IT Week's IT Leader Profile: John Robinson

John Robinson is IT director at business and IT consultancy Morse, with a team of 30

What does your job entail?
My main responsibility is to ensure we have a global IT strategy that supports our business across multiple geographies. This is important because most of our users spend much of their time travelling around the world to customer sites.

What was your first job?
Working in a bank as a clerk in the funds transfer department. My main responsibility was entering credits and debits manually in a general ledger book.

How did you get into IT?
An opportunity arose within the bank to move into the computer operations department as a computer operator working shifts. I jumped at the chance, and I have been in the industry ever since.

How often do you check your BlackBerry?
The BlackBerry has been part of my life since it was introduced in the 1990s. I’m checking it all the time, if I’m not online.

Which technology has had the biggest impact on your working life?
That is a difficult question because there have been so many great advances over the past 25 years, from the PC to the internet. But if I had to choose, I would say mobile IT has had the largest impact on my working life because it allows me to access information from anywhere, at anytime.

Is now a good time for people to enter the IT profession?
Yes. Now that IT is a critical enabler for businesses to grow there are many more opportunities across the whole IT skills set, from business transformation to datacentre consolidation through virtualisation.

If you were not working in IT, what would you be doing?
One of the things I enjoy most is watching people reaching their full potential, so I would probably be in a coaching or teaching role, but within IT.