In the old days, it used to be vaults and chests, keys and locks, and walls with iron bars. One of the major challenges banks always have is finding the right combination between security and customer experience. Since the earliest days, one of the bank’s job has been to put barriers between money and unauthorised access to that money. Then the final proud moment is actually here at HSBC. It wasn’t about inventing new technology, we just stuck together things that already existed. It allowed content to be converted from a static print title to a dynamic digital title, which journalists could use to write stories in a really short time frame. We had an internet facing Content Management System, and we had a system that built the print copy of the newspaper, so we connected the two systems together. The best innovation thrives under conditions of adversity. The challenge was to convert the newspaper’s print titles to 24/7 online rolling news – and we were given a 6-week period to do it. When I joined the company, all their print titles were all completely non-digitised, and their online presence was literally a scan of the front page of the newspaper put up on the internet as a GIF. My second proud innovation moment is from the early 2000s when I was working for a media company in the newspaper business. It collapsed the time taken to advise a customer of a business-critical choice from days to minutes – a real transformation when you consider the number of business deals between companies and across industries that would have been impacted. Today it sounds incredibly old fashioned, but the innovation was to convert this critical mail-based process into a fax-based process. It was a massively paper-based exercise, and the company would be waiting on a letter to arrive in order to choose whether they could actually do a deal with a potential customer or not. Credit insurance companies insure the audit books of other companies, and one of the key parts of that business is to issue ‘limits’, which determine how much a company can trade with another and still be covered by their insurance policy. The first was in the early nineties when I was working for a credit insurance company. Lindsay Herbert: What are the proudest innovation moments from your career?ĭavid Knott: Three examples come to mind. The other useful perspective came from working in industries that manage physical assets, rather than virtual ones. This has been really helpful because it’s given me the perspective of being both on the supply side and the client side. In that time, I’ve done pretty much every job you can do in an IT function – I’ve been a CIO, CTO, I’ve run operations, I’ve been a developer and a Project Manager. Probably 60 to 70 per cent of my time has been in financial services, but the other 30 per cent has been a variety of industries like consulting, media, and utilities. I’ve also worked in many different companies, about 12 in total. I started just over 30 years ago, and I’ve worked in enterprise technology my entire career. I’m one of those people who enjoy figuring out interesting ways to put the right technologies together with a relatively small number of smart people working with me. What experiences have brought you here?ĭavid Knott: I’ve been at HSBC for about three and a half years, but I’ve been doing this a long time. Lindsay Herbert: Tell me about your career path. They also participate in design working groups and governance structures, which helps guide us to make good design choices. This means I look after career framework, training and development, and talent management for that community. I also run a practice of 1,200 people who do solution technology architecture and design across HSBC. They are the most senior technology architects in the bank, and they do things like look after the architecture of the retail bank, the commercial bank, the private bank, our infrastructure, and the state of our security. The way I do my job is I lead a small core team (small in terms of HSBC small) of about 120 people. Lindsay Herbert: What does your role as Chief Architect entail and how do you approach it?ĭavid Knott:The short-form of my job description is to say I’m accountable for all the technology design decisions across the organization. David Knott about his 30-year career leading enterprise level innovation.įrom automating fax machines and putting print newspapers online, to building Blockchains and in-house expertise in AI, David’s experiences in technology are wide-reaching and have led to profound conclusions about the value of real Digital Transformation and the right (and wrong) ways to approach it. In my constant quest for Digital Transformation stories and innovation insights, I had the pleasure of interviewing Dr.
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