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Succeeding in a man's world

Aileen Cater-Steel, Information Age

13/06/2006 12:36:33

On May 13, the University of Southern Queensland (USQ) conferred an honorary Doctor of Engineering on Ann Moffatt in recognition of her distinguished career and significant achievement in the information and communications technology.

When Ann Moffatt was at school in Harrow in England, she was told she would go to Oxford or Cambridge University and get a PhD. After gaining entry to a part time degree at London University in 1958, her plan came to a sudden end when a bicycle accident left her with a fractured skull and brain injuries.

She was working for the Bureau of Meteorology. As they were about to buy their first computer they had decided to send her on a computer course at Bletchley Park. Due to the accident she could not continue with the degree or attend the computer course but during her recuperation, which she was told would take two years, she read all the computer books held by London University - all 10 of them. Frustrated with being treated like an invalid, she applied for a job as a programmer at Kodak UK.

When Moffatt started with Kodak in April 1959, she did not know that the pioneering programming work she would be involved in would signal the start of a career spanning more than 45 years. She was taught to program the Ferranti Pegasus (pic 1), by mathematician Conway Berners-Lee whose son Tim went on to invent the worldwide web.

She was assigned to Kodak's Operations Research (OR) group. They used the Pegasus computer at Ferranti's Portland Place bureau and later the Ferranti Mercury at Shell Petroleum and at London University. Complex mathematical programs were written to optimise the production process. Kodak was amazed that computers could be used to improve productivity and save the company millions of pounds.

In those early days of computing, job titles such as programmer, analyst and operator did not exist. Everyone did everything: "You did your own 'systems analysis', made up your own data and punched your own tape." There were just as many women writing programs as men: "girls were considered to be very good at programming. They paid meticulous attention to detail, were especially thorough when testing and usually had nail scissors in their handbags which were useful for cutting tiny bits of masking tape to correct program tapes on the fly."

By her 21st birthday, she had been promoted to the senior staff at Kodak, earning £1000 pounds a year, three times a teacher's salary. She married shortly afterwards and her dream of going to university stopped right there "because married women didn't go to university". By 1963, Kodak UK had bought an EMIDEC computer - the first fully transistorised machine in the UK, and decided that all programmers would work in their newly established "Computer Department". Moffatt was permitted to stay with the OR department for one more year but she noticed that with the establishment of computer departments, the industry changed:

"When computer people worked within business departments, although they were called programmers, they worked on every aspect of the computing task. Men and women programmers had equal status within the business organisation, but now the industry had started to define many different jobs and computer departments had become hierarchical.

"Men took the top jobs while women were either pushed out of the industry or down the hierarchy to do menial tasks."

While still in OR, in 1963, Moffatt worked on the Ferranti Atlas, then the most powerful computer in the world and developed with significant investment by the British Government. Ferranti hoped to sell three of the Atlas computers (at £3m each) to the Russians "to serve their computer needs to the year 2000".

Atlas was less capable than a PC today. It was the first computer to have an operating system, named the "supervisor". Until then, programmers would write their own drivers, or use the best on offer from their colleagues. Atlas pioneered the use of memory paging to minimise "swapping" between primary and secondary storage. Kodak UK loaned Moffatt to Ferranti where she wrote a lot of the drum learning program at Manchester University.

Kodak's OR department wanted to buy 10 per cent of the London University Atlas but Kodak US had decided to standardise on the IBM 360. They asked for the specifications and could not see how the 360 could be of use as it couldn't do the complex mathematical modelling they were doing on the Atlas. When they asked what they were supposed to do with an IBM 360 they were told it could do invoicing and were amazed: "We couldn't imagine anyone would use a computer to do invoicing - we had a typing pool that did invoicing".

In 1965, her daughter Claire was born. She had worked right up to her baby's due date, unusual for that time. For the first month after the birth, Moffatt continued to work from home. Although the pay was good, the work was frustrating as people at Kodak kept forgetting to give her information about changes to be made so she decided to leave Kodak and be a full-time wife and mother. After three months she realised she wanted to return to work.

In the mid 1960s, there was a severe shortage of programmers. In 1962, Steve Shirley founded fpl (later called the FI Group) to give work to women programmers who had left the industry to have children and wanted to write programs at home while they looked after their children.

When Moffatt joined the company in mid 1965, it had six home-based programmers, four office-based "managers" and the founder. They had just been awarded the contract to write the programs to analyse the black box on Concorde. Because Concorde was a new type of aircraft, initially the black box had to be analysed after each flight before it was allowed to fly again.

The programs were complex machine code running on two special purpose computers. They analysed output from 40,000+ instruments on the flight deck. During the project the office-based manager left the company and because Moffatt had managed projects at Kodak she was asked to manage the Concorde project. The team eventually comprised 20 programmers. The project was completed on time and under budget. From that time, all fpl's home-based programmers were managed by home-based managers.

As the FI Group grew, they realised the key to success was to gather comprehensive metrics for each project to enable accurate estimates to be given to clients and to understand the individual working style of each programmer. They discovered that the productivity of the home workers was double that of the average office-based programmer. The company grew. Contracts poured in from the British Government and companies like Esso, Birds Eye and Littlewoods. The panel expanded to include other home-based computer people such as carers and people with disabilities.

In 1968, after the birth of her son Stephen, Moffatt took on the role of Manger Systems and Programming, in charge of 250 home-based professionals.

From 1971 to 1973, she headed the technical division of FI Group and supervised 400 staff and 40 projects at any given time. One of the projects was a professional executive placement system for the Government employment service.

At its launch, the relevant Minister asked for a demonstration so she input some outrageous criteria. Later, the Director informed her that she was matched with a position close to her home and with a top salary, so she rejoined the conventional workforce, first as product executive at Computer Technology, then in an IT strategic review role with BP subsidiary Scion.

Although she was a Fellow of the British Computer Society (BCS), the first woman voted onto the BCS Council, Chairman of the BCS Database Task Group and recognised as an authority in her area, she found it difficult working in a large consultancy.

"It was so peculiar, it really was a boys' club. It was as if the men expected me to get the tea and punch cards."

Moffatt's husband had decided to go to work for Kodak in the USA but she did not want to raise their children in the USA. Life was difficult for a single mother with a young family working in London as the city was disrupted by the IRA bombings so she was often late home.

In 1974, Computer Sciences Australia (CSA) visited the UK to recruit database experts; Moffatt had been highly recommended but she wasn't interested. They were very insistent and she was persuaded to move to Sydney with her two children then aged 6 and 9.

The 'database expert' was for the AMPNET project for CSA's client AMP. She reviewed the work of Dr Neville Black and AMP's database development team and found it sound. CSA disregarded her opinion and sacked Black.

Moffatt could see the AMPNET project was in trouble. She was concerned about the development of a Transaction Control System (TCS) which was a key component of the project. TCS was based on the Government's Common User Data Network (CUDN) packet switching system which had been aborted. TCS was tightly linked to the Univac operating system, and required the operating system to be heavily modified. Moffatt believed the AMPNET project was headed for disaster.

She decided to look for another job and soon realised that Australia was at least 10 years behind England both in terms of computing and women in management. She decided that before returning to the UK, she would tell AMP's general manager of her concerns for the AMPNET project. Used to getting to see general managers very easily in the UK where she had built a reputation, she was surprised that she could not get to see AMP's. Eventually a meeting was arranged with his deputy. His response was to threaten her that if she made trouble for AMP, she would never work in Australia again.

"That's OK," she said, "I am leaving. The AMP board has approved $6 million for AMPNET; how is it that $12 million has been spent and the project is nowhere near completion and never will be completed?"

AMP checked her UK credentials and realised they had underestimated her ability. They asked her to stay and rework the AMPNET project estimate for the board. She estimated that a further $64 million was needed but warned that there was a high likelihood that the project would never be completed. It was cancelled after an investment of $96 million.

Moffatt was offered an executive position at AMP. As the only woman executive she was the target of malicious rumours about whom she had slept with to get the job. She "cleaned up lots of messes" at AMP and after many years managing projects took on the role of IT futurist looking ahead five to 20 years to advise AMP how not to cut themselves off from the future.

In November 1986, AMP needed 200 more IT staff by the beginning of 1987 to complete their strategic plan. They asked Moffatt to organise the recruitment, a difficult task in a tight market. Her boss thought that because she was chairman of the ACS and well-known in the industry, people might choose to join AMP.

During the recruitment exercise, a head-hunter told her they had the perfect job for her at the Australian Stock Exchange (ASX). Until that time, each state had its own stock exchange with different trading rules and different computer systems. In April 1987, one national stock exchange was to be created by act of parliament. The job was to manage bringing all the state systems together and to develop an IT strategy to the year 2000.

The project started out as a nightmare: the equipment and systems were mainly old. There was a multitude of different types of hardware and software environments. The stock market was booming and the systems could not cope with the volume of transactions. SEATS, the Stock Exchange Automated Trading System was under development but running very late. Moffatt's team, who were responsible for the complex back-end systems, were not allowed to communicate with the SEATS team.

Eventually, she was allowed to hold formal discussions with the SEATS team and confirmed what she had found out informally -- that the back-end systems needed much amendment to facilitate the introduction of SEATS. This further delayed the introduction of SEATS much to the annoyance of ASX. Her insistence on rigorous testing by IT staff and brokers further delayed the project and was met with significant opposition.

The system went live on October 19, 1987. The next day, the stock market crashed and although systems in New York, Tokyo and Hong Kong all failed, the ASX system was one of the few in the world to continue operating flawlessly. Although she achieved hero status for the success of the ASX project, after the crash the volume of trading dropped by more than half and the value of the stock market by 30 per cent. Because ASX could not afford, and did not now need to go ahead with the new strategy, to her horror, she was made redundant at the age of 48, but delighted when 12 job offers arrived.

"But I chose the wrong job - as a consultant with DMR - and hated the marketing aspect of it".

Under Senator Button's Partnerships for Development Program (PDP), IBM outsourced most of its internal and customer training to the University of NSW (UNSW). She was asked to take on the role of Director, Institute of IT (IIT) at UNSW as a bridge between the Industry partners and the academics who delivered the courses. She expanded the Institute to undertake training and research in AI and Metrics for Digital as well as Apple training.

It was the first time IBM had outsourced their training anywhere in the world. IIT had met or exceeded at KPIs. They invited Moffatt to explain her methods to IBM in the US. She believes it was the way her trainers portrayed IBM's products, without the marketing hype, as well as their practice of encouraging students to bring their problems to class and helping them solve the problems after class that made the difference. The Institute was awarded research of the management systems for the FARM project - known now as grid computing. It was the first time IBM had awarded a research project to a university outside the USA.

During the previous five years, women were beginning to take leadership roles in ICT but only about 1 in 400 of top ICT jobs (over $100K pa) in Australia were held by women. They would often tell Moffatt that they felt uncomfortable in their management role. Many had noticed the differences in the way men and women operated in top jobs and wondered whether they should adopt the generally male "command and control" behaviour or the "collaborating, cooperating" behaviour with which women felt more comfortable.

Also, fewer and fewer women were choosing ICT as a profession and they seemed to be mainly in the 'lower level' jobs.

In 1989, she called a meeting of 16 of the top women in ICT to discuss how they could encourage more women to consider ICT as a profession and share strategies for success and things to avoid when women actually got to the top of the profession. This led to the formation of Females in Information Technology and Telecommunications (FITT), which is a highly successful self-help network for women in the ICT industries.

In 1992, IBM "hit a sticky patch". and took their training back in house. At the end of 1992, IIT closed making Moffatt redundant again:

"I knew at 52 years of age I would never get another high-powered job in the industry."

However, her staff had other ideas. In January 1993, together with other professionals from the Institute, they established Technology Solutions (TS), an IT systems services company delivering systems development, consultancy and education. The vision of the enterprise was to deliver high-quality IT services provided by professionals working on a flexible part-time basis from a home base.

After taking TS to a $4m a year business, she decided in 2000 that it was time to retire to the beach at Burrum Heads in Queensland.

Moffatt believes that her career demonstrates that a fairly ordinary woman can get to quite extraordinary places in the ICT industry if they want to.

"There are ups and downs. Even if you are the only woman in the IT area, you can do it, look for the opportunities."

She is very concerned that women are drifting out of the ICT industry, and that when she talks to women, they think that the industry is dominated by men, that it is geeky, and that it is all too hard. Senior women have confided that they feel they are not valued by men, not respected and not allowed to do what needs to be done.

"The workplace at the top is tough for men as well as women. The politics and power games are a waste of energy that can be better channelled to supporting the enterprise and making life outside the workplace better. In senior roles, men tend to choose people like themselves so while they are doing the choosing, women are at a distinct disadvantage."

However, she has observed that when women get into a "control" role they often choose men to be on their teams rather than women because they see that as giving them more status and power so they, too, do not help women grow.

"We really need people to realise that power doesn't come from control but from work done well and successful, happy teams."

Dr Aileen Cater-Steel is Senior Lecturer in Information Systems at the University of Southern Queensland.

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Half a century of industry service Ann Moffatt's professional life (as distinct from her career) has been, simply, busy: since becoming a member of the British Computer Society in 1960, she can given years of her time fostering ICT as a career (particularly for women), promoting professionalism as its cornerstone and nurturing it as an industry.

A member of the BCS from 1960 to 1974, she was elected a Fellow in 1970 for her work in teleworking and to promoting standards in programming languages. She was the first woman elected to its Council.

In Australia, she joined the ACS in 1974, and chaired its NSW branch from 1985 to 1987. She was elected a Fellow in 1996 in recognition of her promotion of ICT as a career for women and for her contribution to it across a broad spectrum.

Her work on the board of the ACS Foundation since 2001 is acknowledged by its executive director John Ridge as "invaluable; she has an intellectual ability to approach an issue laterally, understand its ramifications immediately and communicate them among those seeking solutions".

She has been a board member of NSW TAFE, worked with a number of agencies to get women in western Sydney back into the workforce by arming them with computer skills, started a chapter of the ACS in Hervey Bay and formed a young computer professional group for tertiary students and business people.

She has consulted with governments, established regional incubation centres and been widely recognised by our industry. All of this in and around her own career and while raising a family.

Her honorary doctorate is her first formal qualification: "I never seemed to have time to finish degrees - I did what I did by working to learn and understand the technologies and processes of the task at hand, and how they should be effectively applied to a business outcome," she says.