Realising our big ambitions: the art of leveraging technological advancement

Here at Digital Futures, we have a lot of big ambitions. 

• As we look to diversify the tech industry, we are aiming to remove all forms of bias and discrimination from the skills market, removing unwanted decision-making factors and creating a level playing field. 
  
• We also want to be able to understand that market in such depth that it becomes possible to aggressively optimise outcomes for both our partners and our engineers, creating the maximum possible value for all participants. 
  
• Furthermore, we want to turn the digital skills market into an automated, scalable experience for both skill-sellers, skill-creators, and skill-buyers – but without leaving decision-making to algorithms. 

These are undoubtedly very demanding ambitions, but they’re also very inspiring targets to have in our sights – in fact, I believe that each one represents an idea whose time has come.

Much as I’m eager to dive into them in more detail, the thought I want to share here is more fundamental: how is it that a company at our early stage in the lifecycle can tackle challenges of this scale at all? 

And what’s more, we need to achieve all these things while maintaining a strict regard for privacy and security, and we simultaneously need to bootstrap our business, our platform, and our processes from the ground up. 

A few years ago, I’d have said that ambitions on this scale are simply greater than the tech delivery capacity of a company like ours. But we’ve embarked on our journey at a time when the tech landscape is particularly rich in new tools and techniques – things that weren’t feasible for a small team two years ago are becoming feasible now, and things that were difficult are becoming amenable to innovative solutions. 

Sometimes in technology there are exciting moments when barriers to entry fall due to new innovations – and we are living through such a moment right now. Every day it seems that the key infrastructural building blocks of a technology platform become easier to implement, with low-code, serverless, and infrastructure-as-code (IaC) approaches and products acting as significant force multipliers and greatly reducing the need for bespoke components and line-by-line authoring of new assets. 

Here at Digital Futures, we’re taking full advantage of these developments – because we love technology, and we want to ensure that all our effort is going on realising our big ambitions.