David Knott 07/10/2021 David Knott 07/10/2021

To hire and retain software engineers (and other great technologists): your first steps should be trust and value

Many traditional companies are asking the same questions. Why can’t I hire the software engineers (and other talented technologists) I need? Why don’t they stay? Why do my best people keep leaving once I’ve trained them?

There are a lot of obvious answers to these questions. Talented technologists are in demand by traditional companies and digital natives. Traditional companies are often perceived to lack the brand, mission and feeling of excitement that newer companies have. Newer companies may have different compensation structures.

I believe that these reasons are largely valid. However, I think that there is a deeper reason that is more important: many traditional companies have not yet learnt to truly value and trust their technologists. And I believe that this reason is rooted in the history of how technology functions have evolved in large, traditional companies.

David Knott 30/09/2021 David Knott 30/09/2021

Planning for the future: taking the science fictional view

In 1978, Isaac Asimov wrote in his essay My Own View, ‘No sensible decision can be made any longer without taking into account not only the world as it is, but the world as it will be. This, in turn, means that our statesmen, our businessmen, our every man must take on a science fictional way of thinking.’ Reading this in 2021, this quote is both relevant and an example of the short term thinking it warns against: apparently, taking a science fictional view in 1978 didn’t include a world run by anybody but men.

The circumstances in which I came across this quote further illustrated the importance of taking on a science fictional view. I was reading a book on AI ethics, addressing the implications of living in a world where artificial intelligence is already woven into many aspects of our lives, where we contemplate giving AI agents responsibility for life and death decisions in industries such as transport, and where there seems a strong chance that, within our lifetimes, AI agents will exhibit properties which lead us to hard questions about rights and consciousness. Moreover, I was reading the book on a device that fit in the palm of my hand, connected to a global network that gave me access to the world’s knowledge - as well as playing videos and letting me talk to people. A long way from 1978, and not just in social attitudes.

David Knott 23/09/2021 David Knott 23/09/2021

When evaluating startups, evaluate yourself. Will you be a good customer?

Last week, I was privileged to support the annual Female Fintech Founder competition run jointly by Google, Deutsche Bank and Atos. The competition seeks to find the most promising early stage fintech companies founded by women, and to provide the winners with support for the next stage of their success. (And to provide all the participants with advice and networking opportunities.)

At the heart of the session I attended was a great presentation by my colleague Prue MacKenzie. You can read more about that here.

I can’t improve on Prue’s advice, but the session did prompt me to think about how established companies work with new companies, and whether they always get it right. Many of the founders taking part in the competition will offer their services directly to consumers, but many will have corporates as customers or partners. Founding a company takes great courage, especially in times of great uncertainty. Whether they win the competition or not, all of the founders have already taken a greater risk than any I have ever taken in my career. I think that they deserve customers and partners who think deeply about how to work with them.

David Knott 16/09/2021 David Knott 16/09/2021

Are you suffering from chapter one syndrome?

Keeping up with the latest thinking in technology can be hard. New products emerge every day, and existing products shift and change. If we did nothing but read announcements from technology providers, then our days would be full. If we tried to understand the implications of all those announcements, our nights would be full too. And, to make things more complicated, it’s not just technology that changes: the ways in which we build, organise and manage technology also change. I have had to relearn how to do things many times.

If you’re anything like me, you have a pile of unread books (either physical or virtual), and a creeping sense of guilt about not having read all of them - and that sense of guilt gets stronger as the pile grows higher. But where will you find the time?

David Knott 09/09/2021 David Knott 09/09/2021

Reflections on one year at Google: platforms, products and practices

I celebrated my first Googleversary this week! It’s hard to believe that I have been here a year. I don’t know whether it feels longer or shorter: for me, as for many people, time has passed strangely over the last year.

I’ve learnt many things so far at Google - about culture, about collaboration and about customers. Unsurprisingly, I have also learnt about technology - in particular, to think more deeply about how Google uses technology, and what Cloud means for customers.

A lot has been written about Cloud (including quite a few words by me), but I’ve had a feeling for a while that much of this writing (including my own) does not really capture why Cloud matters so much. Considerations of Cloud often focus on core technology benefits (reduce cost, reduce risk, increase agility) or jump straight to ambitious business goals (innovate, disrupt, create new models), but I think that they often miss a big and important architectural chunk in the middle.

David Knott 02/09/2021 David Knott 02/09/2021

Empowered must not mean abandoned

The most stressful experience in my entire career was when I felt truly abandoned. A very long time ago, I was trying to run a project which was dependent on the work of many other teams - but those teams weren’t interested. The system I was building needed new infrastructure - but the infrastructure wasn’t even ordered. The budget I had inherited was clearly insufficient for the task - but no-one was prepared to provide more money, or change scope, time or quality. And, although I have not always been fast enough to ask for help, this time I did not hold back: I took every opportunity to make sure that everyone around me knew the problems the team was facing and the help we needed, including my boss. But no help came. We were abandoned.

I like autonomy and don’t cope well with micro-management. But the feeling of being truly abandoned was far worse - I ended up leaving that job and have never forgotten the lesson.

David Knott 26/08/2021 David Knott 26/08/2021

Are you making a difference? Managers must tell correlation from causation

Does eating chocolate make you smarter? In a study published in The New England Journal of Medicine in 2012, Franz Messerli demonstrated a correlation between the amount of chocolate which a nation eats and the number of Nobel prizes its citizens win. Unsurprisingly, Messerli’s findings were deliberately playful: he was not really attempting to assert that eating chocolate leads to prize winning research - he was illustrating the difference between correlation and causation. Chocolate consumption tends to correlate with national wealth, which also correlates with those factors which create an environment suited to Nobel prize winning research.

We might think that we already understand the difference between correlation (factors which co-exist and which may change together, but which have no causal link) and causation (one factor which drives another through a causal mechanism), and would never fall into the trap of mixing them up. But I think that if you are a manager you are at risk of mixing these concepts up all the time - I know that I am.

David Knott 19/08/2021 David Knott 19/08/2021

Agreement is optional; understanding is essential

Technology architecture is characterised by debate: we spend a lot of time arguing with each other. Given how much time we spend, we should ask ourselves whether we are any good at it. But being good at arguing doesn’t mean that we win all the time: in fact, winning all the time might be a sign of badness. Arguing well means that we are reliably successful at discovering the truth and making decisions - which may mean that we have to change our minds.

Some time ago I wrote that, as a technology architect, one of your jobs is to get ideas from your head into other people’s heads. I still believe that to be true, but realise that I left something very important out: it is also your job to get ideas from other people’s heads into your head. It is your job to understand the objectives, motivations, constraints and thinking of other people, and to see how these change your perspective.

David Knott 12/08/2021 David Knott 12/08/2021

Cloud transformation: don’t stop at the foundations

Over twenty years ago, I was working in Canary Wharf when the next set of towers after 1 Canada Square started to be built. I had the opportunity to watch the foundations of new buildings being laid, and to see the surprising contrast between the amount of time it took to lay those foundations, and the speed with which the new buildings climbed to the sky. For months it seemed that nothing was happening - but that ‘nothing’ was what made the rest of the building possible.

In Cloud transformation, we usually start by building foundations: basic concepts and constructs such as landing zones, tools and security policies, accompanied by essential training, and proven by pilot workloads. This first phase can be difficult, as it requires you to make some of your most important choices and do some of your most important work at the time when you have least experience and capacity. As with any profound change, you will experience setbacks and surprises as well as success, and you will need to adapt your plan. It is also wise to seek help.

David Knott 05/08/2021 David Knott 05/08/2021

Predicting doomsday: is your transformation initiative in trouble?

Can this initiative be rescued? Or is it doomed to failure?

If you’ve worked on any transformation initiative, I expect that you have asked these questions when things were difficult. If you were a member of the team, you may have wondered whether it was time to find a new project. If you were a leader of the initiative, you may have wondered whether you were up to the job. And if you were a sponsor of the initiative, you may have wondered whether you should apply your sponsorship elsewhere.

In my last couple of blog posts, I wrote about the importance of sustaining energy in large scale transformation, and offered some suggestions on how to keep going. James Cole, who leads architecture for the British Red Cross, asked in the comments for suggestions about when to persevere and when to think again - about how to detect that your initiative is doomed.

David Knott 29/07/2021 David Knott 29/07/2021

The persistence of vision: sustaining energy in strategic transformation

Sometimes you just feel like giving up. Some days, even when you are the visionary leader of a transformation programme, even when your teams and your company are looking to you to provide energy, direction and confidence, it just feels like there are too many obstacles. You look at the many other abandoned programmes in your enterprise’s history, and you wonder how you can succeed when so many others have failed. You look at the status quo, and wonder whether it is really so bad. Maybe you should curtail your ambitions, and settle for some incremental improvements.

I don’t have a perfect answer for sustaining energy in the face of seemingly insurmountable obstacles. But there are three ways of seeing - three perspectives - that I find helpful: the perspectives of imagination, of time and of others.

David Knott 22/07/2021 David Knott 22/07/2021

Apathy is transformation’s greatest enemy; wholeheartedness its greatest friend

There are many abandoned projects in the world. If you Google ‘abandoned projects’ you will mostly come up with examples of construction projects: buildings that have never been finished, that are never going to be finished, and now haunt their environments as shells and echoes of their original intent. When such a project goes wrong, the results are plainly visible.

For those of us who work in enterprise technology, or who try to transform companies, the remnants of our abandoned projects are not so visible. When we walk around our offices we do not see the millions of lines of code that were written but never made it into production, the packages that we bought but never implemented, or the process and culture changes that didn’t stick. Our false starts and u-turns are largely invisible to the eye. But they are visible to our memories: anyone who has been working in enterprise technology or transformation for some time has their mental store of abandoned projects.