I heard on the radio recently that a growing number of IT graduates are choosing not to pursue a career in the industry. If it’s true, that would be a huge shame. Where did we go wrong? How did we kill the perception of IT as a desirable and worthwhile career?

Rant mode is now fully engaged, but to me IT seems like a fantastic career choice. The money’s OK, and you get the chance to work in an exciting area with generally bright and interesting people. A lot of them have a sense of humour (but not all of them would win “best dressed” awards I admit).

I think what we’re lacking is good role models in UK IT.

We need to celebrate the achievements of people or teams in the IT industry in a way that young people can relate to. The perception has to match reality more, in that an IT job really can be cool, fun, and rewarding.

Let’s examine some of the suspects with means, motive and opportunity in our murder mystery;

Number One - The recruitment process.

It’s not particularly easy to break into the IT industry. The talents and potential of prospective employees is reduced down to having X years of experience in technology Y. Not only does that create barriers, getting a job with no experience is hard, but it is incredibly restrictive and backward looking. Talented people might not want to define themselves in terms of a technology, be that Oracle administrator, Java developer, or whatever. Perhaps we’d have more luck attracting people to IT if we treated technical skills as only part of the overall picture when looking at the potential of talented people.

Number Two - Short-sighted IT vendors

When you are growing your business you need partners you can trust. They help you grow your business, you help them grow theirs, and everyone wins. A lot of vendors still don’t get it, though. They contact you on a quarterly frequency and align internally by product. You therefore need to talk to multiple people from the same company if (heaven forbid) you’re looking at more than one product. Some vendors even allow different countries within the global structure to openly compete with each other. It all wastes time - time that could be better spent pushing boundaries for your company.

When I returned to the office on Monday last week after this year's Grand National, the race was unsurprisingly a major topic of conversation, dissection, and debate. As one of the UK's major sporting events, it undoubtedly has become an annual checkpoint for our business.

Not only was that Saturday one of the busiest days on Betfair's UK exchange in terms of load, but it attracts probably the widest variety of customers and lots of new registrations. Everyone's expectations are high. It certainly is not a weekend that you want any aspect of the service not to be firing on all cylinders.

With load doubling every year, Betfair's engineering team does not spend a lot of time looking backwards. Annual events such as the Grand National, though, are a good opportunity to look back at the progress since the last race.

This year none of the millions of bets placed took more than one second to process, which was even better than last year. Getting the money back to the Grand National winners (known as settlement) took 126 seconds this year. This compares to roughly 90 minutes last year. This scale of improvement has massive benefits for our business.

Of course, we continually review what happens on our products (good and bad) so that we can learn from it, but in our environment there isn't much time for protracted navel gazing as we are already onto the next challenge.  Our philosophy is that every challenge we solve makes us more effective, but we can never allow ourselves the luxury of making the same mistake twice.

We have invested heavily in creating the right environment to foster and reward creativity and innovation in a belief that this is what is required to move a new business forward. As an established, profitable business we are now also examining ways to drive efficiency across all aspects of the business. 

I have been thinking about whether these two imperatives are in opposition? Does the need to examine the efficiency of our technology investments and processes potentially stifle creativity? Will looking back at what we have done to ensure that it performs as well as it can, be as exciting and motivating as forging new ground and pioneering new products?  I have worked in IT environments where the only enthusiasm seemed to be in being the first to use the latest and greatest gizmos and building up skills for your future CV.  In many instances the "next big thing" had very little impact on real business strategy or performance.

The buzz around the Grand National has to some extent answered my question. Most of the engineering team were far less interested in how a 33-1 shot like Silver Birch stayed the course, than by how much we managed to reduce the time it took to settle bets for our customers in comparison to last year.

This enthusiasm for making something good even better, was an example of how creativity doesn't have to be just about the latest technology trend. It was clear to me that the team are just as motivated by making an existing service better as by building a completely new service.

For the engineering team who work so hard in the lead up to the big race, it has become a test of their mettle - a highly visible showcase of their work in delivering incremental but significant performance improvements. 

So another Grand National has passed.

We are not the same company that we were this time last year; we have more people, more products, and more locations. We are keen to investigate and exploit new technology, and keep pushing boundaries, but I am also very proud that even with such a successful execution to support the Grand National, we are never easily satisfied or complacent.