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:
Learning the fundamentals: beyond the IT slot machine
Business executives often experience their IT department as a slot machine: something that consumes money, occasionally gives a payout, and whose inner workings are opaque and inscrutable.
Sure, sometimes the slot machine gets new lights and buzzers which claim to give an idea of what it is going to do (project plans, progress reports and dashboards), and sometimes it gets new buttons which make players feel as if they are in control (steering committees, governance processes and change boards). But the machine still seems to keep on doing the same old random things, as if the lights, buzzers and buttons weren’t actually connected to anything.
The hand shapes the tool; the tool shapes the hand
Humans make tools: it is one of our defining characteristics. But our tools shape us, just as we shape our tools. If, like me, you don’t usually do a physically demanding job, try using a hammer for a few hours, and experience the blisters that it raises. Try using it for a few more days, and feel your calluses and other changes in your body.
Researchers now believe that our hands have been shaped by our history of tool use. Early human species (always remember that Homo sapiens is not the only, or the first, species of human) had weak wrists and clumsy digits compared to modern humans. The development of stone tools, and their impact on prospects of survival, meant that, from approximately 1.7 million years ago, the structure and strength of our hands evolved to get better at using tools. Our tools wrote themselves back into our DNA.
Look! I made a machine do a thing!
When I am doing hobbyist computer stuff, I often have moments which can be summarised as, Look! I made a machine do a thing! These moments bemuse family and friends, who are summoned to witness the thing that I have made the machine do, only to see a splurge of text at the command line, or an underwhelming web page. (But look at it - it works!)
The feeling of successfully making a machine do a thing is such an important phenomenon in computing that I think we should give it a name: perhaps LIMAMDAT, or LIMDAT for brevity and ease of pronunciation. The history of computing has been full of LIMDAT moments, from the first decrypts and trajectory calculations in the 1940s, through rocket launches and Moon landings, to the birth and development of the Internet.
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.
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.
Please pay attention to the safety briefing
What do you do when the air crew ask you to put down your books or devices and pay attention to the safety briefing? Do you follow their advice, because this aircraft may be different to those you have flown on before? Do you study the safety card when the briefing is over? Do you check that you know the location of the life jacket, under your seat or in the compartment next to you? Or do you zone out, diving deeper into the mental limbo that air travel induces, waiting for the moment when you can start reading, scrolling or checking emails again?
I expect that most of us regard the safety briefing as a dull but worthy formality, and don’t pay as much attention as we should. However, I also think that perhaps we should regard it differently, and learn some lessons about how we achieve safety in enterprise technology.
How I stopped fearing the phrase, ‘I’m not technical.’
My heart used to sink when I heard someone say, ‘I’m not technical’.
Not because I think that everyone in the world should be a technical expert, but because those words were usually said by a digital leader to mean that, although they were in charge, they didn’t actually understand most of what their team did every day.
Sometimes the phrase was used to indicate humility: ‘I don’t have a technical background, so you’re going to have to explain things to me.’ But at other times it indicated a lack of interest: ‘I haven’t got time for all this technical nonsense – just get the job done.’ (You can imagine which I was most pleased to hear.)
Revealing invisible ingenuity
If you are ever in Paris and looking for something to do, then it is worth a visit to the Musée des Arts et Metiers. Don’t be misled by the name: although it translates to ‘Museum of Arts and Crafts’, you won’t find any William Morris wallpaper or Rennie Mackintosh chairs: it is a museum of technology.
What you will find is hall after hall of inventions, models and instruments, from the 18th century to the 21st century, charting the development of technologies that have shaped the world. There are early phonographs and radios, steam engines and looms, suspension bridges and space robots. There is a secret camera built into a hat, the preserved laboratory of Antoine Lavoisier, and Foucault’s pendulum, swinging backwards and forwards from the roof of a church, steadily measuring the rotation of the Earth.
Reasoning and reflex
I didn’t learn to drive a car until I was in my mid-twenties, and I found it difficult. It took me three attempts to pass my test, and a lot longer before I was a confident driver. But, as well as teaching me how to drive, the experience taught me the difference between reasoning and reflex: the difference between knowing what you should do, and doing it automatically due to muscle memory.
Later, I learnt the management lesson that, when we acquire new skills, especially those with a physical component, we pass through phases of unconscious incompetence (we don’t know what to do), conscious incompetence (we know what to do but we can’t do it), conscious competence (we know what to do, and we can do it when we think about it), and unconscious competence (we know what to do, and we do it automatically).
It’s okay to be overwhelmed by new technology (especially if you’re a technologist)
I’ve been overwhelmed by new technology many times in my life.
When I got my first microcomputer as a teenager, there was very little to help me make sense of it, other than the manual that it came with, some computer magazines, and the efforts of my friends, who were trying to understand their own computers. This new language seemed like a wall of gibberish, with no way to gain purchase.
When I first moved from a corporate environment to a startup environment in the dot com era, I realised that there was a whole new web based technology stack that had sprung up while I wasn’t paying attention, and that I needed to learn in order to lead my team effectively. The skills I had learnt over years of professional work suddenly felt obsolete.