A Different Kind of Technical Strategy

At Naimuri, operating as a consultancy we have a diverse range of customer challenges: all within the fantastically interesting and challenging security, intelligence and law enforcement sector. Projects are made up of different people, different technologies and different problems. The nature and the variety of work that we do is one of the key factors that makes life at Naimuri so interesting, and so fulfilling. However, one of our strengths also offers one of our biggest challenges. How do we ensure we are using the most appropriate technologies for each project, how do we learn from our successes and failures, what technology worked, what didn’t and why not? How do we keep moving in the same technical direction without limiting our technology choices?

Often this problem is met with a technical strategy. A technical strategy is the overall plan which consists of objectives, principles and tactics relating to use of technologies within a particular organisation.

Ordinarily when asked to produce a technical strategy the key steps involved are:

Step 1 :  Look forward x years to predict technological change

Before trying to predict what will have changed in the next two years, consider Moore’s Law. Broadly, postulated in the sixties that computing power would effectively double every eighteen months and remarkably his prediction has been upheld. Back in the sixties a doubling may have resulted in a few kb more processing capability. But consider the effect of doubling any number. The compound effect of exponential growth is illustrated by an old Indian legend…

Hundreds of years ago, a wise inventor of a new game called ‘Chess’, showed it to the emperor of India. The emperor was so impressed by the new game, that he said to the inventor

“Name your reward!“

The man responded,

“I am a humble man and seek only to feed my family.  Give me just one grain of rice for the first square of the chessboard, two grains for the next square, four for the next, and so on.“

The emperor agreed, amazed that the man had asked for such a small reward. However after thirty two squares the emperor had given the inventor four billion grains of rice. Up until this point the emperor could probably honour the agreement but as they head into the second half of the chessboard each subsequent doubling becomes ‘exponentially’ larger. The final square of the chessboard would require more rice grains than has ever been seen in the world before.

Back to Moore’s Law, it was identified in 1958, and using eighteen months as the doubling period, thirty two years later puts us in 2006.

We are already in the second half of the chessboard.

In conclusion, it is incredibly difficult for humans to predict the rate of technological change whilst Moore’s law continues to hold. Each successive doubling in capability offers a leap forward that very few people can quantify. Who would have thought that the nature of short distance travel would have been overhauled by Uber and on-demand scooter hire. Who could have predicted the rise of autonomous cars five years ago?

For the interested readers I’d strongly recommend two books: “The Second Machine Age” by Brynjolfsson and McAfee and “When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence” by Kurzweil for a much more detailed analysis of this phenomenon and its impact on technology.

Back to the next stage of the technical strategy…

Step 2 : Produce an insightful set of guidelines to keep business relevant

So if our starting point is that the amount of technological change is unfathomable then how is it possible to determine what change is required in order to keep up?

A wise man once told me that ‘the nature of change is changing’. Only a few years ago companies would be in a steady state, and in order to get to a target state would undergo a change process…

Once the change process had been executed, that company remains in the new steady ‘target’ state until a new target state is identified. Companies remained in steady state, until going through a change process and then reverted back to a steady state.

Whereas nowadays change is constant…

The increased pace of change requires that companies adapt more quickly, to be more agile.

We may not be able to decide up front exactly what changes we need to make to keep up, but we do know that we must do something and keep doing it.

Step 3 :  Condense all of the above into a concise, readable document

So accurate predictions of change are futile and as a result, we will find it very difficult to identify guidelines that will help us stay relevant to such change. Even assuming we can accurately predict change, and identify some controls the task of gathering our findings and explaining our views is significant and cannot be serviced by a few short notes. As with most documents they are, at best, accurate at the time of writing and, especially in the world of tech, out of date before they are finished.

Step 4 : Ensuring the document is read, digested and understood by all

Once we have documented the technical strategy we have to ensure it is read and understood by everyone in the company, basically a sales and marketing pitch for all our hard efforts. And if everyone has read, digested, understood and accepted the premise, then we start work on the next one…

However, at Naimuri, this is not how we like to do things.

Just because it is hard to do, that doesn’t negate the need. A good technical strategy directs learning, encourages conversation and debate and provides an overall guidance to the technical community of any company. As a technology consultancy, Naimuri is in need of a coherent strategy that will inform learning and increase collaboration, particularly across teams and projects.

As Technical Director of Naimuri I am certainly not clever enough to effectively undertake the tasks outlined earlier, all on my own. At Naimuri we absolutely believe in everyone having a voice and therefore have introduced the concept of technical communities to represent key technical areas important to our business. A community provides an outlet by which technical ideas and knowledge can flow around the company; forums for support in technical decision making; guidance on what training is available and how to access it.  At Naimuri we have introduced the following Communities:

• Programming Languages : how stuff gets written, e.g. Java, Python, Functional vs OO
• Data Storage : where and how stuff gets stored, e.g. Oracle or Elastic
• Platforms : where stuff gets run, e.g. AWS, containers, serverless etc…
• Tools : stuff that allows teams to do their jobs more easily, e.g. messaging, gitlab
• Techniques : how people do stuff, e.g. contract driven testing

The communities are a mix of experience: those that bring years of experience trialling new tools and techniques combined with those eager to learn more. Community members come together to share ways of working, ideas, technologies and tools for the benefit of others.

For example Wakelets has proven to be a popular means of sharing content from across the web, and we now use this to share our preferred reading material and the communities have even spawned the Cinema club where we broadcast interesting webinars and videos to be enjoyed as a group. Our technical strategy is produced by our people, for our people.

The communities are a realisation of many of our core values…

Communication and collaboration is vital to the success of any organisation. As the great systems thinker, Peter Senge, once said

“at its essence, every organisation is a product of how its members think and interact”.

At Naimuri we want to bake the product of thought and interaction into our structure, processes, and practices. A prime example of this is our technical strategy, it brings together our people to continuously share and evolve our technical thinking whilst embracing a constant state of change.

The communities are a recent addition to ways of working within Naimuri and I am excited about the promise they show to help us collaborate in our mission to help revolutionise national security, intelligence and law enforcement through the use of technology.