Who am I?

I’m David Knott. I’ve been working in enterprise technology for over forty years.

I’ve spent most of that time in technical leadership roles: roles where you lead people, but where you have to maintain a good understanding of technology. I’ve had job titles such as CTO, Chief Architect, Digital Transformation Officer and Expert Partner, but they tend to come down to the same thing: build teams of smart people who know more than me and work together to solve interesting problems.

The two things I’ve learnt in my career are that you have to keep on learning and to keep on explaining. Technology moves fast, and is too complex for any one person to understand. It’s also too important to keep getting it wrong - but we do keep getting it wrong. If we seek out people who can explain it to us, and we take the time to explain it to others, we stand a better chance of getting it right.

Where have I worked and what sort of jobs have I done?

I’ve worked in a lot of industries, including utilities, media, consulting and technology, but have spent most of my time in financial services, working for big international or domestic banks.

I’ve done pretty much every job you can do in a corporate IT function, but always seem to end up in technical leadership roles: CTO, Chief Architect and so on.

I started my career as a software developer (except we called them analyst/programmers in those days), after an adolescence spent learning to program home computers. I couldn’t quite believe that anyone would pay me to build things with computers, and I still can’t quite believe it now.

If you’d like to know more about the companies I have worked for, you can find them on my LinkedIn profile.

What do I do now?

I gave up full time work at the end of 2025, and am figuring out what a ‘portfolio’ career looks like, that gives me time to think, write, spend more time with my family, and still get to work on interesting things.

Right now that’s a combination of voluntary, advisory and non-executive work, combined with writing a book on technology (which may be previewed on this site), and developing a course to help enterprise leaders figure out how to engage with AI.

Everything in this blog represents my own views, and not those of any organisation I work with.

Why does this blog exist and what’s it all about?

Several years ago, I was leading a team of technology architects for a global organisation. I was trying to persuade them that communication is an essential architecture skill, and that they needed to produce and publish material that would carry their ideas when they were not in the room. They challenged me to go first, and to publish my ideas on a social media site (I chose LinkedIn). After I’d done it once, they challenged me to do it every week, and I’ve been doing so ever since.

I’ve found that it’s become part of my regular rhythm, and gives me a chance to reflect, and to figure out whether things I have been saying stand the test of being written down.

And, no, I don’t use AI in the production of any content: I enjoy thinking and writing and don’t want to automate them.

What else am I interested in?

I never went to university full time, going straight to work after my exams at 18 (and finding out that I could get paid for doing something that I enjoyed).

My undergraduate and postgraduate degrees came later, through the great British institution of the Open University. The OU’s Arts Foundation course introduced me to philosophy: I had never encountered such a structured, reasoned way of engaging with the world before. I did every undergraduate philosophy course the OU offered, and went on to complete a PhD in Ethics.

I have found that my professional interest in technology and my academic interest in ethics have crashed together in recent years, and I hope that my philosophical background helps me to navigate some of the claims made by technologists.

I also live near the sea and go kayaking whenever I get the chance: even just a mile from shore is a long way from questions of philosophy and technology.