Personal misfortune can spark public good. Like Rod Aldridge, founder and ex-head of Capita, Dame Stephanie Shirley made her money in information technology and now devotes her time to philanthropy, via her eponymous Foundation, which supports carefully chosen causes, mainly medical and educational, including the charity Autism Speaks, which she chairs, and Prior's Court, the residential school for children with autism that she founded and supports. Shirley's focus on autism stems from personal experience. Her only son, Giles, was autistic and died, aged 35, in 1998.
Her other main philanthropic interest is the better use of IT in the voluntary sector, demonstrating the combination of technology and social interest that motivates Shirley, now in her eighth decade, to continue working, as she always has, seven days a week.
Shirley has never seen IT as an intellectual pursuit for its own sake. The public sector now considers flexible working as essential to encouraging a diverse workforce, but Shirley was on the case in 1962, when she set up her own business employing freelance women workers with IT skills who needed flexible ways to work.
Shirley came to this country in 1939 as an unaccompanied five-year-old refugee from Nazi Germany. Showing an early aptitude for mathematics, she took a job in the research department of the Post Office, studying for a maths degree in the evenings. She joined UK computing company ICL, but soon found herself blocked in a male-dominated corporate world, famously changing her name to Steve (as she was then known until she was made a dame). The answer was to set up her own firm. "Things are now very different, but then, no one was employing women," she says. Starting her own company, which went through changing names to become the FI Group and then Xansa, now owned by Steria, wasn't a money-making exercise, it was a "crusade". Shirley was ahead on diversity, but setting up this kind of loose network of trusted workers was itself a new idea, using technology to support different ways of working.
Shirley has been involved as both supplier to the public sector, through her IT business, and, in the 15 years since she retired, as a considerable force in the voluntary sector. She thinks there is a strong role for the third sector, providing not just services, but also information. She points to the work of bodies such as the National Autistic Society, acting as facilitator in setting up services. There's no reason the public sector should do these things, she says. But she does worry about third sector bodies becoming too dependent on government contracts. "In business, I had a sensible rule that we didn't take on any more than a third of our business from any one source and my goodness that was an excellent rule," she says.
She approves of the greater flexibility that privatisation of services can bring. She thinks there is now less of the attitude "not my department". But she'd like to see even more joining up, particularly of health and social care.
Shirley doesn't shy away from large ventures. One of her projects is convincing the World Health Organisation to change the way learning disabilities are differentiated, to improve pan-European provision for people with autism. But Shirley is also a believer in the power of having the right person in the right place. "One individual can make a difference," she says.
From Bubb's Blog
From Whitehall Watch
