Talking with... Jonny Mallabar, Head of Architecture at ACCA

Speaker A: Hey everyone, it's Michael M. Fair from BIT here. Welcome to another episode of Talking with Tech Leaders. Today I'm joined by Johnny Malabar, head of Architecture design and planning at the ACCA. In part one we talk through Johnny's career. Uh, part two, optimizing architecture teams for a platform and SaaS world. Johnny shares lots of examples on how he's optimized teams and how that's an impact on organizations. The balance for skills versus general knowledge and architecture team challenges for scaling, how you should address them. Uh, looking at maintaining agility and flexibility in the team and how to measure the success and effectiveness of your architecture team. Uh, really insightful episode. Very interesting guest, Johnny. Um, but yeah, ah, I hope you enjoy the episode as much as I did recording it. And here we go. Hi, uh, everyone, it's Michael Fair from BIT here and welcome to another episode of Talking with Tech Leaders. Uh, today we're joined by Johnny Malabar, head of Architecture planning and Design at the acca. How are you, Johnny?

Speaker B: Well, very well, thanks Michael. Yes, pleased to be here.

Speaker A: Glad to hear it. Awesome. No, thanks very much for the time. Do appreciate it. And today on this episode we're going to be part two. The theme is optimizing architecture teams for a platform and SaaS World. And obviously who better to speak than yourself as the head of architecture design Planet acca. Obviously you've got a lot of experience, um, and technical development, corporate strategy, leadership. And you've led teams at Harmonic, HP Cassidy as well as consulting with organizations like kind of Serco in the uk, the Ministry of Education in Saudi Arabia. I look forward to unpacking m that and obviously a lot of experience. You've kind of got their lies in delivering business value through systems thinking, enterprise architecture and aligning against corporate strategy and um, the kind of business model that company's going with. We usually start these off at the very beginning and it's usually kind of some form of academia.

Speaker B: Oh, academia. Going back a little while. Uh, actually I go a tiny bit further back if I'm being honest, because I didn't, didn't enjoy school much. So I left at 16 and it took m me a little while to go to college and uh, I kind of, uh, did all sorts of things but focused on outdoor sports, things like that. As a lumberjack for a while, you know, did, yeah, uh, conservation work and all this kind of stuff. And I eventually made it to college in my uh, mid, well early mid 20s. But I studied ecology so my first degree is in ecology. And then I went on, did A master's in uh, in genetics. So nothing to do with tech in the US space. And uh, then I had a short career working with people like Kew Gardens and uh, Natural History Museum in London and doing kind of a survey work for British Wetland, British Wildlife Trust and things like that. So very different. Different, uh, starts to a lot of people in the tech world. But uh, I kind of crossed over as I kind of moved into my kind of late 20s and that is didn't um, get qualified in tech, but kind of um, just kind of crossed over on a opportunistic basis because it had a lucky entry.

Speaker A: Interesting. Yeah. What a kind of beginning. I mean was there an interest in technology at the start that just didn't kind of really grab your attention? It was more ecology, the environment that grabbed your attention at the start. What was the kind of drivers then?

Speaker B: Well, it was the uh. I thought I'd be having a career in ecology.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: And uh, the environment. And I think it was uh. I've got a, a couple brothers, but one of my brothers was always into tech and I just saw it as a gaming thing. I didn't take it any further. But kind of back in the kind of 80s, uh, he would be sitting there coding away and I'd just play the games and go and do something else kind of thing. So it was always in the house, but it wasn't really m in my blood, you know. And uh, what basically happened was uh. I just remember kind of in my late 20s sitting outside back at my mum's house with a brother, just talking about what we were both doing. And the work I'd been doing in the kind of ecology and environment space had morphed into a awful lot of database work. And I was helping people there. So uh, I kind of had a natural aptitude towards helping people with kind of a plant recording and environmental analysis and things like that. And uh, when we discussed what he was doing in a startup in London and what I was doing, there's a lot of similarities. And so uh, he got me an interview and uh, from there I kind of made that crossover from the world of ecology to the world of a, I guess a London startup working in networking sphere.

Speaker A: Yeah, that's really interesting. It just shows you that your job title doesn't have to say, you know, developer, architect or systems analyst or anything to start because the role you were doing in the environment, you know, like working with databases, recording data, uh, doing some analytics on it, I'm sure. I mean, was that the kind of sliding Door moment for you then where you were kind of tech and give

Speaker B: it a try or it absolutely was because I remember at the time I very nearly, very nearly left again in the first six months because I was. Oh yeah, well I moved over uh, into a help desk role. And uh, this is a company called Micromuse, which is uh, now owned by IBM. And uh, I was picking up the phones and we were kind of. We basically sold software to manage large telco networks back in, back in that period. And so I'd have people talking to me about from AT&T, from BT saying kind of their system's not working properly, it's not recording this, that and other. And I had a really steep learning curve. But as I kind of climbed that learning curve I found that I really started enjoying myself and with my communists. I did spend five years in uh, various help desk capacities. But what was quite nice there was um, I ended up running what was a global escalation team. And so we basically any deal over like 100k we may get involved in if it wasn't going well. And so we'd help with all the deals. So it got a very, very good commercial edge and also kind of got me traveling around the world, you know, so I could set up an office in uh, Dallas, in America, you know. And uh, uh, went out to uh, Japan. And it's kind of just lots and lots of travel and it's just really exciting, you know, for a young man to kind of suddenly make that move from slightly sleepy ecology, you know, just kind of wanting around the implant surveys to suddenly I'm flying around in business class, uh, when I got lucky, business class anyway, but kind of. Yeah, exactly. You know, very different environment.

Speaker A: I've always wanted to go to Japan and I mean what age were you when you went there when this all happened?

Speaker B: I would have been about 30. Uh, one I guess.

Speaker A: That's awesome.

Speaker B: 31, 32.

Speaker A: But yeah, what an opportunity.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, uh, it's very uh, it's very high fueled. I think that's kind of why I left that company in the end because it was um, everything was very deal focused. And you've always kind of essentially you run an escalation team. All you deal with is the hardest problems and very rewarding. You get that instant feedback. But if you want to work on more strategic longer term things, you don't really get the opportunity M. It's like

Speaker A: fast, effective, get it done. And it's not. There's a breather in between the next ones. Here you're just kind of constantly in that fast state. I can imagine it's fun to start. Well, exciting, but yeah, I can imagine over time. Hm.

Speaker B: Yeah. You kind of, you want to move on in time. Yeah.

Speaker A: Mhm. Yeah. Not completely. And what was like, I suppose at that age, kind of go to Japan or you know, Dallas, Texas and stuff like that and you're learning about different cultures, the way people work, different companies operate, culture values, all that kind of stuff. Was that quite insightful to learn about early on?

Speaker B: It was because it's a, it's very different in these different countries. You don't realize even how different the uh, American culture is to the British, you know, until you actually go there and work there for a little while. And I do, I do remember a very strange episode in Japan where I was uh, I was there. We were basically taking in turns being uh, I wouldn't uh, care what word I use here. We were encouraged not to leave until the problem was fixed. And so you couldn't kind of get out. You couldn't really commercially leave until somebody else went and joined you and then you could kind of then go back home. And it got into this very strange situation where uh, because we were reliant on the dev organization London to fix things, people go out there for a bit of a holiday because you needed a face of the company so you could go out as a face of the company, keep the customer happy because they always wanted somebody on site. But uh, yeah, just culturally it got quite strange. Uh, boardrooms are different, very hierarchical, you know, compared to what we're used to. Especially if you go one week, you're dealing with a board in America and then you go to a board in Japan and whether things have got more similar now that maybe to an extent, but at the time it was very uh, a much more formal and hierarchical environment.

Speaker A: Mhm. That's really strange. I mean I read something, I watched a video. Probably I'm going to lie on my Instagram or TikTok or something where in Japan if you're doing a presentation and at the end of it if you ask anyone's got questions, nobody'll put their hand up. But what you'll notice is people will look uh, at you if they've got a question. And I thought that was really strange. And if you've not got a question, they'll look away kind of thing. I thought, oh, just different cultures and way things were, isn't it?

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah.

Speaker A: Um, oh, cool. I um, mean, so you're getting your kind of Teeth cut. You're getting that experience, you're traveling about the world. What was next on your journey?

Speaker B: Well, I spent about five years uh, with micromuse and then uh, I moved on to working with the large system integrators. So at the time if you think it's people like uh, eads, eds, hp, like EDS was purchased by HP and then that's now become DXC in kind of today's world. But it was uh, I kind of called them the Blair kind of huge IT projects. At the time. It's like had this huge NHS project which I didn't work on. But one I did spend on and off about 10 years working on was one called uh, the III, the Defense Infrastructure Initiative. I think it's four and a half billion pound project and it's just. Yeah, the scale is. I think that's the first time I understood what architecture was because up until that point I could design a system and I'd do it with a couple pages of notes to hand over to somebody. It might be a really good system, but uh, it was a little bit more cowboyish. You made it work and then you were back on your way again. And uh, it was working on kind of uh, a DII where you'd have like kind of 600 highly skilled engineers. And the CTO office was uh. I think it was 60 people worked into the CTO office. And so the scale is huge.

Speaker A: Yeah, even like you know, like the change process, like security as well and making sure that everything's, you know, like that sounds mind boggling. And what you kind of doing within that organization over the 10 years where you get really involved in the architecture and map it out.

Speaker B: Yeah, well I started off as a uh. If you think that my background in the tech world anyway was in uh, network management. And the company I was working with, it expanded into kind of enterprise system management. So we could manage any endpoint, you know, and uh, from a kind of monitoring and security perspective. And so I was in there as a uh, what we called a system architect. And so I was designing the architecture to monitor all the endpoints and kind uh, of do all the alerting on security alerting. And uh, it's just really big Michael, because I think there's 300,000 users. It was the biggest private network in Europe. It's like everything mod, which was not kind of a, kind of what we call Battlespace. So it was everything which was for running this huge kind of m kind of organization, which is Ministry of Defense.

Speaker A: Was there kind of Any pivotal moment that's, that's 10 years. So it's kind of obviously enjoyed you know what you were doing there and can obviously work on that kind of program project. All those different integrators. Was there any kind of big breaks you had or defining projects? I mean that's quite the final one I'm sure. Was there any others?

Speaker B: Well there's certain ones sticking stick in the mind which are quite uh, unusual. M Myself I went on a bit of a journey. Uh, I didn't spend the full 10 years. I went and did another project which uh, we may touch on but it was uh little challenges which were quite unique is uh, like paying a pension to a Gurkha in the pool. You had to design a system to make sure that somebody in a hut, in a kind of uh, British armed representative could make sure the people were still alive, get a pension sent out and kind of all this kind of just really nitty gritty enterprise stuff which you just don't think of in the complexity of doing that is quite kind of quite surprising. Back in 2005, 2006, you know, which is a period we're talking about and then other uh, projects which are very interesting was deploying into kind of the, I guess the field based systems like kind of so that a uh, soldier in deployed in Afghanistan could book his holiday, you know or book a dentist, you know. So it's, it's really that stuff which keeps people, keeps the whole thing working, you know. And so yeah.

Speaker A: You think about stuff like that do you?

Speaker B: Yeah, no, no. Everyone uh, everyone's employed is so to speak and they have wives, families and uh, as they obviously do. But yeah, it's a practicality to all of that.

Speaker A: Well completely. And I mean when you're looking at these applications that have to architectures or systems that have to kind of pass data through different countries, if it's pensions obviously compliance that are involved in that and that's you know be sent in a certain form or data secured in this manner. Imagine it does get fairly complicated.

Speaker B: Yeah and then you're also working with allies and things like that. So you've kind of got that kind of between the different uh, kind of UK allies. And so yeah it gets uh, a very complex world. But what was very good about it from a learning point of view is it's all also very organized world in a different, in a different way to a lot of commercial environments are uh. And a lot of things we deal with now because there's obviously its defense, there's A hierarchy to the way it operates. You know, uh, it's very contractually managed, which was difficult. And it was also at that period where we, I guess from my experience we moved from kind of a waterfall, very contractual delivery approach to an agile delivery approach to commercial off the shelf software being purchased and figured figuring out that you had to kind of. It didn't quite meet your needs. And so you're kind of bringing all this stuff together at a huge scale with thousands of people working on it, you know, and it's uh, yeah, the complexity. We once uh, printed out a list of all the work, all the different kind of projects running with their dependencies and you could wallpaper a room with it. You know, there's just so much going on you couldn't fit it in your head.

Speaker A: Yeah, I can, I can imagine I'd want to try and have like a picture in my head of everything connects together. I can imagine that just feel absolutely impossible. And I mean, I suppose then you know, when you're kind of doing that kind of work, I think companies try and move to more modular now so that if something fails or falls over, it's not like a domino effect. Was it like that then or was everything kind of getting knitted together more or was it still the kind of same thinking around it?

Speaker B: No. Well, because of uh, because of the scale in my space anyway. And I think kind of, I think it's true as it scaled out, it was just inherently modular because that's the way defense uh, organizations think. And so it's all kind of n +1. You know, it's like kind of you may scale out to multiple kind of army bases or multiple kind of submarines and ships. You could just keep adding on to it as needed, you know. And so you also needed uh, especially with the kind of void environment, you needed to have that independence of operation. So if you lost uh, connectivity for whatever reason, then when you kind of regain connectivity you can start syncing things up and uh, of anything we recover. And so yeah, it was inherently built in. We're probably at more the uh, the early age, the early stage of it. It didn't have the elasticity which you find now in cloud systems by any means. But uh, it was heading that direction.

Speaker A: And do you see much in terms of like cyber security and things like that or like having like zero trust networks and things during that time?

Speaker B: No, not, not within that space that started to come in. But when I was working there it was all kind of perimeter controlled and um, everything was very hard locked Down. So it wasn't that zero trust model that hadn't come in yet?

Speaker A: No, no. Right. Cool. That's interesting. I just like to understand it's always hard to perception of it kind of that time, you know what it was like, what was after that? Then what was your kind of next move? Where did you go?

Speaker B: Well, after I left uh, after basically left HP in about 2015 and then I did a couple of uh, kind of contracts thinking what to do. And uh, one of those was uh, the Ministry of Saudi Ministry of Education, Saudi Arabia, which is fairly small contract but it was quite good fun because uh, again culturally very different, you know, and we're operating up to a deputy uh, minister level in the Saudi government. And so very formal and uh, little things like kind of when a meeting went well, you'd be served tea afterwards. If the meeting went bad, you didn't get the tea.

Speaker A: You just like very classically.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: I mean was it like a recruiter, say like, you know, Johnny, how'd you were looking? You know, do you fancy going to Saudi Arabia? Like did that kind of come out?

Speaker B: That was exactly what happened. I got a phone call out of blue and there's uh, me and this other guy and we got this uh, this uh, gig which was looking at. Basically they had merged their IT, uh departments between the, I guess the secondary and primary education into uh, the higher education. And so they're taking two very distinct organizations serving very different people and they've merged the IT infrastructure together, the IT management and by that the infrastructure together. And so we were looking at the target operating model and what we could do to improve it. So it's very much looking at it from a uh, I guess an IT operating model perspective.

Speaker A: Mhm. And just curiosity. What was their commodity? I mean we kind of just like I just want to say, but I don't know if this is just because I think you see in the previous news and things like did you feel safe when you were there? Was it like quite a nice relaxed environment? Was it high tensions? What was it kind of like.

Speaker B: Well it's funny you say that because yes, I felt absolutely safe out there. And uh, I had been out to the Middle East a couple of times over the years and uh, never had a bad experience. But saying that I do remember, uh, kind of because there was the ongoing kind of conflict with Yemen that was going on rambling along back there. And I do remember hearing about the odd rocket hitting the edge of Riyadh and things like that, you know, and not nobody getting Hurt particularly or anything like that. But just these odd things going on and you kind of. Yeah, it, you'd notice it a lot more if it's happening in the uk, put it that way. But you're kind of out there and you're in a five star hotel or whatever and uh, it's kind of just the second hand or third hand, you know, kind of goes around on the uh, I don't know, the WhatsApp messages between people and things like that. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker A: And did you find that with contractor communities and places like that that you kind of got a bit of community with the different contractors and things and go for dinner together and things like that and.

Speaker B: Yeah, well you get it because it's culturally so different. You, you don't. You are an expat out there, you know, and you're kind of uh, you, you, you're. You don't get a chance to integrate in the same way. M. You may have. And so you do, you do kind of very much uh, interact with other contractors and other international workers who may be kind of from. They're uh, not necessarily from Europe or uk they could e. Be from India or Philippines or places like that. But you get a kind of multicultural group of people who are kind of working there kind of on a contract basis or employed out there.

Speaker A: But.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: So next contract from there then were you kind of back into the UK

Speaker B: or you back into the uk? I did a short spell with a kind of company you probably know quite well as well, Carmack Fairies. And so I kind of had a short spell there which was quite fun and games and uh, I also uh, did a spell with where I, I might got the order slightly wrong here but with ACCA as well which is where I'm based. So that's how kind of we knew each other because I did a six month contract working, working in there back in 2015 and uh, I think contracting's kind of. It may have, it may have had its day in some regards but it's, it is good. But you don't have the same commitment to the organization and that's kind of. Or it's difficult to commit to the organization in the same way because you, you're not thinking there long term, um, or. And you're not thinking their career growth in the same way. But after I guess it'd be about a year and a half or so of contracting, I took a job with a company called Harmonic, which was a very, a company, a type of company I didn't know existed. If I'm being honest, when I joined them because uh, what they, they specialized in was called business winning, which is an interesting one. So they would help. They were based in the uh, kind of southwest of England, worked a lot with the big defense companies and that's kind of how we kind of knew each other because I'd heard of them before and from my time working in defence and uh, they basically helped the likes of Bowie, Lockheed Martin, Leonardo win these very large defense contracts. And so they had a specialized team who would help consume the kind of request for proposal, the RFP which came out. They'd pick it apart, they'd bring in the experts who maybe logistics for a helicopter or something like that, you know, because the kind of contracts are very long term maintenance contracts or engineering development contracts and they would put together a package so that that company was best placed to actually win the work and they may go and help on with delivering it which we did in some instances or it may just be then handed over to the winning company if they were successful. And so it's a very different world.

Speaker A: Yeah, I've worked with a company maybe similar to that before and the level of detail they go into, uh, when an RFP comes out, you know, when they. Are you answering the question and they break it down and it's like, you know, everything's perfectly laid out. You know. That is amazing. And I can imagine with defense contracts and things it's so meticulous that you get everything right.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, you kind of uh. The funny thing about some of the uh, in defense space your supply chain for maintaining say a military vehicle may need to expand out about 30 years which you just don't think about. Not like fast moving tech world, you know, like I'm doing the IT bit. I'm not a hard engineer in terms of a kind of mechanical engineering or anything. And it's just you don't think that way, you know, because it's uh, everything's obsolete in a couple of years. You know. You want a new phone every two years, don't you?

Speaker A: Yeah, it's a kind of rate of change just now, isn't it with the pace of it. I'm sure we'll get into some of that in this part two but yeah, it's just so quick, you know, hard to map it out. But it's really interesting that you kind of went to obviously ACCA first like at a contract basis and you know, you kind of seen the head of architecture role in the market and you know thought well I enjoyed that time and you're going to go back or what was the, what was that like for you?

Speaker B: Well, I had a bit of a gap in between. Uh, I joined ACCA in 2021. It was only three years ago now and uh, basically off the back of uh, working with Harmonic, I, I kind of took a bit of a break. I took a year out and I actually went away and um, I did a diploma in philosophy amongst other things but just took time to chill out and uh, I think I was a little bit burnt out from a, a very, a very busy time of uh. It's like if you remember pre covered people were always in offices. Like I, I was away every single week probably for about 10 years and back at the weekend. You know that's kind of what my life was. It was always on the road and then coming back and so I kind of took a chance to kind of relax a bit and I guess uh, chill out a little bit over uh, over night 2020 and then yeah the roll just came up at, at uh acca. It wasn't actually head of Architecture, it's joining the architecture team but after I joined the head of architecture kind of left soon, soon after I joined and I moved into that role.

Speaker A: You've been doing this position now for the last three years?

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah, about three years. Just over.

Speaker A: Awesome. And I know the ACC obviously have a kind of global presence and we're talking about kind of data in different regions and connections and protocols, controls. I mean because the ACC is like Europe Dinah.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, it's, it's an interesting, it's uh, we kind of joke. It's a uh, it's kind of a medium sized country with a multinational sized company. Problems and challenges. It operates kind of one uh, hundred eighty, I think it's one hundred eighty eight countries we operate in where you can do an ACCA qualification, you know. Yeah, it's, it's got a huge scale and it's got a lot of regional offices and we're kind of. Because as a, as an organization we're very focused on very value based and so we're, we, we see the uh, the growth and professionalism of the accountancy profession has been good for kind of global business and particularly good for developing countries and emerging economies and things. And so we have a very big presence in kind of the more I guess the developing world and the emerging economies.

Speaker A: Mhm. Yeah. I mean how do you kind of keep up to date with you know, tech I suppose even like legalities of it all? I'M sure there's a team people but that's a lot to keep an eye on in terms of the different countries and what they're doing and you know.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, it's, it's interesting because uh, when you're, when you're trying to say, if you think about say China market. Excuse me, but if you think about say China. So I think the interesting thing about uh, kind of that global footprint is you have uh, different technologies in different countries plus you have different legislation. And so if you think about China, which is 20% of our market in terms of students and members and there they use very different technologies. They really don't like email, everything's on the phone, everything's done over uh, a, uh, kind of WeChat and a host of other services. They can't have YouTube, they can't access YouTube because it's not present there. WhatsApp isn't present there. It's the things which we use in other parts of the world you can't use there. And plus you've got a very different language and culture and uh, also there's quite strict laws and quite strict regulations in terms of cross border data transfer. And so kind of do you have to put your systems into China to meet that or can you kind of have, have a global instance? Which is what we want from an efficiency perspective and IT kind of in terms of keeping abreast of it, um, in a way I gave up. I employed a Chinese enterprise architect to keep us abreast of what's going on. And so yeah, it was kind of getting just too hard. And so we've got a very small presence from an IT perspective in China. We've got quite a big um, sales, kind of what we call relationships team out there. But um, uh, we've got a couple people who are just dedicated for IT in China. One's a enterprise architect who, ah, a great lady called Amanda who works for me. Then there's another guy called Billy who uh, he manages the IT supply chain in China for us because it's kind of got a bit too hard to do remotely.

Speaker A: But yeah, that's awesome. I remember we're doing the, I think it was the website. I think we got a contract from the ACC and a Mandarin speaking tester and I was like, I'll give it a go. And we actually did, yeah, we did find someone. She was there for quite a while. But yeah, that's quite interesting when you get weird, wonderful jobs kind of coming through. I mean obviously you've spent A long time in technology, you know, in architecture, how have you kind of seen the role evolve over the years in terms of, you know, architect or being an architect?

Speaker B: I'd say it's changed a huge amount. And if you think about the job has changed as well. And so when I kind of, uh. Like I was talking about kind of my days in network management and then into kind, uh, of large enterprises in the kind of early part of the turn of the century, and then we built everything. You know, it's like we would be. You build a data center and you'd kind of rack it up and you go in there and you install the OS and you build the whole thing up and then you'd layer it. And uh, we also kind of, when we integrated, it was quite hard to integrate. You know, I'm not saying it's not hard now, but in a different way. Uh, you had APIs, but it was a lot more, kind of a lot more code and a lot more configuration. And so from an architectural perspective, you build in a lot more of the foundations. And if you kind of think of the journey we've gone on, where we've gone from kind of a kind of building from the TIN upwards, which is what we would do, we now kind of, uh, we moved into kind of infrastructure as a service with AWS and things, where it wasn't so much it was better, it's just. It was so convenient. You know, you went from kind of a month or two to get the kit in to where you could just turn it on in a couple of hours. And so you kind of went on that journey. Now you kind of start fast forwarding where depending on whether you're in a company selling software or you're in a company buying it, like the acca, you're kind of plumbing things together and you're working much more at a service level. And you may not know how the service you're configured is. You purchase is actually built. And you can kind of ask lots of questions, but they may not want to share with you and could be running on aws, could be running on Azure, depending on the criticality, you know, uh, uh, you'll kind of ask the questions, but you only find out so much because you might be buying it as a kind of a SaaS service, doing a specific thing for you. And um, really understanding it is quite difficult. So you kind of abstracted away from

Speaker A: it an event once, and One of the CCOs was talking about AWS and Azure and things, and I was like, why do you use two. Why don't you just use the one? And like, well, one, if they know that, then, you know, they might put my prices up. The other is obviously having that kind of, you know, shared risk if something happens to one of them. And I was like, that's so interesting. And you're saying, obviously if you use a SaaS service, they might just say it's the service and they'll actually tell you, you know, what's at the kind of back end of it. As long as they're providing, there's no downtime.

Speaker B: Yeah, well, you kind of, uh, you saw that recently, didn't you, of cloudstrike, where how many people were kind of. How many of those companies had had an outage? And luckily, Touchwood, we were, we were largely unaffected, but knew that cloud strike, they may not have even known it was part of their supply chain, you know, because it could have been a second or third vendor, uh, who's. Who's hosting something for a company which you're buying a core product from. And, uh, I think things have got, uh, things have got simpler on one level, but they become very opaque and you can't see into what's actually behind the services you're buying quite often.

Speaker A: I remember I did my work experience at Standard Life on Lothian Road. One of the days it was like coming to the data center, this big frozen room filled with racks and racks of servers and those guys changing blades and things like that. But you're seeing, you knew what was there. If that wasn't working, it was blinking. You know, they're changing this and, you know, patching stuff, etc. But now it's. People can be in their house and you can spin up computing power, storage, you know, within like a couple hours.

Speaker B: You know, I've got a friend who manages 3,000 servers from his house in, in Cape Town on a global basis. You know, just over. He uses, uh. What's it called? Uh, uh, sky. Not Skynet Starlink. Operates over Musk Starlink from South Africa. Yeah. Cape Town. A beautiful little house. And he manages 3,000 servers globally, you know, and, uh, been doing that for about five years. You know.

Speaker A: That's amazing. Elon Musk just sorting out. That's crazy. That's crazy. Um, is there any kind of setbacks or. I don't like that question, but any failures or anything you've kind of had that's been really challenging that you've kind of overcome? Can it junior career?

Speaker B: Uh, there's one project which, uh, I think we rescued Something out of it, which is actually a really interesting project which we did for uh, cidian, which is part of Airbus, this is an Airbus company, basically specialized in security space. And there's a project we were doing for the UK government called Fire Control. And basically it was building a mobilization system for any blue light service. So it's called, in this case it was the Fire Brigade. And it was consolidating the English fire brigade into three regions was plan at the time. And uh, fascinating project because uh, we had to kind of deal with uh, things such as uh, turning on a pelican cotton outside a fire station and then raising the fire station doors and uh, sending down secure codes to a pad in a fire engine so it could get into a secure building. All these kind of things need to be figured out. And uh, if there was a uh, fuel storage near a building and that had to appear on a map so that they knew there was a risk. Yeah, instant. And I think it was a, again it was one of these large uh, government contracts and we were just ahead of ourselves. We're trying too hard. Uh, everyone was over ambitious. And uh, this was before we all used Google Maps. This is about 2008, 2009. And uh, it was coming through. You're noticing that kind of Google Maps is better than what we were delivering. You know, even though we'd be using something kind of, which is proprietary and it was kind of robust in lots of ways. And eventually it kind of got into this kind of cost overrun, delay, confidence situation where when the coalition government came in about 2010, it was one of the projects which they axed upon coming in. And so immediately this huge project was shut down. And so that was a real, kind of a real disappointment because we've been working really hard to do something which felt pretty special at the time. And uh, so it's a massive setback and uh, an awful lot of people were let go and drifted off and do other projects and things. But what we did, which was kind of the interesting bit for me, kind of we should manage to salvage out of it, was we turned it into a reference uh, architecture on how to build these things. And so we kind of went back to what is really at the heart of a mobilization system. Whether that's for coast guards, fire engines, ambulances, police cars, what's really at the heart of that. And we turned that into a reference architecture which I uh, hope is still being used today in Cassidy. And it's like I'm not really involved with that company anymore, but it was being used then sell into lots of different other international company countries such as Switzerland, uh, for, I think it's Basel Ambulance Service. And uh, it was a kind of coast guard in Saudi Arabia and anywhere where uh, a kind of Cassidian had a contact. They then started trying to sell what was left in the service onwards. And the reference architecture kind of pulled something really meaningful out of it, which is good.

Speaker A: Yeah, it's awesome because you've got to work so hard on something and you've kind of like felt passionate about it given what is you're delivering. And then that's unfortunately happened, but not through. I mean it's kind of difficult, isn't it? All the enhancements, all the things, you know, that you could do. It'd be amazing for what you have to make it better. And it was really good that the company kind of thought, right, can we make this an opportunity? And then obviously started to kind of try Weller. So that's really awesome.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, it's good.

Speaker A: Is there any advice, I mean suppose going back through your career, is there any advice you would give to your kind of younger self starting out?

Speaker B: I think one thing which uh, I think I'd definitely say be more patient, don't be in such a hurry because I think kind of I was always, uh, it's very easy to always be chasing the promotion or chasing the next contract and things like that. And I think I would advise my former self to uh, slow down a little bit and enjoy where I am a bit more rather than thinking kind of after a year or two, oh, I should, I want to be in that role or kind of why is that person in charge of me? I want to be in charge of them. So slowing down a little bit. I think I could have definitely done that in my 30s, you know, would have been a good thing. But uh, you never quite. I think that would be my advice. Yeah, be a bit more patient.

Speaker A: That's really good advice. Especially with all the things on Instagram and TikTok and things like now for young people and they're driving these cars and doing these things and materialism and to get those things you need to get more money. And it's kind of like self repetitive and actually like the happiness is in, you know, the now, isn't it? Actually realizing what's there.

Speaker B: So it is. And I think kind of as you get ah, kind of a. As you kind of mature in life and you um, you kind of build up a broader network of colleagues and I think one Thing you don't realize when you're starting out in a career, quite often you still know the same people you start your career with in 20 years time, which is quite interesting. You know, it's like I still know the people from kind of when I worked for Mike muse back in 2000, you know, it was still that, that's, that's one of my biggest networks still, you know. And uh, you, you know, people who have uh, they just didn't move on, they just stayed and they've kind of climbed the rung, uh, kind of like IBM or something like that in a nice steady fashion, you know. And it's, it's a different, it's a different career and different sort, different careers suit different people. But um, I think yeah, just maybe taking stock of where you are rather than chasing the shiny is not a bad idea.

Speaker A: Yeah, ye really good advice. What you're saying there is kind of do keep in touch people that you worked with because Scotland's not a massive place, you know, so usually I'll bump into them again at some point.

Speaker B: No, I'm always surprised at that about how many uh, how many people worked with, uh, other people who, you know, even if you don't know them personally within kind of uh, one or two degrees of separation you will know somebody who they've worked with. But. Yeah, you do as well.

Speaker A: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, that comes in handy. Yes. So part two, optimizing architecture teams for a platform and SaaS world. What are the key factors to consider then when kind of optimizing an architecture team?

Speaker B: There's a few different angles on this and it's like with my role at acca, it's like myself as a uh, as an architect, I'm an enterprise architect. That's kind of where I've spent most of my kind of practicing career as opposed to a solution architecture and uh, so more thinking in terms of the uh, why we're doing things, how we align that against the business strategy, thinking about the organization as a whole rather than specific project solutions. Uh, so there's two elements. One is the enterprise, one is the solution, the project delivery. And what's changed is that the, when we were talking earlier on about uh, that move over my career from kind of building things from the ground up to kind of contracting for service, which is what we do now much more. So the role of the architect has changed a lot. And so whereby you'd have a lot of say, technical architects who could uh, put in the networks in the data centers for you, who could uh, kind of uh, calculate the compute needs and uh, ensure you had enough bandwidth or who could do the software engineering and the kind of deep integration those roles are becoming. Uh, they're still there but they're more within the sell side. They're in the vendors who are building the stuff. So kind of the people who are working for AWS and things. And whilst when you're in kind of the world of ACCA or kind of a mid sized company who's consuming service of others, you're not building as much as you used to, you're more kind of assessing products. And so the role of the solution architect I'd say has changed to where they're more product focused and um, kind of if you're really specializing and focusing on a particular organization, a particular seller like maybe AWS or the Microsoft world, then you really need that deep expertise in that one company and you're less of a generalist. Uh, you're more closely tied I think than ways to, to the platform Service or the SaaS service. And that's kind of made um, the roles a little bit different shaped because as a solution architect you're sitting between the functional expert and the kind of the business itself.

Speaker A: Mhm.

Speaker B: Because the business has been sold to, the technology is much more democratized now. It's not all within the realms of it. And uh, there's a lot of business technologists who will know, know more about the actual product they wanted to purchase than perhaps you do in it, even though it's like it's technology product. And so what you, you've effectively got into this situation where your architectural team may not be the, the expert in the way it once was and it's still there from a security perspective. It's still there from networking and the non functional side but you're relying and you're kind of co creating and collaborating much more with the business. And I think that's one of the things which has changed. And then your enterprise teams I think have had to kind of step up further because they're not kind of, they're not order taking in the same way where you're kind of saying let's go and talk to the business, we'll capture their requirements, we'll take it away or knock it up and we'll go back with a nice solution for them. They may not have the patience for that now because they're expecting it to be. They're being told by the vendors, oh we can just turn that on, you know, or we could do that Very quickly do this, that other. And so you.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah.

Speaker B: The pace of change is much quicker. Patience uh, is shorter. And so when you look thinking about your architectural teams in that environment, you need a lot more, you need a lot more soft skills in the team.

Speaker A: Mhm.

Speaker B: And you need to kind of keep an eye on the expertise in the products. It's a different way because you always had those close but you'd always have someone who is say I uh, know VMware Architect. Those roles have always been there but today it's kind of, you've climbed up into oh, you need to be uh, a power platform expert or you need to kind of understand kind of uh, the uh, information management software and things like Purview. You know, you've got to kind of

Speaker A: have uh, that it's more niche, kind

Speaker B: of like, well it's more niche and there's more of these niches which makes,

Speaker A: even thinking of what you're saying there, I'm like there's so many uh, you'll

Speaker B: see that for your recruitment, won't you?

Speaker A: We want ServiceNow, we want the power apps platform. Want them to have worked with Flow or do the Microsoft fabric platform and know all this and you're just like it's not easy.

Speaker B: Yeah. And it can be quite, quite intimidating from a uh, from a architectural perspective where you come from, background where you were the expert on a lot of this stuff, you could understand it all and now you kind of got to take a step back into what's my real business need here and then start thinking about it in those terms and you have quite a reliance on the vendor in a different way, you know. And in the process it's really changed the shape of uh, it. Well it's like my old company with hp, which is now part of dxc, these businesses have seem to shrunk because uh, they're not doing the integration in the same way. They're not managing the services in the way, same way because uh, the services can manage themselves to an extent. And so what you lay on top is quite different to what you used to, you know. And uh, so the work, the world's, world's definitely changed. And when you start thinking about how do you, how do you construct an architectural team there, you're kind of always a bit torn because you go out to market to recruit and you kind of think well I need these three specialisms. But then I'm really getting a platform architect and is that what I want? And how do I then handle this random stuff coming from left field, you know. And so you kind of end up with this balance where you will deliberately focus on having people who are experts in certain technologies. And then you need one or two generalists who can pick up the bits around the edges, who can turn their hands to many things. They still have value but you don't have quite so many within the teams.

Speaker A: Mhm. I suppose it's important as well because they're not off put by going to learn a bit more about power apps. Obviously quite a broad area to learn about but they'll go and look into this or that or this area of it and come back with this is what I think, I suppose can be quite useful. Is it difficult to look at kind of like you've got your current team and so you moved into a new company and there's a team set up there and you've got to go and find out their current capabilities. I mean CVs you know, great. But uh, that's what it takes. It's quite challenging to find out their breadth of knowledge, what they know, what they don't know so that you can understand where your gaps are or what you need to bring in.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah it is because CVS get you so far. But uh, a CV is always the best image of someone by its nature, you know and, and then sometimes you're interviewing and you're trying to find someone who's got more in depth knowledge than you have and that makes it quite challenging because you can't, you can only test so far. Uh, but uh, I think the two things I, I always uh, I place a lot of emphasis on uh, uh, fit. You know, intelligence and fit are the two things which I'm uh, I place most emphasis on. And uh, that kind of goes, that was something I learned very early on in my career with um, back again lessons you learn, mentors you have in your early career. But in my communities where they, they really did, hiring me as an oncologist was by no means an exception. You know it's like I can remember the head of field sales in uh, Australia I think was hired from, he was working in the deletescent when he was hired. You know when people used to buy their lunch, it was kind of their go out, meet people, get to know them, go well you're a good fit. You know, come and have an interview. If you did well then they would train you up in things. You know, you really see the power of that. When you see people get quite senior in an organization who don't come from A formal background. And so though we don't, I don't go to that, that degree when I'm hiring uh, at the moment I do do, I'll listen to people think well do I like this person on a, on a business level, you know, can I see them fitting in? Can I see them fitting in within the wider group? Because anything we do is uh, I feel very strongly. I'm not after heroes. Uh, I'm not after individuals who kind of be just uh, the big brain who do it all themselves. I'm always after a team player and somebody who can augment the team we have already.

Speaker A: I can't remember what the guy is called in the Phoenix Project, the book, but there's that guy that's there and everything just goes to him and he's always solving things and he obviously loves it, you know, or you know, that kind of guy, that gal girl. Um, but yeah, it's interesting because obviously try to pull more stuff off because it's all that knowledge is sitting with one person. If you keep doing it then there's that risk there and you know, making sure it's going to spread across a team. And that's the point of a team, isn't it?

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And not having those single points of failure, you know, those bottlenecks which slow you down. But yeah, mhm, completely.

Speaker A: Yeah. I mean what about. I know obviously the ACC are fully remote then I suppose it'd be interesting to would you spent your career obviously travel at different places but you probably had teams where you were in the office quite a bit doing face to face. Like how have you found the kind of remote aspect of managing a team and working with a team?

Speaker B: It's in one way it's something I've always done but never on a continual basis. And I think that that's a big difference. So I've got uh, like overall it's like my actual area at work. I've got the enterprise architects, solution architects. I've got performance and uh, planning for the IT department in there as well and business partnering. And so that's a team of about 14, 15 people and I don't know, we meet up. There's some people who've been working for me who have only met in the flesh two or three times in the last two years. Uh, you know it's kind of that light. Yeah because we are remote first company and so we tend to get together for specific reasons if we're having a workshop or something like that. And so the whole experience is Remote which although I used to do conference calls, I've done them all my career. It's not like that now. It's kind of like uh, I'm remote. They're remote. If you go into the DCA office, there's. You won't really see anyone unless you've organized to get together with other people. You know, that's how remote we are. And it does, it changes things. It does get us to that point I think where there's no presenteeism anymore. It's all about output. Um, you know, because that's the way uh, Like I, that we always want. We've always geared towards that as an industry saying that's much more important to be output measured rather than to be kind um, of presenteeism and just kind of being in the office just to prove you're doing the work. And that's been a good change I think.

Speaker A: Uh, I totally agree. What was it? The green dot of availability always been online. And it's the. Was it a, is it asynchronous way of consuming information? This is the meeting. But it can be recorded and digested at a time when suitable. If it is something you want to collaborate on, you know, great. But if you're just shared information, you need to bring 10 people on to tell them something for an hour when they might only need five minutes of that information of this bit or that. But you know, it's.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Mhm. That's interesting.

Speaker B: I think we, I think we struggle though with uh. I think as an, as an industry we've struggled to get to that point where um, it's not just try and be as if you're in the office when you're not. And so it's just lots and lots of meetings, you know, kind of a lot of zoom calls and things like this uh, thing in my role anyway it's an awful lot of uh, kind of meetings and trying to replicate how it would be in the office. And I think that that's something which I do, I do miss you know, because uh, when I. People used to say kind of I uh, was you work in it, so you sit in front of the keyboard tapping all day. That's. That was never my role. You know, I was just walking between buildings and meetings and going to talk to people and uh, obviously we all do the kind of a bit of design, a bit of architect, bit of email. But I was um, half a day, I wouldn't be at my desk, you know, kind of. It definitely the last half of my careers to date. Whilst nowadays it's all in front of the desk and I find that hustle then. Yeah. And you don't get the uh, the kind of water cooler as they say, conversations. You don't get those serendipitous creative moments in the same way because it's, it's kind of tends to be scheduled time.

Speaker A: Stevie did what?

Speaker B: Where does he go running after him? Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker A: No, I totally mean. Yeah, it's definitely that it's a balance in that culture. But then I suppose on the kind of the positive or advantageous side as it is, I mean we do a lot of reports every year on you know, candidates and what they want in the market and you know, remote working sits right up there. A lot of the big FS companies are you know, two or three days now back in the office and ah, that can be detrimental towards the kind of people that they get. Although you know, there's plenty of people out there that want to be in an office and stuff. But I'm sure you'll see a lot of applications with people that are quite keen on that for the remote, you know, work life balance kind of model.

Speaker B: Uh, I do think that that does uh, it does track people to the acca, you know, because there isn't a, uh. We are remote first and I was at a uh, conference on digital workplace uh, about a month ago now and it's quite interesting because I attended a roundtable discussion on meetings and how we're doing meetings within the workplace and there's probably 20 people in the room from various uh, blue chip companies. I was the only person who came from a company which was fully remote and remote first. Everybody. A lot of conversations about how do you manage hybrid meetings, how do you manage kind of uh, five people in a meeting room, one person from home. Is those kind of uh, kind of challenges around the cameras, the meeting space and all of this. And for me we're pretty much nearly always all remote, you know, fly the flag.

Speaker A: Well then do you go in and say, let me tell you something.

Speaker B: Yeah, well I kind of say people quite surprised by it, you know. And uh, there's also. Which is counterintuitive to someone with my background and kind of uh, from the journey I've been on. There's increasing evidence that kind of remote collaboration leads to greater creativity.

Speaker A: Mhm.

Speaker B: And it's kind of, there's, there's a degree of psychology, various psychological studies behind it, but one of them is that people who may be kind of a bit more kind of introvert don't contribute well in a meeting space which is physical in the same way to do remote. And also those dominant voices dominate more in a physical breath space than they do in a kind of remote space where it can be kind of hands up and things like this. And so there are, it seems to be, there are actual proper kind of advantages if you want to brainstorm something or solve a problem to doing it where everyone is remote, which I would have always said get in a room with whiteboard until I started seeing this evidence.

Speaker A: That's so interesting. Yeah, Introvert and also like Neurodiverse because if you say the meetings for I want to meet on Tuesday and this is the problem, we're talking about having that information ahead of time. You know, they're brainstorming. They usually find that there might be a bit more creativity there and they might not, as you say, speak up because of a more dominant voice in the room or they're a bit more hesitant because of the environment or so. Yeah, there's a lot, a lot there. Yeah, I agree. Uh, yeah, that's interesting. How um, do you think. I wouldn't say five to 10 years because things are mental just now, AI and, and all the automation chat that's going on. But what do you think architecture will look like or kind of like working with platforms and SaaS industry in the next three, five years?

Speaker B: Well, I think. Well, what's beginning to come across my horizon in this space, which I think is strange enough, uh, you'll see why this appeals to me so much is that it's a concept of ecosystem architecture kind of going back to my root here. But things have got so, so complicated that they can't really be understood. And by kind of, they can be understood in small chunks, they can't be understood as a whole. And by that I mean kind of the interconnectedness of these huge tech companies we're reliant on. And then all of the services layered on top of the that and each, each piece will have a kind of degree of, kind of a resilience or it will have a, a certain uptime and it'll work in a certain way. And we don't really know how. When you lay this all up, it actually works. It kind of just does seem to work. Then something like cloud strike happens.

Speaker A: Mhm.

Speaker B: And the whole thing goes down in kind of various organizations. Um, Microsoft, I think Microsoft zones were kind of flipping and flopping until they kind of figured it out, you know, and this to me is where it starts getting quite interesting. Because you're no longer living in isolation as a company or as an architecture. You're living in a ecosystem of other architectures and other companies. And so it kind of gets you back to that concept of where you really need to start thinking in big systems. And that system thinking element. How that plays through over the next few years I think is going to be quite interesting because we assume it's all going to work well together. We kind of think of all these different services and all these different uh, infrastructure providers and everything will layer on quite neatly and you pick up where things may creak and things may break. And there was an interesting report just the other day on um, AI and it was about using synthetic artificial Data to train AI models. And it just goes horribly wrong within about 10 iterations to where they start talking gibberish. And it's because of the fact that they're not using human created data, they were using artificially created data which they kind of then started breaking the models. And it's a paper ah, in Nature which was uh, going into this and the fear being that the first move advantage could be really strong here because once you've consumed and you've kind of worked a. For the human creative web content, if you start consuming AI gen, AI generated web content, it's not quite the same for the models it seems they seem to struggle with it and that's a totally unintended consequence there. You know, people thought well we could synthetically create all this data and train a model on it. And uh, it seems there's the challenges there. And uh, I kind of half wonder whether we're going to end up with a. Don't know if you ever read a uh, the Black Swan book by Nazim Talib about kind of the. There are black swans but from a probability perspective there shouldn't be any. And these long deep kind of events which will be uh, destabilizing. And I think that's what might start coming out of the tech world where we think we've got it all figured out. We think it's all kind of highly reliable. But as more and more gets kind of combined together, the layering on of all these different services, you can't predict them in the same way. And I think that's where the challenge will be. And how do you manage that risk?

Speaker A: Yeah, completely. It's crazy the AI stuff. I think that you'd be really careful. I think there's teams of people that combing through data on the web so they don't feed it Things that are on the web that shouldn't be on the web, like thousands, thousands of people. But you're, I can imagine like you're saying everything gets too integrated or layered together. Difficult to kind of separate, separate out, you know, different parts of it. And then when you were saying that, I was thinking about like, I don't know, I was thinking about fashion and I was thinking about flare jeans, but I don't think they'll ever come back. But things obviously go in cycles. Yeah, yeah, they do. And then I was like, you know, it's like, oh, we're on prem. We're off prem. Off prem in the cloud, you know, and it's kind of like there's different phrases and ways of selling things and people just start to bring things back in if that gets too complicated and unable to manage as well, you know.

Speaker B: Well, you already seen that, you know, because it's uh, I think uh, cloud was seen when you go back to say 15 years ago, it was seen as a uh, commodity. You know, that's how we were going to operate. We were going to kind of, you might be in Google cloud, then you're gcp, then you hop over to Europe because it's more price competitive. Then you go over to aws and in reality you get into a cloud, it's very difficult to get out of. You know, you don't tend to hop your workload between different clouds. You know, like some people I'm sure will be listening to go, oh yeah, we got this figured. You know, most companies, you kind of, you do, you go from on prem into say Azure, you'll stay there for quite a long time and then, then you find out how expensive it is and then that's where people have started, I think, let's say actually especially the big boys, the large banks and things. I think some of those have started kind of pulling out of being in the AWS cloud and going back to building their infrastructure because of the um, I guess the cost benefit but also the visibility of it all, I imagine.

Speaker A: M hm. I can imagine. Yeah. Yeah. That's crazy. I suppose it goes back and forth. There was one kind of final question in part two that I was going to ask and it was if you had any advice for other tech leaders who are kind of building or scaling

Speaker B: architecture teams, think very carefully about what kind of architecture architects you need for your business. It's not just uh, it's not just bright people, which is kind of what one thing you kind of, you would have done in the past. And it's kind of do you need an architect where you actually need a strong say functional consultant? Because sometimes the functional consultant is who you need. Or do you actually need a business architect to kind of really understand and work with the business? Because I think when with the way that uh, services platform, SaaS is delivered to us nowadays and the way we work with our uh, individual lines of business, you quite often need everyone to have quite a strong business architect element to even whatever role they're performing. And so I know the focus. What I find useful in the people which I've been recruiting is where they've got a, a degree of a consultant in them. They may not have been a consultant, they may not come from a consultancy background, but they've got that natural consultancy way of communicating, you know. And uh, they're, they're looking to draw out from the people they're working with what they really need. And they're very value focused. And so they're saying well I'm working with so and so from finance, what do they really need and how can I add value to what they want? And so you still need the technical skills in there and you still need a uh, deep understanding of whatever the product, whatever the kind of product or service being built is. But it's having that consultancy skills I find very useful because they're the ones who can get on with the business better, you know. And uh, it represents um, the fact that as an architecture function we haven't got the uh, authority we once had in very simple terms because you don't need the Architectural Review Board in the same way. And uh, it's like I started my career going in front of big architectural boards of 10, 12 people to get approval for what I was doing. And uh, last projects I'm delivering a very much more working at pace with a smaller group of people where we're getting direct approval from quite senior people within the business rather than a big architectural board all the time type. And so that consultancy element I think is key, which probably is my way of saying the soft skills.

Speaker A: Yeah. And so I suppose it's kind of like as you're saying that very um, don't kind of interpret what they're obviously talking about technically but then it's very inquisitive as well. Like what about uh, that, what about this? And kind of asking more to get, you know, just not going what they're told I suppose and being that inquisitive person

Speaker B: and comfortable and just so sorry Mark, I just had that and being comfortable not Necessarily being the expert on everything. And so they're comfortable that they're learning as well, you know, because you're quite often not the uh, you're not the authority of knowledge which you once were, you know, in the role.

Speaker A: So this is kind of like the personal, quick, fiery questions. The first one is what drives you solving problems?

Speaker B: Yeah, I'd say is, yeah. And when I, when I say that it's yes, I love solving technical problems, yes I love kind of gaining understanding. But uh, it's doing that as a group because one thing which uh, I'm a great believer in the old saying that everything I do is built upon the agency of others, but other people help me. And so if the ACCA architectural team is delivering value to the business, I'm enabling rather than leading is the way I see it. It's a kind of nurturing and getting that team working well. And I think there's an awful lot of uh, satisfaction in kind of delivering, solving a complex problem and delivering real value to the business.

Speaker A: What about your favorite technology?

Speaker B: Oh, favorite technology. I've uh, just invested in A uh, Mamelia C330 film camera which you can check TLR twin lens reflex, which means uh, you look through one lens and you take the picture through the other lens. And I've put a couple of rolls of film for it and you've got about three weeks ago and absolutely loving it. And it's totally analog. You have to send off the film to get it developed to get it back like two weeks later. So you don't know what the pictures look like. You only get 12 shots per roll.

Speaker A: How precious that make them though, isn't it? I just kind of like I've got about 30,000 photos on my phone. It's kind of like here's your 12, you know, use them scarcely.

Speaker B: It drives a totally different way of thinking. Thinking it's like, kind of like, like you. I've got an iPhone, you know, and I've got a digital camera and I've got a kind of X hundred thousand photos all over the place, you know. And um, kind of it turns into very different experience where you kind of, you're taking the shot or you get someone to pose for you. And I'd say right now that's, that's definitely my favorite bit of technology. I can uh, I can while away in the afternoon and take 12 shots and uh.

Speaker A: That's awesome. That's really cool. What about relaxing after work or kind of unwinding?

Speaker B: Mixture of things really. Uh, I Still like my hill walking and getting into the great outdoors and doing that when I can. But after a day at work, that's more of a weekend thing. But uh, I like music and I like reading and uh, I'm um, not really uh. I'm definitely not connoisseur of music, but I do kind of. I'm quite sad and just put on Radio 3 and sit into, climb into an armchair and I'm, I'm happy, you know, I'm not kind of. Yeah, I might be living. Listening to uh, I don't know, kneecap or uh, kind of sleep of mods. Just as well. But it's kind of, it's just a bit of music on. I enjoy just kind of listening and be chilling. Especially when I turn off the computer, you know, or turn off for the day. So like 6 o' clock, if I turn around, I quite like to kind of have a cup of coffee or something like that and just kind of of chill for half an hour before I then switch into home mode. Now I find that helpful.

Speaker A: Virtual commute. Yeah, just chilling out in there.

Speaker B: Exactly. You put it so well. Yeah.

Speaker A: Awesome. Well, you said you liked reading then, but I mean you read some books. Is there any recommendations that you would give?

Speaker B: Reading is a really interesting one for me because it's um. I forget where I heard this, but it was somebody from the advertising world who was seen as being super creative. And he was being. He's been asked how do you get the. How do you get creativity? How do you, how do you really kind of, uh, kind of come up with such great ideas? And he goes, it's entirely luck, but you can steer it in your favor by just filling your head full of really interesting stuff and then something more creative might pop out. And so I tend to read quite broadly. I do read, uh, I read a whole host of things from uh, tech books to kind of blogs and things like that. But I was thinking what were two books which I still go back to. Even if I don't pick it up, I still kind of quote it to people. And there's one which uh, you may have heard of, but do you remember Clive James, the kind of TV personality at one stage and used to a travel show. Australian is a little bit before your time. But um, he's actually a writer and a poet. He died in 2019 at the age of 80. But he wrote a book called Cultural Amnesia M and uh, it basically is a series of very personally written autobiographies, uh, biographies of philosophers, writers, dictators, politicians, scientists from the 20th century. And what he's basically done is uh, he's just kind of picked on an individual. It's in alphabetical order. So it's uh, kind of. You might have a Hitler next to Hayek or something like that. Philosopher next to Dictator. It's all. Now there's about 200 people he's written the biographies on, but he's written it really personally. And if you ever watched his shows or enjoyed his humor because he's a bit of a comedian and stuff, time, you can, you can feel it coming through. And he just throws his personality into each of these biographies of these people. And uh, the reason why I was thinking this was, uh. What sprang to mind is it's a real tonic for the political age we're living in because he's looking back on the 20th century and he's looking back at it from the order destruction and the uh, dictatorships and totalitarianism which went on. And he's a humanist and kind of democrat. And so that comes through it. And you kind of. I think it do uh, certain people good to read it and remember where this kind of populism can drive us, you know, because that's. It's not one you read cover to cover. It's one you dip into because it's just very short, five pages kind of thing.

Speaker A: Yeah. Oh, cool. Awesome. What was your second one be then?

Speaker B: Second one was again very different. It's uh. Got it in front of me here. It's called Victory at Any Cost. And it's a. It's the uh, biography. Biography of a Vietnamese general called Gayap. And he fought the. First the Japanese, then the French, then the Americans. And he basically won. He's North Vietnamese Communist and he, he was uh, the main general of the North Vietnamese Army. And it's a uh, biography of his life and how. How he. How he. He managed to win against all the odds, against. Against much more powerful, uh, kind of uh, invaders from his perspective, which effectively they were colonists. And there's two lessons in there. One, victory, any cost. He never gave up. And uh, he basically realized early on that the only thing he needed to do was not lose. He didn't need to win anything. He just needed to not lose. And so his strategy was all guerrilla warfare there. And he would fight a. Basically keep any, any kind of a. Any of the. The American army and the French army kind of just unbalanced the whole time. And every now and then during the book, when you read it politically, he's forced to have A big battle. And every big battle, he loses dramatically because you can't win, uh, head on. And it kind of, um, it really stuck with me when I read through it, because one just tenacity, uh, of the man, you know, like he died under house arrest for political reasons, as kind of. It's just said North Korea, North Vietnam being what it was back in the day. But, uh, it was just the way that he always picked himself up, always reorganized his supply lines, never gave up, and realized that the game wasn't over as long as he kept on getting back up.

Speaker A: Final question then, on dinner guests, any three that are alive, who would they be? Why?

Speaker B: Uh, this is a good question. I started off thinking about who would I have? And I started thinking maybe Jesus, Muhammad M and Buddha or something like that. Be fascinating. I thought that that's too high pro. I'd just be totally intimidated. And then, um, I thought what might be kind of quite fun just to sit back with a large glass of wine would be, uh, trumped Putin and Z and just, just, just let them kick off with each other. Just sit back. Cool.

Speaker A: James.

Speaker B: No, you won't get a word in. Just let them showcase. I just thought could be a really interesting dinner.

Speaker A: You know, Trump's definitely. Yeah, I know. I mean, I totally get, you know, all of it, but yeah, he's. I'm sure it would be an interesting dinner party. Like the three of them.

Speaker B: Yeah, you might, uh, maybe you get out of it again. I don't know.

Speaker A: I know, Totally. Afters, um, Johnny, that is talking with leaders. Thank you so much for your time. Really appreciate it. Thank you.

Speaker B: I've really enjoyed your time here.

Speaker A: Well, that was Johnny Malabar, head of architecture, design and planning at, uh, the acca. Thanks so much again, Johnny, for taking the time. Next up, we have Callum McRae from Introbreaker on the podcast, really excited to share his journey of a new startup. Thanks so much for listening. Cheers, Sam.