Clients

Almost everything Diamax has built in twenty-eight years was commissioned by one of five kinds of office.

They have little in common on an organization chart. What they share is responsibility for a process whose outcome must hold up, a scale small enough that the people involved know one another, and the standing to engage a firm directly rather than through a competitive process.

The firm began here, at the World Bank Corporate Secretariat, and this remains the work it does best. Board proceedings, executive correspondence, the President's calendar, a board portal and the voting conducted through it, and support for a committee convened at the request of a UN Secretary-General.

These systems stand apart from ordinary enterprise platforms. Relatively few people use them and everything they do matters. They demand extraordinary security, and performance and responsiveness beyond normal enterprise standards. The team is effectively on call, and even minor faults have to be resolved immediately.

They also reach into the rest of the institution. Correspondence in a president's office is not a mail problem; addressing it requires working with people five and six levels down and touching every system they use. An executive office generally calls when a process has stopped working, and the reason is often something the rest of the organization has learned to live with. An executive office cannot, because the pace at that level does not permit it.

Large firms holding substantial enterprise contracts tend to avoid this work. They are not built for it, their senior people cannot be substituted for one another, and the risk is considerable. A boutique consultancy with twenty-eight years of experience working directly with senior executives is built precisely for it.

At the National Academies, the executive office and the membership offices sit steps away from each other. That is not an accident of floor plans. Who the members are, how they are elected, and what part they play in the studies constitute one problem rather than three, and the offices that hold it need to be close to one another.

We have built the systems that carry that problem: an election system used by more than 2,000 members to nominate, review, and elect, in continuous service for twenty-one years before it was rebuilt in 2025; an online nomination system for a second Academy; and a membership directory producing a printed volume, a dynamic listing, and a separately rendered accessible interface from a single database.

The governing principle is the same in each case. The process can be digitized; the judgment cannot. Members have to be able to trust that the parts requiring human authority remained human, and a system that quietly erodes that trust has failed even if it runs perfectly.

A program office runs work that has a beginning and an end, a committee that does not report to it, and a result that has to withstand scrutiny.

We have worked with directors of programs, senior program officers, scholars, and executive directors on studies and programs lasting years: a set of grand challenges for engineering that became a global movement; a symposium series whose more consequential role was holding its alumni together long afterward; communities for educators and for engineers; a career program for students that ran for twenty-five years and whose successor we are building; and a research program office managing hundreds of projects, dozens of corporate stakeholders, and thousands of committee members.

The recurring difficulty is not process design. It is that the process must be consistent enough to be defensible and flexible enough to absorb the exceptions required to finish on time. Every year brings revisions to accommodate new edge cases, or to place a human override where the process needs a release of pressure.

A committee convened to address a consequential question is a temporary institution. It has no infrastructure, a fixed lifespan, a deliverable that must withstand scrutiny, and members — chief executives, university presidents, laureates — whose participation is measured in days. Someone has to stand the operation up quickly, run it to a standard those members will accept, and take it down afterward.

Diamax served as senior information officer and technology adviser to the independent committee that reviewed the procedures of the IPCC, convened by the InterAcademy Council at the request of the UN Secretary-General: six months, three week-long meetings, and then months of dissemination, working directly with the committee alongside communications officers and study directors from the InterAcademy Council, the US National Academy of Sciences, the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Royal Society. The environment was unusually exposed, and the system was built on the assumption that attempts to compromise it were certain.

The committee's work restored confidence in IPCC reports. The same pattern recurs with committees convened by the National Academies, chaired in two instances we supported by an Academy president and a chief executive of a Fortune 100 company.

Sometimes the technology organization is the client, and those have been among our best engagements.

A strong team engages us when what they need sits outside their skill set: not beyond their reach, but not a sensible use of a department already fully committed. One of the best teams we have worked with scoped exactly that, concluded correctly that it should not be built in-house, and brought us in. Ten years later we remain responsible for it and they have been able to concentrate on their own priorities.

We are also called for work that has stalled and for work that has to cross the organization. Some problems require reaching multiple levels into an institution and touching every system in use. An internal team often cannot do that, not for want of skill but because moving across departments costs political capital that an employee must continue to spend long after the project ends and a firm need not. We can absorb that cost in a way an internal team cannot.

More than once we have arrived through an executive office and the technology team learned of it afterward. That is not our preference. We move quickly, we do not compromise on data flow, identity, or security, and in the course of the work gaps occasionally surface. We are not auditing anyone, though we understand how it can appear. The tension in those situations is not ours; it lies between the technology organization and the executive office, and our aim is to support both. The measure of success is that the technology organization later engages us directly, for the sensitive projects and for the ones that are not getting done.

Each is responsible for something consequential. Each is small enough that the work is done by people who know one another. Each holds a process too specific for a product to serve and too important to leave alone.

In almost every case the engagement was direct. An executive office, a secretariat, or a committee chair does not run a competitive process for work of this kind, which is one reason the firm has been able to remain small for twenty-eight years.