A few things have caught my eye over the past few weeks. First, the publication of The Big Con by Mariana Mazzucato, where she makes the point that public authorities have become infantilised by dependence on consultants, leaving them unable to innovate (or even operate) on their own. Second, some of the more thoughtful analyses of the Ukraine conflict have highlighted the extent to which the ability to manage and exploit information is the critical difference, and not just in the ethereal realm of cyber warfare, but also in the world of blood, earth and iron. Third, the much heralded launch of ChatGPT, the first tech truly to give white collar workers the heebie-geebies.
In my world of enterprise IT, I am struck by how blighted my clients are with a particular form of this dependency so colourfully described by Mazzucato: they believe that they cannot survive without the constant support of another type of external specialist, the IT department. As a soldier (years ago!), I started in the world of paper files. There was a file for everything important and common across the unit, and a settled (internal) group responsible for their upkeep. Thus, continuity and the ability to find things I wasn't looking for: as a newbie Operations Officer, I could unearth not only the documents relating to previous operations, but all the messages sent and received by my predecessors.
Fast forward to the "improvements" brought by personal email inboxes, where the shared reality of the filing cabinet was replaced with an atomised shambles of point to point messages. Not only is this new tech worse that what it replaced (although it felt whizzy and modern), it was so flaky that it needed a specialist team to manage. Soon not only the tools, but the information itself gets put in the hands of people who, whilst being able to write code, have neither the skills nor the mandate to exploit this lifeblood of the organisation. And, instead of thinking strategically about their information, organisations descended into a language of "project deliverables", "tech packages", thinking that the action of apportioning a budget to something is the same as addressing a problem.
The interesting thing is that tech has evolved to a point where it no longer needs the constant intermediation of people for whom Star Wars is the last word in culture. Whisper it quietly, but the WFH revolution showed how employees could have a direct relationship with their organisation's information, often using their own kit. The much-feared avalanche of cyber intrusions did not transpire in this scandalously unfettered world: quite the reverse, where the damage was actually in systems that remained on premise, under the loving care of the network guys. So what? With the tech taken care of (“as a service”, as they say), then perhaps organisations can regain control of their own information, understanding their digital heartbeat so that they can respond as it changes.
And how important is that in Ukraine. I have worked with many Ukrainian organisations before the war, and was impressed by how they got it: sort the disparate data, store it in proper relation to each other, and exploit the insights. Works just as well interdicting a column of Russian tanks as it did analysing bank transaction flows. Sadly leveraging native UK skills would result in what The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy retold: it would be fine if a perm or a meeting was needed, but bugger all else.
…which brings us to ChatGPT. If all you do is have meetings and write narrative messages, or perhaps really push the boat out and use excel to list things, then look out. AI will always do this sort of thing better. To survive, (or at least to earn a human wage), you’ll need to do more than express a few nice words: you need to be able to inspire, to disagree with courage and tact, to build alliances and actually do something. Oh, and speak digital, the language of the machines. Sort, store, exploit.