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Directing professional traffic no drama to this educator

Peter Davidson, Information Age

12/04/2006 12:20:53

Shakespeare might have been onto something when he remarked that all the world's a stage and all the men and women merely players.

Maybe that's why a young Kate Behan's first formal qualification was a diploma in drama production from NIDA - to gain the knowledge to manage their exits and entrances.

This ability to direct professional traffic has been a hallmark of her professional career for the last four decades as an educator, practitioner and fervent proselytiser of business/information technology convergence.

It has earned her Fellowship of the ACS in recognition of her service to her profession, and the society's Honorary Life Membership (its first for a woman) for her work in developing and driving the society's certification program in particular, and service to the society in general..

Dramatic entry into ICT It was drama that pointed her footsteps at ICT. One of six kids raised on a Central Queensland sheep station, her early education was by correspondence and by a governess.

But like many in rural Australia, by age six she was off to boarding school, in her case a convent where she would stay for a decade with nothing other than a career in medicine at the front of her mind.

A year at Queensland University med school and some personal experience with the frailty of life convinced her that her calling lay elsewhere, and an abrupt course change saw her at the National Institute of Dramatic Art (NIDA) in Sydney.

A two-year course earned a Diploma in Drama Production, and at 21, she notched up her first professional theatre production, James Searle's The Lucky Streak in Brisbane.

As tour manager for the Melbourne Theatre Company and later the NSW Elizabethan Theatre Trust until 1966, it was for some part a matter of "travelling around Australia managing potted Shakespeare plays for school kids", but it didn't take long for the business end of her brain to kick in:

"I decided that theatre funding was not getting through to the actors and that theatre management needed reforming", so she enrolled in a part-time business diploma at RMIT in Melbourne but found that juggling theatre work at night with her studies was too hard.

Time to change course again. "I found a job at IBM - I knew nothing about them as a company and even less about computers, but I'd seen a fax or something addressed to 'Inbusmach' and figured IBM must be a German company."

After a couple of years in IBM's technical information centre ('the IBM Manager's Handbook was a very useful guide for doing RMIT business assignments"), software engineering courses followed, and work as a programmer and analyst.

Her next step defined the metier for which she has become known: joining IBM's education department introduced her to teaching.

Adding such a powerful string to her professional bow brought a part-time lectureship at Swinburne Institute while still at IBM but the draw of academia severed that tie after five years as she became immersed in a bachelor of business degree, and later appointment as senior lecturer in Swinburne's business faculty.

(In the midst of it all, she went back to matters theatrical for a while in 1973 as assistant to the administrator of the Melbourne Theatre Company. It was something of a timeout before returning to Swinburne.

There another breakout in 1982 when she became Victorian marketing manager for Prime Computer.)

Collaboration with Diana Holmes saw several books produced, beginning with The Computer Solution which came off the press a few days after the arrival of the first of three children.

Their second book, Understanding Information Technology also used Australian case studies, a novel approach at the time, in a quest to create computer literate users rather than technical specialists.

Her prolific output of books, courseware, conference papers, videos and film supported a personal passion to get people to understand what effective computing is, and what must be done to achieve it.

These days she stridently laments the trend for ICT to dwindle almost to zero in business degrees.

"After 50 years of knowing how effective computing can benefit industry, you can now do a commerce degree at almost any university in Australia with absolutely no computing content other than how to use PC packages.

"We were better off 20 years ago than we are today; the arrival of the PC meant that as long as they did spreadsheets, word processing - and, God help us, PowerPoint -- that's all they need to know to about computers to work in business.

"It isn't.

"You can even do an MBA which has very little computer content; it's still computing from your desktop up - there's no understanding of infrastructure so no understanding of what computer people really do. And that, to me, is the biggest disadvantage that we have now.

"If you are learning about business in Australian 2006 you really want to be learning about your role in the organisation in using computing effectively; knowing a lot more about information and a lot less about spreadsheets.

"We tried to suggest 20 years ago that there should be some sort of common case study in all of the first year subjects so that if you were studying computing, you would do it within the framework of a company. In accounting they would be dealing with that company's accounts.

"It created a demarcation dispute. In the first textbook that Diana Holmes and I wrote, we had the standard triangle of control, strategy and operations; an organisational theory academic said that the diagram was used in organisation theory, and was not to be used in IT.

"So there is this demarcation of disciplines and no interest in trying to give a more holistic approach to business.

"How do young graduates manage when they go to organisations, which expect innovation, when they haven't really done much more to learn about information and using computing effectively, than the people they are replacing?"

Involvement with the ACS while still at Swinburne has offered another platform to carry her message on the business value of IT beyond the commercial highways.

The public awareness program Information Technology Week needed an ACS person, and there was a casual vacancy on the branch executive committee; she was Victorian state chair of ITW for six years and coordinated as many as 100 free community activities a year to introduce computing to people.

Her connection with the society remains, having held a number of positions, both honorary and paid, along the way including being a member of the membership board, editor of the Victorian bulletin, Artificial Intelligence stream chairman for the 1987 national conference, examiner for basic computer principles, secretary of the Victorian branch executive, director of the marketing board and a national councillor.

But perhaps her greatest contribution has been her pivotal role in the development and implementation of the ACS Certification Program in 1993.

To become Certified Members of the ACS (CMACS), participants needed to pass two core subjects (IT Trends, and Business, Legal and Ethical Issues) and two subjects from among Project Management, Marketing and Selling IT, e-Business, Strategy and Management for IS, and since 2001, Software Engineering.

Conducted as a part-time Masters level distance education course, graduates can use the CMACS qualification to articulate into a Graduate Diploma or Masters with Open Learning Australia and the Association of Professional Engineers, Scientists and Managers, Australia (APESMA).

The program has an assignment-based assessment in the two core subjects and the first subject in each specialisation to test students' application of knowledge rather than an ability to learn by rote.

The business value of IT is covered in the Business, Legal and Ethical Issues subject, while Evaluating and Justifying IT Initiatives is in Business, Strategy and IT.

About a year ago, the core and professional level subjects of the program have been almost entirely rewritten to ensure the content currency. The specialisation subjects are being updated right now, with all the subjects due to be finalised by the middle of the year.

As part of the assessment in this subject, students complete core tasks and assignments, then select one assignment topic that reflects their area of specialisation, whether it be Digital Business (formerly e-Business), e-Learning, Knowledge Management, Managing Technology and Operations, Project Management or Software Development.

Undertaking assignments which relate directly to their workplace not only adds value to their occupational output, but satisfies Behan's drive to generate business value through IT, a driver which persists in everything.

Her work in developing distance education 25 years ago set benchmarks, starting with introduction to computing for RMIT in 1979, EDP systems for Deakin, an MIS module for a Deakin MBA and IT management for CPAs, for whom she has done significant work.

Typically, she gives credit for the success of the certification program to those who worked with her on its development.

A request for this interview brought a instead a suggested list of alternative candidates from among her contemporaries that would have been more deserving of record: Graeme Simsion, Gerald Murphy, Rob Thomsett, Diana Holmes, Gerry Maynard, Geoff Dober, Peter Thorne - it's a long list.

However, we meet and speak but issues are higher on her agenda than personal triumphs, in fact she doesn't mind if nothing gets printed. It's not a matter of being coy, more that results are more important than reflections and there are things to do, places to go. Aggrandisement is for others.

However, she will concede that getting 600 people to an ACS branch meeting in Victoria for a debate on CASE tools was something of a highlight. So too being able to get business managers to realise that it might be their fault that their IT investments were under water - not the IT department's.

Her consultancy, Kerandan, which she established in 1989 after leaving Swinburne, runs high-end business seminars around the country with the effective extraction of value from IT as a central theme.

Kerandan has been her professional base since then, and she develops all its courseware which she delivers herself, or in association with others with specific expertise. It numbers some pretty heavy-duty outfits among her clients, and like most effective people, she seems to have endless energy resources to devote to them.

Similarly with the significant property in central Victoria where she and her husband are nurturing acres of selected Australian hardwoods despite the drought - and having to take an OH&S course in food preparation before being allowed to make sandwiches for the bush fire brigade people that protect them.

Things in the bush are a bit different from those at from their Melbourne address. A lack of TV doesn't seem to matter much, but the time and cost of wrangling with Telstra over getting business lines into the property unleashes a spray about organisations' lack of customer support.

There are other crisp thoughts from Chairman Kate: technical snobbery ("a specialist is someone who knows all about their discipline except for its place in the universe"), analysis paralysis ("perfect is often not worth waiting for; just do it and then improve it") - and separating responsibilities and accountabilities, confusing governance with management.

On professionalism: it's a state of mind, and you don't need to join the ACS or anything else to be a professional. You do that to support the infrastructure that a professional needs.

"As a professional it's incumbent on one to support the organisation that provides the infrastructure that enables a profession to develop - to promote ethical standards and proven practices."