Wheeldoit's origins
The company was
founded by Jim
Lewis and Mike
Fox in June 1998 and our offices are in Midlothian Innovation Centre, a Technology Park
on Edinburgh's southern fringe. The full title of the company is The Wheel (Scotland) Limited, and we use wheeldoit.com as our trading, and online name. We are strategic partners with RR Donnelley, one of the World's leading Facilities
Management and Print Services companies and have preferred supplier
status with them for delivery of a range of our services to major Public
and Private Sector clients.
Director's
Profile: Jim Lewis
Jim began his career as a cartographer with the UK Government's Hydrographic Office in 1970. In 1973 he moved to map makers John Bartholomew and then in 1974 to The Scottish Office where he was appointed manager of their Computer Graphics Unit, with a staff of 20 designers, cartographers and typesetters. In 1994 he moved to Her Majesty's Stationery Office (HMSO) as an IT project manager. When HMSO was privatised at the end of 1996 Jim left to found wheeldiot.com with Mike.
Director's
Profile: Mike Fox
Mike's background is also in cartography. He joined the Scottish Office as a trainee map-maker in 1974, then progressed through Boundary Mapping, Remote Sensing & Air Photo Interpretation, research into GIS-based mapping systems, and Systems Analysis, to Map and Publication design and production, In 1994 he too moved to HMSO, as Deputy Manager of their Cartographic Centre, then left after privatisation to found wheeldoit.com with Jim.
So how did we get involved in doing web stuff?
In the good-old, bad-old days, when computers were the size of a small house, with whirring discs and rows of blinking lights and the only one you had ever seen was in Bloefeld's secret volcano being sabotaged by 007, Jim and Mike began their careers as Cartographic Draughtsmen. Drawing boards, tee squares, and technical pens were the high-tech order of the day, and they served their apprenticeships on these tools. But the wind of change was blowing their way, and soon new equipment began to appear - monitors, keyboards, servers, printers, plotters, digitising tablets and so on. And with this came the end of the traditional Drawing Office, replaced by specialist units with exotic names like Digital Mapping, Computer Graphics, and Air Photonet. Jim and Mike could see that their future lay in mastering the new tools, so they made sure they were first in line for jobs in these new units. At first the computers were limited in scope, as they were really no more than glorified word processors with rudimentary drawing and technical software bolted on. However, these were soon replaced by more sophisticated ones with professional illustration, document design, digital mapping, image manipulation, and GIS software.
One of the first principles they grasped was that once information was held digitally, it could serve a multitude of purposes, be copied and reused, or merged to create entirely new material, all without any loss of quality or integrity. The trick was to get it right when the stuff was being captured, and this is where their cartographer's meticulous, analytical approach came to the fore. They made sure that everything produced digitally was carefully structured to maximise its potential for re-use, and was logically referenced and archived. And when new computer systems were introduced, they were taught to communicate with the older ones and share data. The byword became 'create once - use many times', and this continued throughout the years, as Mainframes and Minicomputers with command-line interfaces became networked to Workstations and PC's, then Apple Macs, and eventually on to the introduction of Wide Area Networks, FTP, and the ubiquitous World Wide Web.
During this time, Jim and Mike continued to build on their knowledge and understanding of how to handle digital information, and when the opportunity arose to undertake the web conversion work for the Scottish Government, they immediately recognised that this was just another take on what they had been doing so successfully for years, so they went for it. And the result has been over ten years of business success for wheeldoit.com.