Harry Potter’s IT department
How much time do you spend thinking about London’s livery companies? I’ll take a guess at around one minute per year. After all, a small group of dining and charity fundraising clubs in the City of London seems an awfully long way away from the everyday world of technology: all the mainstream media shows is the annual trip that London cabbies make to the seaside, with disabled and disadvantaged children loaded into their taxis.
Googling for livery companies generates an even lower-key impression, because the majority of them seem to be based on trades and skills that are no longer in everyday use; the goldsmiths, the fletchers (from the centuries when gluing feathers to arrow-shafts was a job with some social prestige) and so on.
Not so the Worshipful Company of Information Technologists (WCIT). These guys are a contemporary livery company, with a connection to the industry from which they spring, displaying considerable credentials when it comes to the kind of work-for-thepublic-good-orientated thinking that the IT sector sorely lacks.
Before I went along, mindful of the self-confessed lunch club reputation of many of the liveries, I asked a few contacts for feedback on the WCIT. I was surprised by the strength of opinion – in a positive way. While constrained by a centuries-long tradition across all the companies of modesty in good works, the WCIT team had been involved in a range of projects for the public good. For example, the IT behind Opera Holland Park is a WCIT project.
My visit to its tiny little livery hall was very Harry Potterish. Unlike Merchant Taylors, WCIT hasn’t kept a half-timbered building swallowed up within a concrete development, nor does it have the grandeur of the Goldsmiths’ Hall – this is a compact offering, tucked into the edge of St Barts’ giant redevelopment site.
Inside, it’s quiet, with small meeting rooms sympathetically laid out for presentations and displaying the wares and gifts from past masters, clerks and luminaries of the company. On this occasion I was talking to Paul Jagger, who’d been awarded a prize by the rather confusing committee of livery companies – the oversight body, that is – for bringing members into line with the 21st century. This isn’t much more than putting them on Twitter, and setting out the rules for being a good Twitter citizen. Viewed from inside the rather extraordinary world of these baroque institutions, that’s an huge step forward.
I realise there are a lot of critical voices when it comes to professional bodies in IT; Paul Ockenden adopted a very diplomatic wincing expression when I brought up the confusion between the WCIT and the British Computing Association (BCA). While many of the sour accusations levelled at that institution certainly can be applied to any livery company, old or new, that’s more to do with the way the profession perceives them than it is to do with the behind-thescenes work they undertake in the real world. It’s sobering to reflect that architects get their own Royal Institute, despite their business being far smaller in head count and turnover than ours. What we get by comparison are a few literal do-gooders, and a massive national chorus of negative, solitary commentators.
Is that what information technology should mean?
“The WCIT has considerable credentials when it comes to the workfor-the-publicgood thinking that the IT sector lacks”