Diamax has completed a wide range of projects over twenty-eight years and continues to welcome assignments that push our capabilities forward. Most fall within six practice areas in which the firm has an established record. Each practice began with a single institution asking for help with a process that had stopped working.
What follows is selected rather than complete. Client confidentiality limits what we can describe publicly, and further cases are available for discussion.
Delivered to the NAE Membership Office in early 2025. Diamax election systems have supported the Academy's multi-year nomination, review, and election process since 2004, in continuous operation for twenty-one years. The current system is the third generation, rebuilt on modern architecture and adds community features allowing members to collaborate more flexibly.
In early 2026 Diamax worked with PRCI through discovery sprints to prototype a successor to a Diamax platform that PRCI uses to manage the organization's global research portfolio. The work established how client-generated applications can be embedded securely and reliably within a professionally engineered system, an approach now standard in our practice.
Diamax is migrating many its own clients to Milieu Gravity and taking on new implementations on the platform as a partner.
The system has guided NAM members through the nomination process continuously since 2006. Every few years it requires revision to accommodate bylaw amendments, integration changes, security and performance work, and improvements to the member experience. 2026 is one of those years. Maintenance is continuous; larger revisions are planned and staged, and over time a system may be replaced piece by piece rather than all at once.
Systems for the offices where consequence concentrates. Few users, extraordinary stakes, security and responsiveness beyond ordinary enterprise standards, and a senior team effectively on call.
This is where the firm began, and it remains the work that large consultancies are least equipped to take.
Board meetings of the World Bank and the IMF ran on a conference microphone system that knew who was speaking and an agenda process that did not. A team of senior engineers conducted a series of rapid experiments against the microphone hardware until an integration strategy emerged, streaming live floor data to remote browsers and mobile devices, synchronized with agendas and voting results, with weighted board votes simulated during the meeting to help leadership establish consensus.
Executives stopped losing time waiting for an agenda item on an agenda that could be reordered mid-meeting. Remote participation became possible years before it was common, agendas could be altered, proceedings were captured precisely, and the number of voting rounds required to reach quorum fell.
We believe this was the first web integration with an electronic conference microphone system anywhere. Related engagements gave the firm hardware-level knowledge of most leading conference microphone systems, and because attrition here is exceptionally low, that expertise remains within the team.
Correspondence to the President's office was taking more than thirty days to answer. The problem was not the mail system. It was a question of enterprise architecture, and answering it required working with people five and six levels into the institution and across every system they touched.
The process and system recommendations that followed brought response time to under ten days. This is not an unusual problem for large institutions operating globally, and there are now considerably more technological means of addressing it.
At the request of the UN Secretary-General, the InterAcademy Council convened an independent committee of scientists to review the procedures by which the IPCC prepares its climate assessments. Diamax served as lead information officer and technology adviser, working 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.
Within days the firm stood up a secure collaboration platform with two-factor authentication, an interactive site for public engagement, and infrastructure for correspondence, information security, document management, and remote work. The committee worked from locations around the world and met three times in person, where Diamax also provided support and advisory services on site.
On the assessment of a long-standing senior security collaborator, the entire system was built on the assumption that attempts to compromise it were certain. There were no successful breaches. The committee's work restored stakeholder confidence in IPCC reports.
Also in this practice: the World Bank President's calendar and the Board of Directors portal (2004), and NAE Council voting, ongoing.
Impactful communities form around a field and defined goals, rather than around an organization for the sake of it, and the difference matters.
An institutional website tells people what an organization does. A community exists so that people in a field can accomplish common goals, to reach one another: to learn what the work is actually like, how someone arrived where they are, what a career looks like from inside it, and what to do when the documented route does not apply.
None of that can be written down in advance. It moves between people or it does not move at all. Designing the conditions for that exchange — who belongs, what brings them back, what makes participation worth the time — is a distinct discipline, and one we have practiced for twenty-five years.
EngineerGirl introduced middle-school students to engineering careers, to the women who work in them, and to the paths others had taken over the same obstacles. For twenty-five years it helped a generation of students qualify for, apply to, and persevere through engineering school.
When a student submitted a question, several engineers answered it. A system built for efficiency would select the best answer and serve only that one; this one kept them all, because the point was never the answer. It was to surface the engineer whose path, background, or way of explaining things made the career feel possible. The same reasoning shaped the gallery, which was not a directory of credentials but a population large enough that recognition could occur on grounds no one could have specified in advance.
EngineerGirl concluded in early 2026. Its successor, EngineerTeen, is in service now and reaches a broader group of students, engineers, technologists, and educators. Diamax was engaged as the concept took shape. EngineerTeen is a work in progress.
An information system supporting the full business process of an invitational symposium series held annually in several countries. Participants are nominated, vetted, and selected on their engineering and career achievements, their potential for leadership, and their likely impact. The platform's more consequential role is holding the alumni community together for years afterward, among engineers who met once and continue to matter to one another.
A community for pre-K through 12 educators teaching or integrating engineering, built with a project committee chaired by Cary Sneider of Portland State University and a project team led by NAE scholar Greg Pearson. Diamax worked directly with the committee and participated in meetings across the country that gathered educators' views and informed the strategy and design of the platform.
An online community and resource library for a committee chaired by NAE President Charles Vest and DuPont chief executive Ellen Kullman, aligning the way corporations, agencies, and universities describe engineering. Diamax worked with the committee and its co-chairs on strategy, identity, and system design before building the platform, which remained in service long after the committee dissolved. Three years of work produced communications changes across universities and corporations.
Firms that know Diamax generally know it for directories. We have built more of them than we can readily count.
We do not regard a directory as a database of records. Every entry is a starting point for content, media, engagement, and connection to everything else in the system. A person, or the organization that person works for, is not a row. People and organizations are the network, and they are what make a business, a place, or a process work.
Get that right and a directory stops being a lookup table. It becomes a map of who is actually in a field, and the fastest route to the person who knows the thing nobody wrote down.
A business-to-business exchange making small and mid-sized system integrators visible to the buyers looking for them: a directory reconceived as a marketplace, in which a profile earns attention rather than simply existing. Combining integrator and supplier directories with a library of industry knowledge, questions and answers, member posts, and an interview series, the Exchange became the association's leading source of new members and a material share of its revenue within three years of launch.
A business-to-business directory for a global membership of relocation services and specialists, where the value lies in comparability and reach rather than in record count.
A member directory alongside a report database and a regulatory filings library: a directory as one face of a connected information system rather than a standalone list.
Institutional processes whose outcomes have to be defensible. Members must be able to trust that the parts requiring human authority remained human.
The principle is simple and unusually hard to hold: digitize the process, and never automate the judgment.
More than 2,000 members nominate, review, and elect new members each year. The system had to standardize what could be standardized without disturbing the several phases of dialogue and deliberation that ensure each nominee is considered individually, on the basis of their most consequential contributions to engineering. Assembling a nomination can take years, because a candidate is unaware of being considered and the record of their career must be gathered indirectly. The process is collaborative, sensitive, and of considerable importance to members.
The same governing question applied to a second Academy with a different membership culture.
A single directory database serving three interfaces: a three-hundred-page print-on-demand publication with automated page layout, a dynamic online directory, and a separately rendered accessible interface. The system was later extended with a multichannel communications platform that allowed the Membership Office to correspond with each member by their preferred channel, whether electronic mail, facsimile, or post. Personalization and the separation of presentation from content were architectural decisions here twenty-five years ago.
The collaboration and business processes that produce consensus output: policy studies, sector reports, and research portfolios.
Each runs on the same tension. The process must be consistent enough to be defensible and flexible enough to absorb the large number of exceptions required to complete a report on time. Underneath sits a human reality, in which a dozen people from a dozen organizations work toward agreement outside their usual responsibilities.
An enterprise architecture assessment of how PRCI program managers actually executed a research portfolio of hundreds of active projects, more than sixty corporate stakeholders, hundreds of research contractors, and thousands of committee members collaborating globally.
What followed was a platform for the entire lifecycle: selecting and funding project ideas; managing projects, proposals, and contracts; tracking invoices against deliverables and approving payment; managing documentation and voting on report drafts; supporting committee collaboration; and organizing meetings. It has been in production for a decade.
A knowledge management system for holistic financial sector review reports: the same problem in a different discipline, where the output is a judgment on which institutions act. The principal innovation was to decompose each report for storage in a database, so that it could be assembled dynamically as a single document or searched section by section. An economist could retrieve the relevant passage, move up to its chapter, and then to the report entire. The approach accelerated access to technical material and shortened decision cycles at partner organizations, and the thinking behind it still informs how the firm applies AI to retrieval today.
Among the most consequential programs in the Academy's recent history, the Grand Challenges did not answer a policy question so much as mobilize a profession. The committee's report identified fourteen grand challenges; universities established a Grand Challenge Scholars Program; and a movement formed that persists today.
Diamax was consulted early enough that digital strategy was written into the first grant proposals. The central recommendation was to engage the public through the website before the committee had findings. At a moment when social platforms were in their infancy, the Academy assembled a community of engineers, journalists, and interested citizens, so that an audience was waiting when the report was released. Diamax designed the identity, built the systems, and maintained them for almost two decades as the program grew from a committee to a community to a movement.
Recording what an institution knows, and ensuring that it reaches the right people at the moment they need it, is considerably more than the production of a manual.
Retrieval is the straightforward part. The harder and more valuable questions are who relies on a given section, who has interpreted it before, and who should be consulted when a situation falls outside it. We regard an operations manual or a standards manual as an information system in its own right: one that organizes the content, everything related to the content, and the people and organizations who hold expertise in it, and that keeps a record of who uses which part and when, so that they can be supported and can support others later.
Engineered properly, the distinction between content, data, media, collaboration, and AI in a reference of this kind becomes usefully indistinct.
The firm's first engagement, and a multichannel publication of the manual on which the institution runs. It began a practice in collaborative authoring, automated production, and reliable enterprise-wide access, and Diamax maintained the manual for some thirteen years before it was rebuilt by an internal team.
A publication management system and interactive resource library tracing the basic research behind everyday technologies. A series of short print publications became a searchable site with expandable figures, a glossary linked dynamically from the text, contributor attributions that opened into biographies, and downloadable material that added depth beyond what print allowed. The project validated a relational approach to content management at a time when most systems in the category were document collections dressed in display templates.
A multichannel accreditation manual, in which the same content had to be authoritative in print, online, and in process. After more than a decade of building content and knowledge management systems, and of using both as a substrate for connecting people, the manual amounted to a large document turned into a database and used by an entire field rather than by a single enterprise.
Every engagement is different. Some are best served by a low-code enterprise platform a client already owns, some by a product, and some by a custom application. Diamax works in all three, alone or in combination, according to what the objective requires.
Diamax is proficient in a wide array of base technologies and languages. Most of our current work involves Microsoft .net, Microsoft SQL Server, Azure, AWS, AWS SES as well as an assortment of front-end frameworks. Given how long our team has been active and how many integrations we have completed, the list of technologies we know is longer than most information systems consultancies.
AI is integral to our research, design, coding, testing, deployment, and maintenance. The architecture is ours, and AI is applied in a manner that preserves the firm's standards for security, performance, scalability, adaptability, and maintainability. Each member of the team remains accountable for what they produce, which includes being able to read, diagnose, and revise it without assistance.
Acceleration is now something a client can choose to buy. An engineer working at full pace against a substantial model budget can consume a considerable amount of capacity in a month. That dimension did not exist three years ago, and how far a client turns it up depends on the problem: some engagements require little, while an executive office facing something sufficiently consequential will accelerate the work well beyond what would appear reasonable elsewhere.
What changes is not only the schedule. It is when the important conversations become possible. We can prototype in the second week, put several interface directions in front of the people who will use them, and map a complex journey end to end long before an engagement would ordinarily reach that point. For a firm whose method is to find where a documented process stops being sufficient, that matters: we can build the exception path and watch someone use it, rather than describing it in a workshop and discovering the difficulty in month five.
The constraint is not access to the models. It is whether a team can work at that rate and still deliver something a client would want in production. Volume without architecture, senior review, and evaluation produces a great deal of code and very little that can be depended upon. Acceleration is therefore offered in defined intervals rather than as a standing rate.
Not everything requires a frontier model. We use the strongest models available for design, exploration, and difficult problems, and smaller or local models for maintenance and routine operation, including servers in our own offices for work that should not leave them. A system intended to run for twenty years needs a compute strategy that does not assume today's economics will hold.
The Election Tracking System for the NAE has been in production 24 years. EngineerGirl ran for twenty-five. Systems for the National Academies, the World Bank, and other clients have been rebuilt two and three times, with the same firm, the same relationship, and often the same engineers. Some have not required rebuilding.
Remaining with a client for decades is not sentiment. It is a phase of the work, and it produces something we did not anticipate when we began doing it.
Several of these systems have outlived the staff who commissioned them. When an institution loses the people who held its process knowledge, documentation rarely restores it, because that knowledge was never written down. It lived in the people who had done the work long enough to know why each exception existed, and why some seemingly unnecessary steps were retained to prevent low probability-high consequence breakdowns.
More than once we have found ourselves training a client's new staff not on our application but on their own business processes, because in building the system we had to learn how the work actually ran, in greater detail than anyone had recorded.
That is the clearest evidence we can offer for what we believe about information systems. The knowledge that determines an outcome is rarely in the file. Part of what a long relationship provides is somewhere for it to remain.
We stay with what we build.