Some thoughts about the future of the Tech industry

Last week I was given the opportunity to sit on a panel of technical leaders and talk about the future of technology. I had a few notes about about how we're going to need to change our thinking about building capability and I thought I may as well capture and flesh out a touch the results of my crystal ball gazing here.

I spoke briefly about three areas:

• The people we hire
• The expectations of our users, and our expectations of them
• Where I think we’re going to need to invest and build capability

The people

Fairly obviously, Technology is getting more important to daily operations. But it's getting harder to hire people all the time. As we all keep hunting for talent, those who aren't offering the top end salaries will increasingly have to look nationally or even globally to recruit. I don't think moving the organisation to another city is a sustainable approach - at best, it will simply move the problem. Instead, I think we will increasingly see a more distributed workforce, and therefore more remote working. As staff turnover is identified as a major organisational cost, we’ll also see more emphasis staff retention - succession, training, individual growth and so on.

Whoever nails building a strong remote working culture and environment which encourages loyalty and celebrates and develops the individual is going to do very well. I think the secret to this is going to be building very strong communities of practice, and if I’m right we’ll see more “Head of Community” style work and roles growing up. 

I also think we’ll see more Tech decisions based not on the best technical or product solution for the org, but the best fit for the skills we can grow or hire. This would suggest a lean towards the big names (the Microsofts, Googles and Amazons) who are heavily investing in training the Tech industry through free access to courses, sponsoring hackathons, and so on.

I believe this will be more acute as Automation is used to deliver more while avoiding the continual growth of IT departments. We will need to retain the skillsets to maintain that automation layer or we'll be seeing yet another wave of technical debt.

Expectations from and on users changing

In times of yore, users used to have to know something about operating a computer to install and use software. These days, users on a smart device can just touch an icon and get everything they need. This is a victory for accessibility and digital inclusion but it also means the gap between “technical” and “non-technical” user is widening. Our helpdesks and other support points will need to work with an increasingly broad ranges of questions, especially as tech like AI gains traction, and expectations for what it can do are all over the place. 

We’ve also been seeing for years the expectations from users increasing as they use more SaaS products at home and demand the same sort of tools at work. To satisfy these needs, the cost of development is going to go up and cover a wider range of skillsets - and of course this links back to the earlier points about skill availability. Out of the box services are also going to be affected - vanilla deployment is going to be less palatable in the office, requiring more work for a good result especially with the current state of many internal systems user interfaces with respect to accessibility and usability. 

This is particularly true regarding what have often been considered secondary requirements - accessibility and environmental sustainability for example. Users are (quite rightly!) far more vocal about accessibility needs, and we need to not just respond but get ahead of their requirements.

Other places we’re going to need to build capability

Technology is obviously an increasingly essential part of everything. I mentioned the effect on helpdesks above. We're also already seeing increasing amounts of security threats and the wider reaching impact of a successful attack. This will take us into an ever more expensive arms race in the Security field, which will mean building Security capability. This is going to need to be approached very carefully as it will be very expensive - everything I’ve said about skills shortages are far more acute in the world of InfoSec. Part of the Security picture is a renewed emphasis on good, basic engineering practice (such as patching) - but again, this places a challenge on building skills in our organisations.

We’re also generating and handling more data all the time, so inevitably we’ll see more human error leading to data loss. In fact, for any organisation a major security incident or data breach is only a matter of time now. If we are assuming that it is going to happen, there is a need for much more robust organisational responses to these scenarios which means building appropriate incident response and Business Continuity capabilities. Of course, just responding isn't enough so there will also need to be stronger data ownership throughout our organisations, with more people with data owner and controller roles. Organisations will need to fully grip their end to end processes and user journeys in ways that perhaps hasn’t been happening before.

Obviously there is a lot more that can be said about everything here!

Recovering a sense of wonder

For the last few years I've started the year with a post about how January is bad and I want to reboot the year. This year is going to be different. While I could certainly be having a better time (as could many) I'm facing 2020 round 3 with a sense of cautious optimism.

I spent a lot of time over the Christmas period reflecting on what has changed for me over the last few years and one thing that I think I've lost is my sense of wonder. That childlike sense of feeling the magic in the world, revelling in something small but infinitely complex, and enjoying the feeling that I can explore something and there will always be more to learn.

I say lost - I think I prefer to think "misplaced".

This isn't the kind of thing that I can analyse and come up with a formula for change. It is not something that will come from deliberate action. That said, while there isn't a "solution" here, some deliberate steps can lead in the right direction.

On reflection, what I'm really missing is what comes before - that level of contentment and general feeling of peace when I'm open to the world and new experiences. There are several active things I can work towards, but at the heart of it for me really is personal space. Odd to reflect on after nearly two years of being pretty much entirely alone. That space is better called "free time" - those moments when I don't have some pressure on me to do something. Pressure from real work, volunteer work, paperwork, need to write a blog post, put up pictures, etc. In those free moments I can pick something up (literally or metaphorically), look at it, turn it over and actually experience it. I can engage with something in more than a facile way before rushing off to the next thing, and I can take the opportunity to see the beauty and wonder in it.

So this year, I'm going to invest time carefully. I'm going to try to only do things I actually want to do, minimise the things I have to do and avoid being pushed into doing things I don't want to do. I want to keep my time precious, so I can put more space around the things I enjoy - and by that I mean take the time to enjoy things properly. I'd also like to actually finish some things. While I don't want to be ruled by todo lists, I do actually get something from completing a task and putting a line through it. There are some things on my "want to do" list that have been there waaaay too long and it would be nice to make some progress in the areas I've identified as things I actually want to do.

More than anything, I need to relearn how to Enjoy the Thing. Through that I think I'll start the see the beauty in the world again and that is the route back to wonder I feel.

After twenty three weeks

It has now been around twenty three weeks of lockdown and the world has changed. The restrictions continue to ease, although the number of new cases per day is on the rise. Many decisions are being made about the future of the country, however I’m not going to write about those.

What I do want to write about is the weird message we are seeing in the papers about getting back to work. Setting aside the utter lack of empathy being shown - people are frightened - I want to take a quick look at the underlying assumptions in the message.

Firstly, there is an assumption that people aren’t working now. Because we aren’t in the office, we are slacking off or not working at all. Now clearly there are some jobs for which location is important (you can’t build a house remotely) but the modern office is perfectly capable of working remotely. Indeed, during this period I’ve seen my colleagues work harder than ever - putting in more hours, remaining better focused on delivering solutions. I myself went through a long stretch of working around 3 days worth of hours for every 2 calendar days, including over the weekends. And yet we’re hearing about “bone idle workers” staying at home and not helping the country recover. This narrative is simply not true and does a great disservice to the many workers around the country who have done everything they can to keep things going during a time of international crisis.

Secondly, there is an underlying assumption that returning to normal (ie as things were a year ago) is the ideal. For me, this is a long way from true. A year ago, I was travelling an awful lot and basically doing nothing but working. I was looking to change this before the pandemic hit, but now I’m certain. I have been stuck in one place for pushing six months now and that has been lovely. I haven’t had to get on the train, I haven’t had to run from location to location looking for the next person to meet. I’ve been at home - the place I’ve worked for and which is full of my stuff - and it has been great. Now I’m not certain I want to remain a remote worker, but I do know that the minimal commute (bed to sofa via shower) has been wonderful compared to getting on the tube every day for half an hour or more.

Not that I want things to be as they are right now. I would like to go to more than three locations and I would definitely like to be able to pick up new things and meet new people. However, I feel like my current life is a good starting point and I’d like to be able to add to it - not reset to the madness of my old life and work from there. I know a lot of people who feel this way, which makes the ongoing call to return to the bustle and noise of before hard to hear.

Underpinning the “back to the office” narrative is a push to get the economy running again. Of course, one would be forgiven for thinking the London economy is entirely shaped by sandwich shops. Maybe this is modern city life? Working hard so you can buy sandwiches from someone else, while the city around you slowly prices all service industry people out of living there?

Myself, I see a different story. It’s about control. Get back into the office quick - before you realise you actually have some options. Don’t start making any decisions for yourself because you might notice that this unique event has stopped The Machine long enough to take a look at the world and think that maybe this isn’t what you want. Maybe we don’t want to all be running around all the time like ants.

Control is in the micro - we only trust you’re working because you’re in the office where we can see you - and the macro. The current economic system doesn’t benefit many. I am fortunately enough to be in the ranks of people who are doing ok, but there are many people who are chewed up and spat out by society. And there are a very few who benefit from the status quo - the queen ants in the analogy above. The same people who seem very keen for us all to be back in the office where they can see us...

There isn't a conclusion to this post. Like all of these lockdown posts, I’m recording my feelings and the way I’m thinking. At the moment I’m using this time to think about what I really want from my life, what I’m worth (both in the market and in a general existential way) and what this means for my future. What I want is definitely different from what I had.

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This post is from a series of shorter posts, written roughly once a week while the country is on lockdown to capture my feelings and reactions as we go. They are all tagged with coronavirus.