I’m David Knott. I’ve been working in enterprise technology for over forty years and I’m still learning. This blog is based on mistakes, failures, lessons and some things I find interesting:
Why have FO when there’s no MO?
If you are a business leader in 2026 trying to deal with AI, you are surrounded by fear on all sides. Analysts, investors, vendors and the media are all telling you that if you don't invest in AI, you should fear being left behind. At the same time, lawyers, risk professionals, privacy advocates and employee representatives are telling you you should fear AI harming your staff, your customers and your company's reputation.
Fear is rarely helpful in an enterprise setting. I once knew a large corporation which was desperate to move to cloud because they feared that their aging data centres could fail at any moment. But, after spending many millions to get their cloud environments ready, they wouldn't move their data because they feared security breaches. Fear drove double cost and double complexity.
Uncertainty: the final frontier
When our schedules and streaming services are full of Star Trek content (at the last count, thirteen series and fourteen films), it seems hard to remember that the series was once a lonely, experimental long shot: the first regular science fiction TV series with recurring characters and themes, squarely aimed at adults.
Prompted by watching the (excellent) series Strange New Worlds, I tracked down a print copy of the book The Making of Star Trek, published in 1968, between the second and third season of the original series, when it was on the brink of cancellation. If you can put aside some of the 1960s-era attitudes (despite the generally progressive tone of Star Trek, there are some paragraphs that wouldn’t make it into a 2026 edition), it’s a fascinating overview of television production at the time, and of the challenges of getting studios and networks to try something new (and expensive).
Can we see the future from here?
After the Second World War, it was clear that the telecommunications infrastructure of many countries needed an upgrade. The digital computer had been invented, and was emerging from the lab into the economy. In the USA, the giant early warning and control system, SAGE (Semi-Automated Ground Environment) was being built to cope with the threat of nuclear war, and needed systems and sensors to be connected across the country. The old copper cables of the telephone and telegraph systems were not up to the job.
Fortunately, experts, researchers and engineers had a solution: they would use light to transmit information rather than pushing electrons through copper. However, they did not start with the flexible, glass optical fibres that we are familiar with today: they believed that glass could not be manufactured with sufficient transparency to carry light over long distances and that, even if it could, the photons would escape at the bends.
Lessons from forty years of Excel: if you give people tools, expect them to be used
One of the anniversaries I missed last year was that of Microsoft Excel, which turned forty in August.
I think that anybody who has worked in enterprise technology over any part of those four decades will have mixed feelings about Excel. On one hand, they will be grateful for a flexible tool which almost everybody has access to, most people know how to use, and which can be used for modelling and forecasting without the need to run big projects or write complex programmes. On the other hand, they will remember the times when a major upgrade was delayed because of a set of fragile, convoluted macros, when a business critical operation depended on a spreadsheet which only one person understood, or when they were asked to ‘just’ take the logic embedded in a spreadsheet and make it into a system that worked for the whole company.
A few phrases to help resist AI illusions
‘It can’t hurt you: it’s not real!’
You might hear those words from the hero of a horror, science fiction or fantasy film. They could be walking through a dream world, subject to a hallucinogenic drug, or under the spell of a sorcerer. They know that the things that they are seeing are not real, and that all they have to do is to try to ignore what they think they can see and hear. Telling themselves that what they are experiencing is not real is a guard against fear, against stepping off the path, or, worst of all, the temptation to talk back to the illusions.
Dealing with current forms of AI can feel like this. Not just because AI is surrounded by hype, marketing, inflated expectations and a big dose of FOMO. And not just because AI can be used to produce fake videos, fake images and fake words.
A suggested New Year’s resolution: be more curious
When I was growing up, my Dad and my uncles were always working on cars and motorbikes. This was partly through need: they didn’t have much money and they had to travel for work, studies and family life, so fixing a car using spare parts, ingenuity and improvisation was an essential skill. They also enjoyed it: it was as much of a hobby as a necessity.
It was not a practice I ever acquired the skill or the appetite for. I was much more interested in reading books than getting my hands covered in grease and oil. I enjoyed spending time with my Dad and Uncles as they struggled to fit strange shaped pieces of metal into strange shaped spaces, and as they scoured scrap yards to find an old car with the right part. But I never really understood what they were doing.
This Christmas, give yourself the gift of knowing that your work isn’t boring
‘Sorry, this is the boring bit.’
When I hear those words, my heart sinks almost as much as it used to when I heard someone declare that they were not technical. In the field of enterprise technology, they normally mean that the speaker is about to attempt an explanation of technical detail to an audience which includes non-technical people.
Perhaps they are going to explain to a product manager why the system built for a hundred users can’t scale to a million without extra infrastructure. Or why it’s not a good idea to put a system which holds customer’s personal details into production without security testing. Or why, while it might be tempting to make the chat interface available to every user, someone has to pay for all those tokens.
Reflections on a vertical learning curve
Today is my last working day as CTO for the UK Government.
Three years ago, I had just learnt that I might be offered this job. I was completely uncertain about whether I should say yes or not. Fortunately, my wife, as ever, gave me good advice – to talk to some experts and mentors, who knew me and the kind of work I did, and to get their perspectives.
Those conversations yielded two insights. First (from people who were naturally analytical), when we plotted pros and cons, the pros sounded like reasons to do the job, and the cons sounded like work to be done – and therefore more reasons to do the job. Second (from people who thought in terms of purpose), I discovered a strong sense of public duty: for an example, an Australian friend told me that if his country asked him to do an equivalent job, he would accept with pride.
Look on the bright side: the power of applied optimism
Somewhere in the 20th century, at the beginning of my career, I worked with a project manager on several projects. After a while, they told me why they liked to have me on their team.
I waited for them to tell me that it was due to my technical brilliance, my architectural insight, or my all-round charm and charisma. Instead, they told me that it was because I was an optimist, and that I was quite vocal about my optimism.
That gave me an immediate lesson in self-awareness: that the attributes that people value you for are not always those that you value in yourself. I would much rather have been known as the technical wizard than as the person who says, ‘Don’t worry, everything will probably be alright’. Especially as, on most IT projects, such optimism is often seen as a sign of naivety and inexperience.
Three leadership lessons (in theory)
I have learnt most about leadership from people and practice: from working for and observing people who are good leaders (as well as some bad leaders) and attempting to do more (or less) of what they do.
Most large enterprises attempt to supplement or accelerate this practical experience with theory: with leadership frameworks, principles and objectives which attempt to express what a good leader should be. These theoretical constructs exist in companies of all shapes and sizes: start-ups, global giants, banks, tech companies and consulting firms. They are usually well-intentioned, sometimes banal, frequently obvious - and generally less useful than what can be learned from seeing leaders lead.
How augmented is your reality?
In the Battlestar Galactica reboot series, the Cylon character Brother Cavil laments that, when he saw a supernova, ‘you know how I perceived one of the most glorious events in the universe? With these ridiculous gelatinous orbs in my skull! With eyes designed to perceive only a tiny fraction of the EM spectrum. With ears designed only to hear vibrations in the air . . .’ He goes on to demand, ‘I want to see gamma rays! I want to hear X-rays! And I want to - I want to smell dark matter!’ In the story, Cavil is a synthetic being but, rather than the gleaming robot form of the Cylons from the original film and TV series, he inhabits an organic human body, subject to humanity’s frailties and constraints.
Don’t settle for horses when you could have dragons
Sometimes, when we are talking about technology, we quote Henry Ford, who said, ‘If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have asked for a faster horse.’
Except that Henry Ford never said these words. They were first associated with him in 1999, when an article by John McNeece suggested that, ‘There is a problem trying to figure out what people want by canvassing them. I mean, if Henry Ford canvassed people on whether or not he should build a motor car, they’d probably tell him what they really wanted was a faster horse.’