Behind the Scenes at Global-Roam

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This blog post is written to provide some background to my “relationship” (if that’s the right term) with ICT.

Primary School - 1970s

Sometime back in primary school our family picked up a Microbee 16k computer, and this became a source of fascination for my elder brother and I for a period of time.

For a period of time we learned to program in BASIC, and tried to design our own games on the PC, to the limit of the (very limited) memory capacity on the machine.

Truth be told it was probably more of a fascination for my brother than I, as I grew bored with the whole show more quickly and my attention turned to other things…

Can’t honestly recall how long my interest lasted, but it certainly was not long (in the scheme of things) and before long the new toy was another paperweight gathering dust…

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Secondary School - 1980s

A couple years later at secondary school we had new Apple 2’s delivered (can’t remember what vowel, there were a few of them).

Basically the same thing happened – with the exception that games had advanced, then, to the stage where they had become quite addictive, I recall.

Saw early versions of spreadsheets then (must have been Lotus 1-2-3, I guess) but they did not seem overly complicated, and I wondered why someone would bother to use them, and not just a writing pad.

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University - 1990

At university, took a course in Turbo-Pascal.  Not sure whether it was optional or not for me, but it sure was boring.  Even at that stage, I did not really get what all the fuss was about, as logic seemed so basic to me (pardon the pun).

Had to learn Fortran 77 to do some modelling for my thesis, and ended up doing a poor job of the modelling (and a very poor job on my thesis).

Again, had no interest in the technology.

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California, 1995

Happened to be working in Sunnyvale (and living in Mountain View) in 1995 as part of my ES Cornwall Scholarship.

By that stage, I was using Excel (in Windows 3.1, I think) to run sizeable queries with data relating to power station forced outage rates.  Sucked to have to continually switch between Excel (for the charts) and then somehow get them into Word.  Surely there’s got to be a better way, I thought!

Saw early demos of a couple of the browsers around at the time, which started me thinking that – maybe the internet could be useful for something, but not sure what.  Unfortunately, did not have the mindset (then) to invest in a couple of the IPOs at the time (“investing” in life experiences was far more appealing to me!)

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London, 1997

After a sojourn in Alberta, ended up in the UK working with the Electricity Pool of England & Wales (who ran the electricity market at the time) – again, as part of my ES Cornwall Scholarship.

What they asked me in to do was to help all the market operators around the world to compare the way their markets operated.  Hence (in true form) I jumped into something I knew nothing about (this time coding websites) and put together a website at www.electricitymarket.com (website’s dead now, so no point linking) that was the start of them doing just that.

Without really knowing about it, what I was looking for was Wiki-style Web2.0 technology years before it existed.

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Brisbane, 1998

Back in Brisbane at the end of the scholarship, I worked with a government-owned consulting company for a while.

In doing so, I dragged together a small team of people (mainly uni students) and started developing a few IT projects that (I thought, at least) would offer significant benefit for the company.  Other events conspired to put paid to these plans and I found myself in my own company at the start of 2000.

The ideas we had been developing (if you recall them, Allison and Grant) have still not been implemented (to my knowledge) so I might get around to it one day!

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global-roam, 2000

Ours is a company specifically set up in 2000 to make the electricity market understandable through software.

We have done a reasonable job of growing since then, and have progressively added new products, as we have identified new customer needs.

Have plenty more ideas to implement, as well…

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What’s the Moral of the Story

The reason for relating this history is to point out that I am not an “Enthusiast” (to copy a phrase from Crossing the Chasm).  Specifically, ICT does not interest me in its own right.

However, I have been a “Visionary” at times (as Geoffrey Moore has defined one) and will presumably continue to be into the future – though not always (for instance - I am very comfortable sticking with my 6+ year-old Nokia handset).

Specifically, what a Visionary looks for is a technical edge that will give them a major competitive commercial benefit.

This is an important distinction to understand, in terms of how the company has operated, at least up till now.

What it means is that we don’t do technology for technology’s sake – we need to see a clear commercial benefit for our clients (in the “real world”) before we take a certain path.

Does not mean we always succeed – just means our drivers are different.

As the principal driver of the company (and the dominant shareholder) it’s fair to think that such views will still be important into the future.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 1st, 1980 at 12:33 am and is filed under 03 - Product Development, CEO's Philosophy, Company Philosophy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.