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:
Living with uncertainty: be ready to be wrong
Are you ready to be wrong?
Let’s imagine that you have followed the first seven steps in this article about becoming an enterprise AI leader (and maybe even attended the course to be launched later this year). You have learnt the fundamentals of computing, examined and adapted your leadership style, developed your leadership team, figured out your values and ways to stick to them, built a robust supply chain, re-imagined your enterprise and found a practical route to implementation.
And then everything changes. A leading AI company releases a whole new category of model which promises capabilities beyond anything you have seen before. Or the same company burns through its investors’ money, fails to raise new funds and the models you rely on vanish from the market. Or powerful, highly optimised new Open Source models are released which collapse the price of training and inference. Or companies come under pressure to recoup their capital investments and prices shoot up.
Managing the change: don’t turn your experts into novices
Technology people often forget the human side of change management. It is hard enough to design and build systems, integrate them, migrate data, configure infrastructure, and get everything working and stable. Technology can be erratic and unpredictable: who has time for even more erratic and unpredictable humans? Perhaps if we tack a training course and a couple of videos on the end of the systems rollout, we can achieve a bulk update of the human config files.
The error of thinking this way was demonstrated to me when I was working on a large scale merger between two banks. The technology choice was easy: we picked the systems of one bank, and then started planning how to migrate data from one set of systems to the other. Our designs were filled with data extracts and transforms, temporary integration layers, reconciliation and testing suites. We thought that our hardest problem was fitting all the migration work into a constrained time slot.
Imagining the enterprise: look through both lenses of your AI goggles
You’re looking at the problem wrong.
This is one of the perennial laments of technologists, particularly enterprise architects, when they work with leaders who claim to want to transform their business. Somebody senior, such as the Chief Operating Officer, or the person who runs all of the call centres, will invite the technologists in, and say that they want to fundamentally reimagine the way their business works. Yet, when the technologists start to produce designs and make proposals, it turns out that they have a rather different understanding of what fundamental means.
The change *is* the system
What do you think of when you think of computer systems? Do you think of a fixed set of features and functions, designed to meet a particular purpose, which changes steadily over time as a result of planned projects or essential maintenance? Or do you think of a dynamic process of continuous change, which adapts to meet a set of needs and opportunities revealed through practice and experience?
Many people who have worked in systems development for a while would favour the second definition: they recognise that a computer system is never ‘done’ and that its capacity for change is one of its most essential features. However, most organisations continue to construct investment plans, portfolios and even balance sheets as if the first definition was correct: IT systems are fixed assets with defined purposes which are built through upfront investment and then depreciated over time.
Risk Management: the often overlooked dimension of Digital Transformation
I have to confess that I’m not good at keeping New Year’s resolutions: I find it hard to change my behaviour on the basis of a single decision that happens to coincide with the end of the year. The ubiquity of broken New Year’s resolutions also seems to give me permission to break my own. But this year will be different! I’m going to try something that I hope will not be too hard and will be of some interest: to share some thoughts about Digital Transformation which have been bouncing around my head for a while - and through sharing them, give them form.
As these thoughts form, I expect they will almost fall into the classic people, process and technology triad. The one difference is that, when we talk about Digital Transformation, I think that we should talk about practices rather than processes. This might seem like a fine semantic point but, to me, a process is something that people follow (the process is in charge), whereas a practice is something that people do (the people are in charge). Practices seem to fit a world of autonomy, skill and expertise - people doing the work that cannot be done by machines.
If you’re going to land on the Moon, at some point you have to land on the Moon
The recording of the Apollo 11 Moon mission, just before the Eagle lands in the Sea of Tranquility, never fails to make my hair stand up. The tone of the astronauts is matter of fact, calm and professional: if you didn’t know the context then you would never imagine that they were engaged in one of humanity’s greatest endeavours.
And the more of the context you know, the more astonishing that air of calm becomes. Those last minutes before the landing were filled with alarms, unexpected behaviour from the lunar module, an overshoot of the planned landing site, and a search for a favourable place to land. By the time the module touched down, the craft had less than 5% of its fuel left, and was less than thirty seconds away from abandoning the mission. (This page gives a full transcript of the last 13 minutes before landing, and a great commentary on what was going on behind the words.)
To transform in isolation, create context
Imagine the experience of going to a meeting in a physical office, back when that was a normal thing to do (who knew a year ago that we would be nostalgic for featureless meeting rooms, grubby white boards, and markers that don’t work?). Don’t think about the content of the meeting: think about the context.
On your way to the meeting room, you walk past your colleagues and you catch glimpses of what they were working. You say hello to your friend who sits on this floor, but who you don’t see every day. You walk past the charts on the wall which show team performance and progress against the big project plan. You smile when you saw that the idea you sketched out on the whiteboard still hasn’t been wiped away.
Technology leaders: cultural transformation starts with you
How do you react to the launch of a cultural transformation programme in your company? How does your team react? With anticipation and delight, or with the suspicion that this will be a parade of slogans and new names for old things, and that it will melt away after a few months? I know that I have been responsible, with the best of intentions, for eliciting the latter reaction several times in my career. How do we learn to avoid it?
A few weeks back, I wrote about my first day at Google, and how pleased I was by the focus on culture, and the message that as Nooglers we were, from day one, custodians and participants in this culture. (And I should say that, just like that article, the views here are my own: if you’d like the official Google view, you can find plenty of that here.)