Partner profile: Marcus De’Freitas

Blue Hat Associates partner Marcus shares his insights what’s next.

In this blog series, we introduce you to each of our Partners.

Blue Hat Associates is a collective of entrepreneurial technology leaders who’ve all lived through the challenges of scaling SaaS businesses. Working across Finance, Health, Media, Advertising and the Public Sector, we help clients achieve tech and product goals quicker and more cost-effectively. Combining strategic leadership, with a nearshore talent pool of over 1600 consultants, means we provide the flexibility, innovation and pace that scaleups need to grow.

Introducing Marcus.

Marcus has over 35 years of software industry experience across several industry sectors. He’s worked in the UK Public Sector, including HMRC and Home Office, for 20+ years on some of the largest data-centric applications. 

He is a Security Cleared TOGAF architect with specialist knowledge in cloud architecture, microservices, SOA architecture, systems analysis, enterprise architecture, software design and implementation.

How has the pace of technological change influenced the way you do your job?

Once upon a time, when I started in Information Technology (some 35 years ago) it was pretty steady. There were various programming languages. Code was cut by hand, just about everything we did was waterfall. It took six months to get requirements and then we thought about them for a while and then maybe we do some designs and then maybe we build that system! These days the pace of technology change really means that projects must deliver value much more quickly. If you’re too slow, the competition will leap-frog you.

So, that influences what we do in Solutions Architecture (my area of expertise). We're looking for solutions that deliver that value quickly. Yes, we would like good solutions of course, but solution elegance isn't the main driver - it's delivering!

We must be tactical and get to market first, then look at what we really want to deliver (e.g. scalability). But showing value quickly is what clients need. We must be pragmatic and nimble. Rigid delivery processes do not allow us to be competitive and can lead to companies being beaten to market.

One thing that hasn't changed is that it's always about who the stakeholders are and what do they need. Stakeholders may have changed over time (e.g. stakeholders for startups and scaleups are the investors, right?). Where stakeholders are external customers, who may not be particularly technology-savvy, the drivers are very different there.

How do you help your clients build an organisation that can keep up with the pace of change? 

It is practically impossible to read everything that's out there (even with the help of an AI app). So, you need to be selective and, without getting my trade secrets away, you do a LOT of talking to people (in person, online as well as reading the right thought leadership articles).

It all comes back to talking to my clients though and learning about what they need. If they have a gap or a problem, I can go and explore for them. We need to be flexible too and have quick ways of researching and forming early thoughts and outline solutions.

One of the things I've learned over the last three decades is that you don't always know the answer and that's okay.

How do you keep up with new technologies? 

I do like to do stuff myself to try things out in a limited way. These days it’s not my ‘day job’ to cut code, but sometimes I feel the need to understand something a bit deeper I'll do the research, and I'll just roll my sleeves up. It helps me be confident in what I’m saying and advising on. In some companies, technical leaders can be very remote from the physical implementation, and that’s fine. But our clients lean on us, as technical specialists, so I think it’s important to ‘have our feet on the ground’ and maintain a level of hands-on knowledge and experience. But you can’t know everything, which is why the network is so important.

What's next in your sector? 

A couple of things spring to mind. Firstly, even though we have more computing power in our phones today than we might have had in a data centre twenty years ago, we’re still not very good at ensuring the quality of the data that we're gathering is as good as it should be. So, for me, data quality is one of the main things I think that has been side-stepped. We just gather more of it – it’s still a bit ‘quantity over quality’. And that needs to change if we are to truly maximise the potential insights hidden in the volume.

In the Public Sector, there are lots of government departments gathering lots of data. How consistent is that data and how well is that data shared and exploited across government? I couldn't possibly comment on that but I'm sure there's lots of opportunity there because there are techniques being developed in private sector are completely applicable and could readily be applied to many public sector projects. The challenge is how to do that with constrained budgets and targets. Collaboration is key and we're becoming increasingly engaged with bodies like techUK because we see that as a way of being involved in the right conversations and bringing our experience into those discussions.

Secondly, we today we have these billion-dollar businesses that are essentially data businesses (that didn’t exist 20 year) which is driving the realisation that the data has value. And that is putting focus on improving the quality of data (i.e. better-quality data is more valuable). It’s a driving force across industries because there are very few businesses these days that don't need (good quality) data.

What technologies do you think stand the most chance to change your clients businesses in the next 3-5 years?

In my sector, there’s a lot of focus on bringing in large scale data processing techniques, machine learning and difference flavours of AI to process the enormous amounts of data that are being collected to identify those patterns that are of importance.

For example, I’m working with the Customs and International Trade at HMRC, and there's an opportunity to improve the information we collect regarding the movement of goods that could help plug the tax gap – something that would benefit citizens and trade.

There’s an opportunity to improve interactions between our Public Service systems and our customers. It does mean that the customer will need to share more information about their business and/or trading behaviour which means building trust in the accuracy and security of these systems is critical.

What kinds of technology problems do you think will drive the next wave of innovation?

As a country, we spend an enormous amount of time manually processing inefficiently gathered data in our government departments. There's just so many efficiencies that I think we can affect if we bring more assistive technology into that whole government data gathering, processing and decision-making space.

For example, I was a trying to do a very simple task using a Government website a few weeks ago, which I couldn't complete because the system was down for maintenance. We’ve all had this experience and in the 21st century, we expect our Citizen experience to be on a par with the always-on customer experience we get from our bank or online retailer. Public sector is going to have to move to more zero downtime – designed in from the start.

What client projects are you particularly proud of, and why?

I'll tell you what gives me a buzz every time I see it…because I see it virtually every day. When you get a letter these days (remember postal letters!?) and they've got a little 2D barcode on the top. We’ll, that was me! It was a project I did at Royal Mail It called “barcode every parcel”, that we extended to all mail items to get a barcode on everything so they could be tracked accurately through the system.

Getting the data designed to go into that 2D barcode and to get it compact enough so that we could track every item was my job and yes, I get thrilled every time I see them!

It enabled them to track every single item – something they couldn’t do before, so now they can accurately track every item through the network, which allows them to optimise delivery, cut costs and improve customer service.

Why did you join Blue Hat?

All the Partners in Blue Hat have been working in the tech space for decades – working in companies, consultancies and as independent contractors too. The appeal of working together as a partnership is that we can do so much more together than working as individuals. The whole is so much more than some of the parts - we have a greater capability to solve problems when we put our collective heads, and we love it!

What's next for Blue Hat?

We are looking for opportunities to bring that data expertise into more public sector clients and that may well involve partnering with other organisations to do that. We can come in as an SME with specialist skills and collaborate across projects to add value. We don't pretend that we cover everything that any organisation needs, but we do have certain specialist skills, wrangling data, processing unstructured data graph databases, data visualisation etc - all those kind of things that will help an organisation to exploit their data better - we can bring those into public sector as a package that we've proven in private sector clients. That’s where we see a big opportunity in the next 12 to 24 months to help public sector to improve accuracy and productivity, cut costs and enhance the citizen experience.

Thanks for reading, we hope you’ve found it insightful to get to know Marcus’s perspective on the tech landscape.

Learn more about our other Partners and get in touch for a free, friendly chat anytime.