David Knott 13/07/2023 David Knott 13/07/2023

The three flavours of legacy: sour, bitter and sweet

What does legacy technology taste like?

That might seem like an odd question, not just because it’s strange to ask about the taste of technology, but also because it might seem obvious that legacy tastes bad. We usually talk as if legacy systems are unequivocally awful. We have legacy remediation programmes, legacy reduction programmes, and legacy elimination programmes. We sometimes seem to put more effort into getting rid of legacy systems than we do in building them in the first place.

However, I think that the world is not that simple, and that it’s more helpful to think of legacy systems as coming in three flavours: sour, bitter and sweet.

David Knott 06/07/2023 David Knott 06/07/2023

Risk isn’t boring if you are a lion tamer (and we are all lion tamers now)

I was at an event recently where a presenter apologised for talking about technology risk. They anticipated that the audience would perceive it as a dry and boring subject.

I can see why they felt that they needed to make this apology. When people hear the words ‘technology risk’ they often think about processes, risk registers, controls, reviews, assessments, forms, and all sorts of reasons that they can’t go faster.

I don’t think that we need to think about risk this way, though. Risk clearly isn’t boring if you’re doing a dangerous job. If you’re a tightrope walker, an astronaut or an airline pilot, then the danger is immediate and obvious, and risk management is an essential part of your work. Checking that the safety net is in place, that your oxygen tank is full, and that the doors are closed properly are matters of life and death.

David Knott 29/06/2023 David Knott 29/06/2023

Making the unapproachable approachable

I don’t have many regrets, but I do regret not paying more attention in maths class when I was about 17 years old. I had reached the point where I was thoroughly bored with full time education. I think I must have been staring out of the window during the vital lesson when the fundamentals of calculus were explained, because suddenly I was in a world of symbols and concepts that I didn’t understand. It was like skipping a couple of episodes of a complicated TV series: I was lost and struggling to catch up. With the help of some friends, I bluffed my way through the exams and didn’t do too badly, but I never felt at ease with the subject.

To tell the truth, I don’t even regret that academic mis-step very much, as it was part of the path that led to me skipping university at 18, a choice which I wouldn’t recommend to everybody, but which had a huge influence on my personal, professional and academic life. However, I have always felt that calculus was an important hole in my understanding of the world. This has particularly been the case recently, when I have attempted to educate myself about Machine Learning.

David Knott 22/06/2023 David Knott 22/06/2023

Some problems are interesting once; others are interesting forever

Dates are horrible.

If you are a computer, or a computer programmer, it makes sense to measure time as a single continuously increasing linear quantity, such as the number of microseconds since 1st January 1970 (known as the Unix epoch). You can compare, add and subtract such numbers. However, humans insist on measuring time based on the rotation of the Earth (days), the passage of the Earth around the Sun (years), and on further subdivisions (weeks, months and hours). This means that dates and times have structure, and computers and computer programmers have to handle that structure.

Maybe there are people out there who like writing date and time handling routines. Personally, my heart sinks every time I have to capture a date from a human input and store and manipulate it in some way. If I’m using date and time functions, I always have to look them up in reference guides and on Q&A sites, and I always make some mistakes. (Is that a date or a datetime object? Did I put the month in the right place? Have I adjusted for time zones?)

David Knott 15/06/2023 David Knott 15/06/2023

The technology hierarchy of needs

The theory has been criticised and challenged, but has a continuing intuitive appeal, and is often taught on management courses. If you’ve done any management or leadership training in your career, you have likely seen that pyramid many times.

I believe that we can borrow the concept of the hierarchy of needs to help us understand the answer to a related question: why do anything with enterprise technology? And, more importantly, which things matter most?

Enterprise technology is a field of continuous, strenuous activity. The digital service that you consume as an end user may look simple and elegant, but behind the scenes there will be people writing code, testing systems, managing deployments, building infrastructure, probing security, negotiating contracts, defining architecture, making decisions and so on. And there will be more people managing and leading the first set of people, gathering data, reading reports, assessing risk, allocating funding, finding resources and so on. Over time, some of this work will become automated or delegated to service providers, but the total amount of work never seems to reduce: there is always something else to do, and there is never quite enough budget or resource to go around.

David Knott 08/06/2023 David Knott 08/06/2023

Time to talk about mental health

It was Mental Health Week a couple of weeks ago, but I was too busy to write this article. Actually, that’s not true. I was too nervous to write this article. But those are both good reasons to write it, even belatedly.

I want to write about how anyone can experience challenges with their mental health at work, how it can be difficult to know when this is happening, and how welcome it is that times have changed. I also want to illustrate this with an example of a personal experience.

Two declarations before I share that experience. First, I am not a health professional and have no training in the field. Second, this is a tale of everyday stress and its consequences. I have come to realise that, part of the reason that it is important to talk about mental health is that many people experience challenges which are not long term, and which don’t require a diagnosis, but that nevertheless need help. And they (including me) don’t always feel comfortable asking for help.

David Knott 01/06/2023 David Knott 01/06/2023

The value and inevitability of being proven wrong

Do you like being proved wrong? If you work in enterprise technology, I hope that you do, because it’s an essential part of the job.

Working in enterprise technology means that you are in the business of making predictions: small predictions, such as how many stories you are going to complete in this sprint; medium predictions, such as whether this partner is going to deliver the project successfully; and big predictions, such as whether this technology is going to make an impact on people’s lives.

I have got every single one of these predictions wrong at some stage in my career. My favourite example of getting a big prediction wrong is the way that I thought about QR codes.

David Knott 25/05/2023 David Knott 25/05/2023

Swimming against the tide of your own skills: the importance of unlearning

Which is harder, acquiring new beliefs or discarding old ones?

Last week, I wrote about how technologists can respond to the pressure - and the frequent interview question - to stay current, to keep their skills and knowledge fresh and up to date. Tim Pieters suggested that I consider the related topic: how we unlearn. That is, how we shed beliefs and practices which are no longer helpful.

I think that unlearning is harder than learning.

Both require humility, but learning requires an easier sort of humility: we need simply to admit that we are ignorant, and that we need to put in the effort to read, listen, watch and practice. Unlearning requires us to admit that we were wrong, that prior decisions and efforts were made on the basis of beliefs that we now consider to be mistaken.

David Knott 18/05/2023 David Knott 18/05/2023

Answering the question: ‘How do you stay current?’

How do you stay current?

I have to admit that, every time I am asked this question, I panic a little internally. I have an answer: there are blogs and sites I read, there are people I follow on social media, I have a long list of courses and books, and I try to do some real coding when I get the chance. But I also know that all those activities are flimsy bulwarks against the rapidly rising tide of ignorance, and that if I truly wanted to ‘stay current’ I would have time to do nothing else. In recent years and months, the press has been full of stories about new technology: ChatGPT and LLMs are the latest topics to grab the global imagination. But, for technologists, these are just the highly visible tips of a very large iceberg of trends in computing, networking, cyber security, software engineering and data science that most people don’t see. We are used to our concepts being disrupted.

Does this mean that there is no point in trying to stay current, that we should abandon all attempts to maintain a general understanding of the field, and only learn about new topics as we need to (perhaps using an AI assistant to explain things to us)? Unsurprisingly, I don’t think so: I enjoy learning, and think that the dynamism and volatility of the technology market make it fun. I do believe, however, that we should be thoughtful about what we learn, and distinguish between knowledge that will last and knowledge that will fade.

David Knott 11/05/2023 David Knott 11/05/2023

Styles of reuse: what do we expect from each other?

Reuse seems like a good idea. Building new stuff takes time and money, whereas copying or using existing stuff sounds like it should be easier. If that’s the case, though, why is it so hard? Plenty of organisations attempt to control the cost and complexity of their technology by increasing reuse, setting metrics to measure their achievement of this goal. Unfortunately, these metrics usually show that they have limited success: people seem to like building and acquiring new stuff, even if they have stuff that does the same job.

I think that one of the reasons for this phenomenon is that reuse is dependent on trust (if I am going to use your software, I need to trust that it works), trust is dependent on expectations (if we are going to work together, we need to know what we expect from each other), and expectations are often unstated or unclear (I don’t know what I can expect from you, and you haven’t said what you expect from me). Furthermore, there is more than one style of reuse, each of which comes with different expectations.

David Knott 04/05/2023 David Knott 04/05/2023

What do I believe about enterprise technology?

Last week, I wrote about three things that I learnt in my time at Boston Consulting Group. One of those things was the practice of conducting belief audits: figuring out what you believe and what your true goals are. This practice is particularly important when considering major change: if you don’t know what you are really aiming for, then how are you going to achieve it?

I’m moving to a new role, so it seems like a good time to conduct a personal belief audit. There are inherent beliefs that I’ve acquired in a long career in technology (note that I use the term technology in this article to mean the broad field of computing: I realise that there have been many other technologies since the earliest days of stone tools - but that’s the way we use the word these days - and, unfortunately, if you say Information Technology or IT, that makes people still think that you have come to fix the printer), but I’m not sure that I have ever attempted to write them all (or at least the most important ones) down. Here goes . . .

David Knott 27/04/2023 David Knott 27/04/2023

Three things I’ve learnt at BCG

Today is my last day at BCG. (I’ll share what I’m going to do next in the near future: let’s just say that it had to be something pretty special to tempt me away from BCG.) My time here has been one of the most intense learning experiences of my life: I’ve learnt about new industries, new technologies, and got to see how one of the world’s leading consultancies works from the inside. But there are three things which have particularly stayed with me, and which I plan to add to the box of conceptual, practical and technical tools I have built over my career.