘test and learn’ customer preferences vs. new innovations.
What mobile app do you use every day?
That would be Evernote – I must admit I’ve pretty much outsourced all my ‘routine’ brain functions to its utility and convenience! My day could simply not run without it.
What 3 skills should an aspiring Technology Leader look to develop?
Influence, Influence, Influence – as a ‘peer’ in a multidisciplinary leadership team, you must have the capability to ‘nudge’ the organization to greater digital opportunity and growth. This is the key skill to unlock the potential of the expertise that technology leaders have.
People development – for me the bedrock of any leadership role. If your team / people are not developing then your organization is standing still, so the role needs great coaching skills. You can never do too much of this.
Strategy / Execution efficacy - The skill of establishing the vision that motivates the team, underpinned by strong execution capabilities. For me this is a single ‘converged’ skill, since strategy without execution is worthless (and vice versa).
Where do you look for trusted technology information & inspiration?
Every leadership interaction (at every level) eventually boils down to strategy. When things are going well we’re encouraged to multiply more of the same (“lets replicate THIS here and also here”). When things are going badly we’re urged to change tack (“let’s try THIS instead – it worked for Google”).. After a million and one frameworks I’ve found Simon Wardley’s mapping model to be a godsend – every interaction/ suggestion is now underpinned with substantive context that can evolve and adapt every day. So, I follow @swardley.
Sites I use for information/ inspiration include:
AKF Partners Blog - (long term fan of their books)
InfoQ - Practical insights from practitioners; (Disclaimer: I’m on the Programme Committee for their annual QCon London conference).
What books should someone looking to get on in their technology career read?
ONE book?! Impossible! On the assumption the person that wants to ‘get on’ is aiming at taking on team/ org ‘leadership’ roles, then I’d recommend Peter Block’s ‘Flawless Consulting’ to help hone the habits that result in better relationship building and more effective influencing that make your (hopefully existing!) technology expertise and interpersonal skills effective ‘up’ and ‘across’ the organisation.
If you could tell your 20-year-old self one bit of information that would enable them to get on in their career, what would it be and why?
Keep playing with tech stuff. A thing called ‘Java’ will be invented and it could be great for you. Pay attention and work at it, but after 3-5 years, STOP and look around you – there will be other opportunities that will likely be bigger and better for you longer term (I spent FAR too much of my life wrestling Java infrastructure problems through the 2000’s!!)