A major milestone for Stuart Sawle of Sysop

Stuart Sawle, celebrating 50 years in IT

Stuart Sawle, Managing Director of Heywood based Sysop, is celebrating a major milestone – 50 years in IT.

Mr Sawle left grammar school at 16 with a handful of ‘O’ levels.

A neighbour friend was an IT Operations Shift Leader at Dunlop and suggested that Mr Sawle apply as a trainee operator.

He took to operating large mainframes, which were tape-based and demanding work physically, like a duck to water. The tapes were 3,600 ft zinc spools and some 100 tapes per shift needed to be mounted/demounted on the eight tape decks on each of the huge LEO III mainframes. Understanding what was going on came much more easily to him. He had a natural aptitude for IT.

At just 19, his boss asked him to set-up and run an offline job-assembly function. The goal (successfully achieved) was to improve consistency and reduce job-assembly errors.

This work caught the attention of a senior colleague who head-hunted Mr Sawle to join him as Chief Operator at Halfords in the centre of Birmingham. The small ICT 1901 mainframe at Halfords was a step down from the sophistication of the LEO and, at the tender age of twenty, he had the challenge of supervising the operation of three shifts, job and data control.

Mr Sawle began to take an interest in the George II operating system and pioneered its implementation to streamline operations and reduce mis-operation.

This led to a change of career as he learnt how to program in PLAN – an assembler language proprietary to ICT 1900 mainframes.

He loved it and determined a short while later that he could earn much more money as a freelance programmer.

Very soon he was assigned to a major development project for Woolworth – all in COBOL. Mr Sawle hadn’t written a COBOL program but had, at least, covered the basics in a college course.

His PLAN and GEORGE II experience stood him in very good stead and he quickly earned a reputation as the technical guru as he could understand diagnostic dumps when many of his colleagues found them perplexing.

He was freelance programmer at Woolworth for nearly three years when the new Data Centre Manager asked him to join the management team and establish a competent technical and operations support department – again with the objective of improving consistency of service and reducing error.

The challenge was to develop the operations support group, exploit the operating system and bring real business benefit to the organisation. This opportunity was enhanced when he led the project to migrate the George II workload to the newly launched ICL 2900 range under VME.

Woolworth IT developed a reputation for leading-edge technology and practices and Mr Sawle was often invited to speak at User Group conferences and joined working parties to help steer ICL development plans – most of them focusing on reliability, consistency of service and error reduction.

His responsibilities at Woolworth increased and he was given responsibility for the Rochdale data centre and also the data centres in Swindon and London.

In 1985 everything changed. A new IT Director changed the technical direction from ICL to IBM. Senior IT professionals with extensive experience of IBM operations were parachuted in and Mr Sawle was offered a very attractive package to go do something else – and that something else was Sysop.

The early days of Sysop saw an increasingly fruitful partnership with ICL.

Sysop pioneered the development of storage management systems to exploit the capabilities of automated tape libraries – always looking at ways to help clients reduce cost, improve reliability, and improve storage management.

Then along came ITIL®.

In 1990 Sysop was one of only three companies who offered training in IT Service Management. The other two no longer exist – which makes Sysop the world’s longest exponent of ITIL.

Sysop continues to innovate and see itself as a new breed of IT educator.

Mr Sawle said: "Our mission is to provide a more creative and stimulating, world class educational environment that addresses vital areas of IT service management. Our training and education is designed to make ITIL more accessible, digestible and relevant for its clients, while its practical workshops can be tailored to the specific needs of the client organisation."

Asked when he is intending to retire, Mr Sawle said: "Not while I’m having so much fun."