Then I saw ‘a new heaven and a new earth’, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and there was no longer any sea.
Revelation 21:1 NIV
After the ICL Network Services operation of the 1980s and early 90s collapsed in financial chaos, I needed to find another job in the company or be made redundant. After a few unproductive interviews, I got a job in the team looking after a major government department (Department for Education and Employment – DfEE). It was my experience in Training and Enterprise Councils (TECs) which was attractive to the managers of this new team.
The job title was “ICL Sorbus Account Manager” which is surprising in two ways. Firstly the “Sorbus” bit which came from a services company that ICL had bought (ICL at the time had a number of different brand identities for different markets). Secondly an “account manager” role was a new experience to me because it was hit didn’t need my in-depth technical expertise but did require people skills.
The key location was a place in Runcorn (Cheshire). The DfEE was located next to a place called Shopping City. I don’t know what it’s like today but Shopping City was a big concrete cube which had obviously seen better days. To be brutally honest there was rather a dystopian feel about the place and I felt distinctly uneasy about leaving my car in the dark multi-story half deserted car park. The customer’s building was an equally concrete structure which could be reached from the Shopping City car park by a footbridge that linked the two buildings. The DfEE building housed a big data centre and most of their IT staff.
ICL’s role was to run what was called a Total Managed Service (TMS). The contact was based on the fact that the customer spent a large sum of money each year on all sorts of supplies and services over the year. I can’t remember the value of this but it ran into millions of pounds each year. The customer needed to reduce this spend and the deal was to hand over all that money (less the savings they wanted) to ICL and ICL would provide all of those products and services for a guaranteed saving year on year. The idea was that ICL could use its buying power and private sector cleverness to not only reduce all of these costs but make a profit at the same time. The ICL guy in charge was a bit of a “wheeler dealer” and I guess that’s exactly the skillset that was needed.
It was fun to work with that team and since we were good at achieving all the targets I got quite a nice bonus each quarter.
After a bit, it was clear that my skills would be better used in a technically orientated role and I was able to transfer into the consultancy team which was then called Power of 4. I am not sure the derivation of that brand but it was what ICL called its customer facing technical skills. (another example of the diversity of brands in ICL at that time).
Richard Mann 