The Author

"I have travelled the length and breadth of this country and talked with the best people,
  and I can assure you that data processing is a fad that won't last out the year"

The editor in charge of business books for Prentice Hall, 1957

The Drowning Director is the product of fifty years of experience and applied research by Geoff Codd, who is one of the very early practitioners in the introduction of information technology into business and the Public Sector. When he started his career in computing way back in 1957, he worked with the earliest computers in business use at Rolls-Royce Aero Engine Division in Derby in the UK.

 

Geoff Codd

by T Moore

Since that very early beginning he has faced almost every conceivable challenge in business IT exploitation, within a wide range of business cultures and management styles in both the Private and the Public Sectors, latterly at board level. That broad range of experience, in a variety of roles, has provided Geoff with a unique insight into the many major inadequacies that arise in business IT exploitation, both from a business management as well as a technology perspective.

It was twenty years ago that Geoff Codd first became convinced that the roots of the major problems being encountered in the introduction of IT into business were mainly cultural and behavioural, rather than to do with technological issues. The main culprit seemed to be a deep rooted culture gap that has always existed in most organisations between the business people and their IT specialists.

Everyone has known that the culture gap was there, and that it was damaging, but a truly comprehensive and co-ordinated initiative aimed at dealing decisively with this issue has still not been attempted. The main reasons for this considerable inertia on the part of business and government leaders are many and varied, and these are dealt with at length in The Drowning Director.

Suffice it to say here that business people have always regarded IT matters as a subject to be strictly delegated to the specialists, and not one that needs to be addressed by business management. Furthermore, the IT specialists themselves were heavily preoccupied with technological issues, at the expense of serious investment in relationship management, with the result that the damaging culture gap has continued largely unabated.

Over the past two decades Geoff Codd has invested in continuing research into the issues surrounding this culture gap and its effect on IT exploitation effectiveness, and he has used his extensive personal experience to gradually and painstakingly put together a business IT management framework which responds to the considerable challenge that was identified. That framework is now promoted in The Drowning Director as the UNITY way forward.

As an external 'Adviser to the Board' during the 90s, Geoff Codd was gradually able to prove certain individual elements of the UNITY approach within client organisations. What then became abundantly clear was that huge benefits were there for the taking, provided that there is clear backing for such initiatives by the business leaders as well as by IT management

During the last few years he has devoted a great deal of his time and effort in bringing together the massive amount of material that was to be the foundation for the UNITY way forward. His personal mission was to actively promote the many lessons that had been learned within so many management cultures and styles over the years, so that the unacceptable waste of resources that currently occurs in connection with business IT exploitation could be dealt with effectively.

During Geoff's research while writing The Drowning Director, he was deeply impressed by a book written by Jack Welch who had been Chief Executive Officer at General Electric in the US. Jack Welch's transformation of that very large and complex company, and of its fortunes, was founded upon an amalgam of cultural and behavioural change together with inspirational leadership and highly professional management practice. These are all extremely important ingredients in the UNITY transformation that is promoted in The Drowning Director.

Geoff Codd is a Fellow of The British Computer Society and a Fellow of The Institute of Directors where he also attained their Diploma in Company Direction. He is also a Chartered Engineer and a Chartered IT Practitioner.

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