Interview with Mandy Chessell CBE II

After 35 years working at IBM and as a Distinguished Engineer, Mandy has retired. She says of the move: “I’m still leading and working full-time on the Egeria Open-Source Project. It is an unusual retirement in that I’m not starting lots of new hobbies, but I am happy to be in complete control of my destiny.” Mandy has also started a company with two friends; Pragmatic Data Research Limited (PDR), a consultancy for organisations who are adopting the Egeria Project. She adds: “PDR is aiming to take the Egeria open source project to its next level of maturity.”

The Egeria project is open-source middleware designed to provide a set of standards for metadata and governance. Mandy explains: “It’s designed for organisations that either need to make broad use of its data and/or to be sure that its digital operations are transparent and operating efficiently, securely, etc.  If you imagine a physical business, the managers can watch the operations, they can see the factory working. With digital operations, you can’t see much of the operations and so lots of issues are left unmanaged because there are problems that nobody can see. Egeria provides that very low-level infrastructure that keeps all the tools that an organisation is using up to date with the latest information about how their digital operation is structured, deployed, operating. It’s a very big project and that is why it’s open source.

“This function not something that any particular vendor could do on their own and even if they tried, it wouldn’t be the right solution because organisations use technology from many different vendors. This solution has to work with many different vendor technologies. We need to build trust so that the vendors work together.  How is this achieved?  You provide open access to influence the project direction, you make the technology free, ensure that you have top engineers working on that project so that it combines the best practices from the industry.  Egeria is something I’m very proud of because the community is so excellent in so many ways.”

Mandy says ING, a global bank is among the users. She adds: “They have been staunch supporters of this from Day 1.   In fact, they have the largest number of the developers on the project and they’re using it to drive their digital transformation.  SAS Institute, an analytics company, are also firmly behind it, as are IBM. Since I’ve retired there are also a number of other vendors, popular names, I can’t tell you who because we’re not at the point of disclosing them, but they are much happier working with me now I don’t work for IBM. I think there was a feeling that Egeria was too IBM centric.  We did our best to be vendor agnostic but there is always a suspicion J. Now, of course, I’m not tied to IBM so that makes things easier from an openness point of view.”

In Mandy’s first interview with the Archive she described three horizons of technology, she explains: “Level 1 is where you have a new idea, you are proving it in the market, you’re looking for proof points, for one or two organisations to take that idea on and show that it works.  Level 2 is where you’re trying to build market presence, sometimes you’re competing against another organisation and you’re trying to get market share, so, it is much more focused on volume, number of customers, often, you’re spending a lot of time adding features, publicising it, trying to get more and more people to build it. The third level is where you have a lot of customers, you’re generally trying to keep them happy, making small changes but stability is key because they’re don’t want to keep having to redo things.  It’s much more of a nurturing stage in the project.”

Asked where the Egeria project is, Mandy says: “Very early stages. We have some areas that have been in production quite a few years and for those pieces, we focus very much on stability, backward compatibility as we move it forward.  Performance is another key area in that space. Other parts of the project are very much at level 1 which is the innovative stage. There we are working through use cases, working with different organisations, creating proof points because it’s very disruptive to the way people think about tools and building products. … in addition, we’re still innovating around different mechanisms for governance and making integration as seamless as possible.

Asked about the connection between software and engineering, she says: “Software engineers build complex systems that are increasingly safety-critical. Software engineering is based on skills, processes and best practices. The engineering mind-set of providing practical solutions to real-world problems is as true in software engineering as in civil engineering; there is a lot we can learn from each other.  A scientist focuses on one particular question, they become deep experts in it and they understand its behaviour to a great deal of detail.  With an engineer, they’re building a system and it requires systems thinking over a wide range of aspects to make sure the solution works for people and for the real world. Increasingly, software is part of our world and so software is a very key part of engineering.”

While working at IBM, Mandy worked with many organizations on their data management strategy to support AI and says this was the impetus for the Egeria project. She explains: “If we go back to about 2013, there was a thing called “big data”. As the world was increasingly digitised, more and more data was available along with new data platforms, Hadoop being one of them. There was a belief that we could start to understand the world by processing this big data.  There was also a belief that because there was so much data, we didn’t need to do all the traditional data management activities around managing quality, having a metadata catalogue and designing schemas that controlled the structure and meaning of data.  All of the key capabilities of data management became unfashionable.

“I was working with a lot of customers at that time, talking about using big data.  Many were in regulated industries and they were concerned about how they were going to manage it. So, I started to develop was initially called the Data Reservoir Architecture and later became the Data Lake Architecture. It explained how you worked with big data but also managed quality, governance, etc. where you needed to.  It was a very flexible approach and was shared with about a hundred different organisations from all different industries. There was general agreement that this architecture was the right approach but it was very hard to implement because there weren’t the integrated software products and platforms it needed.  Everything was very localised, most technology focused on a functional area and made it very difficult to manage data.  The set of requirements from those hundred-plus customers is what went into the Egeria design. ”

She goes on to discuss the idea of AI and whether it will overtake human intelligence, she says: “The best AI is actually a combination of human expertise and machine expertise since there are things that we do well and there are things that machines do well. So, when we work together, we do create a greater intelligence.  Similarly, when you’re able to bring people with different skills on a problem, we create a greater intelligence.  The way the Covid vaccine was created was an example of that network effect.  I would say that we are already collectively, creating a greater intelligence on the earth, compared to what we had 200 years ago. On the question of whether AI is a thing you can turn on and off, I think it is this connected network that is the intelligence and bits of it will come and go. Turning off all AI will be very hard.”

Asked if AI is creating a disruptive turmoil, Mandy says: “We’re certainly in a disrupted age at the moment. Things are changing in terms of the balance of power between national governments and global organisations.  It is very hard for a particular country to be isolated. A lot of political turmoil has been caused by an inappropriate use of AI. The fact that AI has been used to isolate people through the knowledge they see, means that information is not as freely available as you would expect, and we’re seeing the impact of that isolation of knowledge.

“So, we’re all trapped in our own information bubbles and one of the things we all need to learn is how to break out of those bubbles.  Otherwise, we will end up with a very divided planet because we’ll all have our different versions of the truth.”

Mandy will become Honorary President of the Institution of Engineering Designers in 2022, she says: “The Institution represents product designers; people who build the products that we use every day and who are very focussed on usability, safety, and that human interaction with the product. They are very strong engineers and the wide range of projects that they work on is phenomenal.  It’s a really great group to work with because it’s very easy to see how effective their work is.”

Mandy will be president for a two-year term. Asked about her theme for the period, she says: “I am interested in how software interacts with physical products. Think about the data that is being collected with the products that we buy. How do we bring software into the physical engineering space?  How do we think about the software aspect of the product and the usability around it?  At the moment, we have software engineers who are a very long way away from those commercial product-type engineers; so, how do we bring them together?  I’d also like the members to all understand a little bit more about open source before I finish my term as president. With software engineering, we do a lot of work on usability for the individual, but usability in an ecosystem also interests me.  So, not just the individual using an individual product, but an ecosystem of people who use related products together, particularly where software is that connection.”

In 2020, the Institution awarded its first registered product designer certificate, Mandy explains what this means: “Being registered gives you chartered status as an engineer, it is part of your professional recognition. Product designers have a lot of skill beyond a core engineering discipline and therefore they can find it hard to become CEng.   This is a way to recognise this type of engineering, to allow consumers or employers to be able to distinguish between people who just say they can do it, and people who have a proven track record, as with all chartered status. It is about declaring that this is a profession, this is important to our industry and these are the people who meet the professional criteria.

“We don’t have mandatory professional status in our industry in the way that doctors and lawyers do.  That does not mean that there is no value in being able to distinguish people who have certain skills and a proven track record.  Employers and people who are engaging a particular engineering firm can make that choice as to whether that chartered status is meaningful to them or not.”

Mandy says of joining the IED: “It broadens your horizons and that accelerates your learning and the opportunities that come to you as you move through your profession.  So, whatever job you begin with, you’re learning and very early on in your career that might seem all you can cope with.  However, after two or three years, you start to get a little bored and maybe a little narrow and so, by joining any of the engineering institutions that match the work you do, you will start to broaden your horizons, you’ll see what new opportunities are available. You will be able to bring what you learn back to your job and become more successful there.”

Mandy says that constant learning has been a feature of her own career, she explains: “It’s partly because I like working on innovative projects and “the next big thing”.  In that space you have to do two things; you have to constantly train your successor so that you can move on, and you have to learn new things. One of the great things about working in a brand new area, particularly one where everybody is innovating, is that you’re all learning together. It would worry me if, in any month, I couldn’t say this is what I’ve learned this month. It’s a continuous process and there is always something else to learn.”

Along with constant learning, working on multiple levels of detail is an essential engineering skill according to Mandy. She explains: “Abstraction, being able to see patterns and manage complexity are key engineering skills. That’s a lot of what I do, that’s my core skill.”

For women thinking of entering the industry, Mandy offers the following advice: “You can never know it all and it’s very easy to feel that you’re no good at it if you focus on what you don’t know.  Instead you need to be very realistic and understand that everybody is in that situation. The important thing is to be focused on being as good as you can and delivering. Try to keep track of everything you do and congratulate yourself on how you’re progressing, what you’re learning, what you’re achieving, because you cannot expect anybody else to do it.  You have to be your own cheerleader, keep questioning why things are done a certain way, keep learning, be as good as you can be and then, continuously tell yourself you’re doing a great job.”

Mandy also suggests that staying calm in leadership is the most effective way of managing difficult situations. She explains: “The reality is that as you lose your temper, you lose your thinking brain, so, being calm is actually an effective way of behaving and that style of leadership is being increasingly recognised. Certainly, in the open-source community, I can’t tell anyone to do anything. Nobody works for me, and yet we work together, we have a mission and we’re moving forward.”

Asked about difference between the genders, Mandy says: “I think we all have a mix of skills and I just don’t subscribe to that deep gender difference that is used to justify why women do not progress in certain professions. Feminism is such an overused word.  I certainly believe that women should have an equal place in society as men, I don’t think women are inferior to men. We are equal. If that makes me a feminist, then absolutely I am.

On the subject of what defines a woman today, Mandy adds: “We need to let go of that binary question.  It’s increasingly being shown as nonsense. To me it’s a bit like trying to judge somebody from their age, we shouldn’t be judging people from their gender either. I’m fully behind the support for transgender people. From my experience of having been in an industry where my gender was not welcome for many years, where I was encouraged to dress like a man so I didn’t look so different, I have a small understanding of what someone who is transgender is going through and I just wish we could let go of our fixation with gender, age etc. in areas where it just doesn’t matter, particularly, in the professional space.”

Asked what technologies may be of interest in the future, Mandy says: “One of the things we’ve been playing with on the Egeria project is the idea of using 3D printing to create architectural design kits to help people to build up models of distributed architecture.  I find the idea of 3D printing absolutely fascinating. It has so much potential to get key parts to key places around the world.”

“Egeria itself is very distributed –  it is for connecting tools on multiple cloud platforms and data centres together.  There are different types of servers that perform different types of roles in the architecture.  Therefore in the architecture design kit, there are different shapes for each type of server.  Each type of server supports particular types of connectors to plug-in third party technologies.  The server models will have different shaped holes in their base to represent the types of connectors. Then, we’ll be able to link things together. We’re thinking of a castle-type scenario where you’re putting your castles in the different places and you’re connecting them up. It’s designed to be fun but also to teach how you assemble these different pieces together.”

Looking to the future of the Egeria Project, Mandy says that reaching Horizon 2 and 3 are the next big steps that will lead to a “whole new raft of innovation.” She adds: “Whenever you establish an important standard in the industry, then, suddenly, there is a new raft of innovation because what’s stopped you before disappears. If Egeria is successful, then the transparency of operations will be greatly enhanced and different professions will work together much better whilst still using their specialized tooling. “

Interviewed by Richard Sharpe

Transcribed by TP Transcription

Abstracted by Lynda Feeley