Beneficial Intelligence
Sten Vesterli
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A weekly podcast with stories and pragmatic advice for CIOs and other IT leaders.
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Dec 10, 2021
Other People's Failures
In this episode of Beneficial Intelligence, I discuss other people's failures. They can affect you, as the recent Amazon Web Services outage showed.
Cat owners who had trusted the feeding of their felines to internet-connected devices came home to find their homes shredded by hungry cats. People who had automated their lighting sat in darkness, yelling in vain at their Alexa devices for more light. More serious problems also occurred as students couldn't submit assignments, Ticketmaster couldn't sell Adele tickets and helpless investors watched their stocks tank while being unable to sell.
On a personal level, this dependency is an occasional inconvenience. But for companies, it is a problem.
When you buy cloud services directly from Amazon, Microsoft, or Google, at least you know what you depend on, and can take your own precautions.
But your SaaS vendors depend on one of the big three cloud providers. You will find that most of them consider using two different data centers with the same cloud vendor to be plenty of redundancy. It isn't.
Another problem is your "smart" devices that all communicate via the internet to a server controlled by the device vendor. The vendor is running that server in one of the three big clouds. That means an Amazon outage can lock you out of your building.
Some of your systems are business crucial. For these, you need to find out what your vendors depend on. Otherwise, you will be blindsided by other people's failures.
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Beneficial Intelligence is a bi-weekly podcast with stories and pragmatic advice for CIOs, CTOs, and other IT leaders. To get in touch, please contact me at sten@vesterli.com
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Nov 26, 2021
People Shortage
In this episode of Beneficial Intelligence, I discuss the people shortage. It isn't real.
Complaining about a lack of people is what is known as a "half argument." You say what you want, but not what you are willing to give up. That's like a politician promising to build a new public hospital but won't say where the money will come from.
The full argument for missing people is "we cannot get the people we want at the conditions we are willing to offer." If you had a crucial project that will make the business millions of dollars, you would be able to find the resources you need. You could simply offer three times the market rate, full benefits, and a 40-hour workweek with no overtime.
Allocating resources is a basic leadership task. You rank your tasks and projects in order of descending business value and allocate available resources to the most valuable. It doesn't make sense for a CIO to say that the organization is "missing" a hundred programmers. A full argument would be that if we had a hundred extra programmers, we could build a specific IT system that is less valuable than all the current projects.
There might be a real shortage of money or copper or clean water. But there is no shortage of people.
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Beneficial Intelligence is a bi-weekly podcast with stories and pragmatic advice for CIOs, CTOs, and other IT leaders. To get in touch, please contact me at sten@vesterli.com
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Oct 29, 2021
Data Hoarding
In this episode of Beneficial Intelligence, I discuss data hoarding. Gathering too much data costs money and doesn't add value. We think we need all this data to train our AI, but hoarding data is the wrong place to start.
Using a counterproductive metaphor, some say that "data is the new oil." That is a dangerous metaphor with no less than four problems:
* First, data is not fungible like oil is. One barrel of oil is just as valuable as the next barrel. But one data record does not have the same value as another data record.
* Second, data hoarding shows diminishing returns. The value of 100 million barrels of oil is 100 times the value of 1 million barrels. But the value of 100 million transaction records is not 100 times the value of 1 million transaction records.
* Third, the process of refining data into valuable business insight is not repeatable. Anybody can build an oil refinery. That's just a question of money. But extracting value from data is more art than science, and even with the best data scientists, you might still not be able to extract any value from your data.
* Fourth, the value density in data is very low. Everything in a barrel of oil becomes a useful product. But most data records do not provide any business insight.
Gathering data in the hope of extracting value is putting the cart in front of the horse. The right way to work with data is to start with a business goal and a hypothesis about which data might provide insight. Gather the data, run the experiment and evaluate. Don't just hoard data.
Beneficial Intelligence is a bi-weekly podcast with stories and pragmatic advice for CIOs, CTOs, and other IT leaders. To get in touch, please contact me at sten@vesterli.com
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Oct 15, 2021
Monoculture
In this episode of Beneficial Intelligence, I discuss monoculture. Just like in farming, monoculture is efficient and dangerous.
Modern farmers will plan hundreds or thousands of acres with the same crop. That gives efficiency because the entire crop will respond identically to fertilizer and pesticides. It also means that the entire harvest will be lost if some new pest or disease suddenly appears. Monoculture cost more than a million lives in Ireland in the Great Famine of the 1850s.
There is also monoculture in your IT landscape. If all your systems have the same hardware and run the same software, they will all be vulnerable to the same bugs and malware.
Your servers are probably many different types because they have been added over the years. But if you run the same virtualization software on most of them, your entire infrastructure is vulnerable to a bug in your virtualization.
Your workstations are monoculture, and if something takes out Microsoft Windows, you are dead in the water.
But the really dangerous monoculture is found in your network equipment. You probably buy all your gear from one vendor so your network people only need one skill stack. But that means that a vulnerability will expose your entire network.
You don't want to put all your eggs in one basket. If you are concerned with robustness and business continuity, beware of monoculture.
Beneficial Intelligence is a bi-weekly podcast with stories and pragmatic advice for CIOs, CTOs, and other IT leaders. To get in touch, please contact me at sten@vesterli.com
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Oct 1, 2021
Trust, but Verify
In this episode of Beneficial Intelligence, I discuss trusting your vendors. You trust them to make their best effort at producing bug-free code. You probably trust that their software will perform at least 50% of what they promise. You might trust them to eventually build at least some of the features on their roadmap. But can you trust them to not build secret backdoors into the software they give you?
Snowdon showed we cannot trust any large American tech company because they send our data straight into the databases of the National Security Agency. Apparently, you cannot trust Chinese smartphone vendor Xiaomi. The Lithuanian National Cyber Security Centre just published the results of their investigation, and they recommend that people with such phones replace them with non-Xiaomi phones "as fast as reasonably possible."
It turns out these phones send some kind of encrypted data to a server in Singapore, and that it has censorship built in. Phrases such as "Free Tibet" simply cannot be rendered by the browser or any other app. Right now, that feature is not active in Europe, but it might be enabled at any time.
During the nuclear disarmament discussions between the United States and the Soviet Union in the 1980s, Ronald Reagan was fond of quoting a Russian proverb: Doveryay, no proveryay - Trust, but verify. The ability for both parties to verify what the other was doing became a defining feature of the eventual agreement.
In software, we can verify Open Source. If you cannot find open source software that does what you need, many enterprise software vendors will make their source code available to you under reasonable non-disclosure provisions.
In your organization, there should be both trust and verification. Don't simply trust your software vendors. Trust, but verify.
Beneficial Intelligence is a bi-weekly podcast with stories and pragmatic advice for CIOs, CTOs, and other IT leaders. To get in touch, please contact me at sten@vesterli.com
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Sep 17, 2021
Time to Recover
In this episode of Beneficial Intelligence, I discuss time to recover. The entire network of the justice ministry of South Africa has been disabled by ransomware, and they don't know when they'll be back. Do you know how long it would take you to recover each system your organization is running?
When you have an IT outage, what the business wants most is a realistic timeline for when services will be back. If IT can confidently tell them that it will take 72 hours to restore services, the business knows what they are dealing with. They can inform their stakeholders and make informed decisions about in which areas manual procedures or alternative workflows should be implemented. The worst thing IT can do in such a case is to keep promising "a few hours" for days in a row.
In the 1980s, I was working for Hewlett-Packard. They had a large LED scrolling display mounted over their open-plan office. The only time it was ever used was when their main email and calendar system was unexpectedly down, telling everyone when it would be back up.
In the 1990s, I was doing military service in the Royal Danish Air Force as a Damage Control Officer. After an attack, I had to tell the base commander how much runway we had available. I had planned our reconnaissance and could confidently say that I would know in less than 28 minutes af the all-clear.
In the early 2000s, I was working with database professionals. These people spent much of their time preparing to recover their databases. They had practiced recovery many times and knew exactly how long recovery would take.
As the CIO, take a look at the list of your system. It needs to list the expected time to recover for every system. The technical person for the system should verify that this time has been tested recently, and the business responsible should verify that this time is acceptable. If you don't have a documented time to recover per system, you need to put your people to work to create it.
Beneficial Intelligence is a bi-weekly podcast with stories and pragmatic advice for CIOs, CTOs, and other IT leaders. To get in touch, please contact me at sten@vesterli.com
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Sep 3, 2021
Goal Fixation
In this episode of Beneficial Intelligence, I discuss goal fixation. Richard Branson almost didn't make it back from space. His pilots had a problem and flew very close to the limit. They should have aborted. But the future of commercial spaceflight was resting on their shoulders. They were fixated on the goal, and that causes problems.
The reason we are finding out is that authorities noticed the flight was outside its designated airspace because stronger winds than expected caused the flight to have a different profile. The pilots got a red light ENTRY GLIDE CONE WARN. That means the spacecraft is so far from the planned course that it might not reach the place it has to be to glide to the landing site. The correct checklist approach is to abort the mission. But this was a highly-billed first commercial flight with the founder on board. The pilots pressed on. They managed to go to space and return safely. But they were dangerously close to the edge.
People die because they get fixated on the goal and push on. Mountaineers continue towards the summit after the safe turnaround time, and pilots fly into bad weather. Some of the well-known people we've lost to pilot goal fixation include basketball legend Kobe Bryant and Polish President Lech Kaczyński.
We see the same thing in failed IT projects. Multi-year, million-dollar projects keep collapsing ignominiously without anything to show for all the effort. This happens due to goal fixation.
Tragically, the problem is completely invisible to project sponsors who feel part of their reputation is on the line as sponsors of the project. It is also invisible to the program management and project leaders inside the project.
There are two solutions. One is to listen to the people on the ground. The programmers and testers know that a project will fail. The other is to get an independent outside opinion. That's what I provide to my customers. If you don't have a process for gathering in-the-trenches information, or an outside advisor, or preferably both, you are likely to fall prey to goal fixation.
Beneficial Intelligence is a bi-weekly podcast with stories and pragmatic advice for CIOs, CTOs, and other IT leaders. To get in touch, please contact me at sten@vesterli.com
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Aug 20, 2021
Narrow Focus
In this episode of Beneficial Intelligence, I discuss the narrow focus of IT professionals. This is an unavoidable consequence of the complexity of the technology we use. We've had to learn to give our computers very exact instructions, and that informs our thinking.
The app from my local supermarket is obviously built by people with a narrow focus. If I search for "sugar," the first hit is "pickled cucumber (sugar-free)." The Amazon app, on the other hand, is built by people with a wider focus. Whatever you search for, Amazon will always give you a suggestion.
When IT organizations try to hire, they will come up with a long list of technologies and programming languages. Unfortunately, nobody matches the entire list, and no one is hired. Successful organizations instead ask for recommendations and interviews to find people with energy and willingness to learn.
In the IT industry, we call something Artificial Intelligence if it can succeed at some very narrow task like recognizing cats in videos. Unfortunately, the word "intelligence" means something much wider to everyone else. When Tesla talks about "autopilot," they mean something that can stay on the road at a constant speed. In a narrow sense, a Tesla has an autopilot. In the wider sense, drivers expect that word to mean a car that drives itself.
A narrow focus is a quality in an IT professional. There is no need to change them, and they do not get a wider focus by being sent on a User Experience (UX) boot camp or a three-day Product Owner course. Your teams need people with a wider focus. That's something that UX professionals and real product owners from the business can give you. That's why the best IT organizations employ anthropologists to study users. It is your job as an IT leader to ensure you have people with both narrow and broad focus.
Beneficial Intelligence is a bi-weekly podcast with stories and pragmatic advice for CIOs, CTOs, and other IT leaders. To get in touch, please contact me at sten@vesterli.com
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Aug 6, 2021
Back to the Office
In this episode of Beneficial Intelligence, I discuss whether you should force people back to the office. This will be your most important leadership decision this year.
Apple told everyone to report back to the office. Apple CEO Tim Cook says that "in-person collaboration is essential to our culture." Google is expecting 20% of employees to work from home in the long term, while Facebook is expecting 50% remote work. The big Wall Street banks, on the other hand, require everyone back in their New York offices five days a week.
Remote working presents two problems: Culture and promotion.
* Management guru Peter Drucker said, "culture eats strategy for breakfast." That means your culture and the implicit knowledge is much stronger than anything you write down. Your culture is how you actually do things, which is sometimes very different from the written rules. New hires can only assimilate the culture in person through small talk and watching others. We are already seeing lower retention among new hires that joined during the pandemic.
* The second problem is promotion. You are an enlightened leader who will not let your promotion decisions be influenced by whether someone is in the office every day. But other leaders in your organizations will be less able to overcome the bias towards people they see in person. The data is clear. The more you are in the office, the quicker you will be promoted. Unfortunately, the people who say they want to work more at home are women and minorities. Exactly the people you need more of in your leadership team.
Deciding on a remote working policy is your most important leadership task right now. Not making a decision and letting people work it out for themselves is the worst option. It will mean that experienced employees will stay at home and the new hires will wander the halls of empty offices, quickly quitting again. And your leadership team will become less diverse.
Your job as a leader is not to be popular. Your job is to do make decisions that ensure your organization meets its goals. This year, that is likely to involve forcing some people back to the office.
Beneficial Intelligence is a bi-weekly podcast with stories and pragmatic advice for CIOs, CTOs, and other IT leaders. To get in touch, please contact me at sten@vesterli.com
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Jul 23, 2021
Humans and Computers
In this episode of Beneficial Intelligence, I discuss humans and computers. Jeff Bezos went to space in a fully autonomous computer-controlled rocket. Richard Branson went to space last week, and he had humans flying his spacecraft.
The Silicon Valley mindset is that you can program or train computers to do anything. However, as the continuing struggle to build truly self-driving cars has shown, some things are still very, very hard for computers. Even Elon Musk, who claims his Teslas are self-driving, has manual controls on his spacecraft, SpaceX Crew Dragon.
Jeff Bezos remains fully committed to the power of computers, and computers will fire Amazon workers automatically if they don't perform as the algorithm expects. Richard Branson, on the other hand, is an entrepreneur. He has founded dozens of companies and made them successful by believing in humans. He hires good people, gives them resources and direction, and lets them do their thing.
The first human spaceflight program of the United States was Project Mercury. NASA initially subscribed to the computer-centric school of thought. But the highly trained astronauts rebelled and demanded a window so they could fly the spacecraft if needed. Fortunately, they got their way. On the last Mercury mission, astronaut Gordon Cooper saved his life and the U.S. space program by hand-flying his craft back to earth after multiple equipment failures.
You can implement IT systems in two ways. Either the computer is in charge, and the human can intervene. Or the human is in charge, and the computer assists. What's your approach?
Beneficial Intelligence is a weekly podcast with stories and pragmatic advice for CIOs, CTOs, and other IT leaders. To get in touch, please contact me at sten@vesterli.com
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Jul 9, 2021
Competition
In this episode of Beneficial Intelligence, I discuss competition. Billionaires Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson are competing who gets to space first, with both likely to blast off within the next two weeks.
Competition is one of the great forces propelling the world forward. Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic spacecraft is based on SpaceShipOne that won the Ansari X Prize back in 2004. That prize was for a private spacecraft that could go to the edge of space twice in two weeks. It seemed impossible, but aerospace genius Burt Rutan with funding from Microsoft billionaire Paul Allen claimed the prize.
In the early part of the 20th century, the Schneider Prize similarly spurred innovation in aviation. The 1931 winner became the basis of the Spitfire fighter aircraft that won the Battle of Britain in 1940.
Self-driving cars come from the DARPA Grand Challenge. In 2004, no car could autonomously drive more than 7 miles. The next year, competition between especially Stanford University an…
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Jun 25, 2021
Pseudo-Security
In this episode of Beneficial Intelligence, I discuss pseudo-security. The lock on your front door is not secure. It takes an experienced locksmith an average of 7.1 seconds to manually an average door lock, and it's even faster with a "pick gun."
If locks are so bad, why don't we have even more burglaries? Because your total security does not only depend on the lock. A would-be burglar has to contend with the risk of somebody being home, neighbors noticing you, a camera on someone else's house recording you, and cops grabbing you and putting you in jail.
Like locks, passwords also do not protect you. At least one of your thousands of users has re-used the company password somewhere else. That means it will end up in one of the large hacker databases where identities can be bought for pennies. Then a hacker can sit comfortably in a basement in Moscow and run software to try thousands of username/password combinations with zero chance of being caught.
In the military, I learned that…
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Jun 18, 2021
Good Enough
In this episode of Beneficial Intelligence, I discuss how to choose what is good enough.
How do you know when something is good enough? That requires good judgment, which is unfortunately in short supply.
IT used in aviation, pharma, and a few other life-and-death industries are subject to strict standards. We can lean on standards like the GxP requirements that anyone in the pharma industry loves to hate. However, in the general IT industry, we have lots of standards, but none of them are mandatory. That's why each week seems to bring a new horror story of an organization that believed their IT was good enough and found out it wasn't.
Southwest Airlines learned that first-hand this week. On Monday, they couldn't fly because the connection to their weather data provider was down. On Tuesday, they couldn't fly because the connection from airports to the central reservation system was down. If you don't know who is supposed to be on the plane, you can't fly. They ended up canceling mo…
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Jun 4, 2021
Unnecessary Roadblocks
In this episode of Beneficial Intelligence, I discuss unnecessary roadblocks. Amazon has a problem finding enough workers, and they have decided to get rid of an unnecessary roadblock: They will no longer test people for marijuana use. As marijuana becomes legal in more and more states, Amazon decided they only need to test truck drivers and forklift operators, not everyone.
IT organizations are also always complaining that they can't find the people they need. There are three reasons for this: Bad business cases, unrealistic requirements, and unnecessary roadblocks.
If you don't have a good business case, you can't pay what talent costs. In this case, it's better for the world that IT professionals go somewhere where they can create more value.
If you are requiring a laundry list of database architectures, programming languages, and architecture patterns, you are indicating to prospective applicants that you don't really know what you want. That's a turnoff for most professionals.…
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May 28, 2021
Expectation Management
In this episode of Beneficial Intelligence, I discuss expectation management. I was doing a small renovation project in our summer cottage, and I needed a special type of hinge. I found it on the website of our local building supplies store, but when I got to the store, it wasn't there. It turned out that this store was part of a co-branded chain. They had an aspirational website showing all the items a shop could potentially carry, but each shop would actually sell only their own idiosyncratic collection of items. The store did not meet my expectation, and I will not go back there.
You also want to meet or exceed the expectations of the users of your IT systems, no matter if they are internal users, external partners, or customers. The problem with achieving that is that IT professionals are notoriously bad at putting themselves in the users' place.
The secret to meeting user expectations is to ask real users. You don't need a fancy usability lab to do that. Usability guru Jakob Nie…
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May 7, 2021
Gaming the Metrics
In this episode of Beneficial Intelligence, I discuss gaming the metrics. We measure things to be able to manage them. But when we start using metrics to reward individual employees and teams, people will start gaming them. Newton's third law for business says that for every system the organization implements, the employees will implement an equal and opposite workaround that negates the system.
Amazon is managing a huge workforce of delivery drivers. To ensure they drive safely, they require drivers to be logged in to a mobile phone app. The app uses the accelerometer to measure acceleration, braking, and other parameters and gives each driver a score. But because Amazon is also ruthlessly pushing their small subcontractors to deliver a lot of packages very quickly, the delivery companies have started instructing their drivers to game the metrics. Drivers say they are instructed to drive very carefully for the first two hours each day to achieve a good score. After that, they are als…
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Apr 30, 2021
Accidental Publication
In this episode of Beneficial Intelligence, I discuss accidental publication. There are two ways organizations lose data: Through break-ins and through carelessness. It is hard to protect your systems against determined hackers, but it should not be hard to protect yourself against carelessness. Strangely, this is just as big a source of data leaks as determined hacker attacks.
Some accidental losses are the result of individual failures to follow procedures. The British MI6 is famous for losing classified laptops in taxis and having them stolen from unattended cars. In Denmark, the health authorities produced two unencrypted CD-ROMs with data on every Danish citizen and their illnesses. They were accidentally sent to the Chinese embassy instead of the national statistics authority.
Other losses happen because organizations are accidentally publishing data to the entire world. By now, every tech journalist who sees a ?id=48375 in a web address will try to change the number to somethi…
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Apr 23, 2021
Irrational Optimism
In this episode of Beneficial Intelligence, I discuss irrational optimism. IT people are too optimistic. It is a natural consequence of our ability to build something from nothing. Our creations are not subject to gravity or other laws of physics. A builder cannot decide halfway through a construction project that he wants to swap out the foundation, but IT regularly changes the framework in mid-project.
Similar optimism informs our project plans. For some reason, we assume that everything will go the way we plan it. Fred Brooks first wrote about programmer optimism in his classic "The Mythical Man-Month" back in 1975. He points out that there is indeed a certain probability that each task will be completed on schedule. But because modern IT projects consist of hundreds of tasks, the probability of every one going right is low. Even with an unrealistic 99% chance of success, having only 100 tasks reduces the overall probability of all tasks to finish on schedule to 37%.
Sadly, our ir…
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Apr 16, 2021
Risk Aversion
In this episode of Beneficial Intelligence, I discuss risk aversion. The U.S. has stopped distributing the Johnson & Johnson vaccine. It has been given to more than 7 million people, and there have been six reported cases of blood clotting. Here in Denmark, we have stopped giving the Astra Zeneca vaccine because of one similar case. That is not risk management, that is risk aversion.
There is a classic short story from 1911 by Stephen Leacock called "The Man in Asbestos." It is from the time where fire-resistant asbestos was considered one of the miracle materials of the future. The narrator travels to the future to find a drab and risk-averse society where aging has been eliminated together with all disease. People can only die from accidents, which is why everybody wears fire-resistant asbestos clothes, railroads and cars are outlawed, and society becomes completely stagnant.
We are moving in that direction. Large organizations have departments of innovation prevention, often calle…
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Apr 9, 2021
Biased Data
In this episode of Beneficial Intelligence, I discuss biased data. Machine Learning depends on large data sets, and unless you take care, ML algorithms will perpetuate any bias in the data it learns from.
The famous ImageNet database contains 14 million labeled images. However, 6% of these have the wrong label. The labels are provided by humans paid very little per image, so they will work very fast. Unfortunately, as Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman has shown, when humans work fast, they depend on their fast System 1 thinking that is very prone to bias. Thus, a woman in hospital scrubs is likely to be classified "nurse" and a man in the same clothes is likely to be classified "doctor."
Google Translate was showing its bias when translating from Hungarian. Hungarian only has a gender-neutral pronoun, but the English translation was given a pronoun. The original gender-neutral phrases became "she does the dishes" and "he reads" in English.
As CIO or CTO, you need to make sure someb…
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Mar 26, 2021
Price transparency
In this episode of Beneficial Intelligence, I discuss price transparency. In the U.S., a coronavirus test can cost $56 if you pay yourself, but $450 if your health insurance pays it. This lack of price transparency makes the U.S. healthcare system the most expensive in the world, costing the US 17% of GDP. Every other industrialized country is below 12%. There are now laws requiring hospitals to publish their prices, but they deliberately hide them from the search engines.
You see the same kind of price obfuscation with cloud vendors, who carefully charge separately for CPU, RAM, storage, network traffic, and make sure that one vendor's CPU is not equivalent to another vendor's CPU.
When you buy proprietary software, you have better price transparency, unless you sign up for one of the "unlimited" licenses the vendors are pushing. Open source has an initial cost of zero, but unless you go with a well-known and popular tool, the true cost can be hard to gauge.
When you are looking fo…
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Mar 19, 2021
Blaming the Humans
In this episode of Beneficial Intelligence, I discuss blaming the humans. It often happens that a system failure is attributed to fallible humans. In that way, you don't have to admit embarrassing shortcomings in your system.
A recently declassified report showed that a weapons officer blamed for accidentally firing a missile back in the 1980s was actually the victim of a system error. Boeing initially tried to pin the blame for the 737 MAX-8 crashes on pilot error. Last year, Citibank accidentally paid out $900 million instead of just the few million they intended. They blame a back employee, not the archaic bank system that allowed the error.
If we look only at the last link of an accident chain, we find a human. But behind the human error is a system that created the situation where the human could err. The Harpoon missile system was eventually fixed. The Boeing 737 flight control software was fixed. And Citibank is looking at a long-overdue replacement of their arcane backend sys…
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Mar 12, 2021
Wasting Money
In this episode of Beneficial Intelligence, I discuss wasting money. The business always complains that IT is costing too much. That is because we are wasting so much money. We're on track for worldwide IT spending of about 4 trillion, and surveys show that at least 25% of that is wasted. That's one trillion dollars we waste.
IT organizations waste money in two ways: With what we build, and with what we run.
It's a time-honored tradition in IT to never retire an old system. We keep everything running forever, even though the business benefit has long since evaporated. We might suspect that a specific system is not providing business benefit. But we don't know if anybody might be using the system for something. So we keep it running. To address this kind of waste, have someone examine the system logs to find who uses the system. If you have an old system without proper instrumentation, you might need have your network people to look at the network traffic to identify unused or barely-…
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Mar 5, 2021
Moving Fast
In this episode of Beneficial Intelligence, I discuss moving fast. Mark Zuckerberg is famous for saying "Move fast and break things." That was his way of communicating a preference for high speed, accepting high risk. It has become an unofficial motto of Silicon Valley, but Facebook now has billions of users and today have a different risk profile.
Elon Musk, on the other hand, moves fast and breaks things. He is launching SpaceX Starships as a furious pace, and the landings often end up in spectacular fireballs. He had one rocket blow up on landing in December, and another in February. This month, he managed to get one to land, only to blow up shortly after landing. But he is in a hurry, and he can afford to lose dozens of rockets.
As CIO or CTO, you also need to move fast. Speed is what the business most wants from IT, and what we are least able to deliver. If we don't deliver speed, the business will run crucial business processes in faulty spreadsheets, or swipe a credit card in…
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Feb 26, 2021
User Experience Disasters
In this episode of Beneficial Intelligence, I discuss User Experience disasters. Danes consistently rank among the happiest people in the world, but I can tell you for sure that it is not the public sector IT we use that make us happy. We have a very expensive welfare state financed with very high taxes, but all that money does not buy us good user experience.
Good User Experience (UX) is not expensive, but it does require that you can put yourself in the user's place and that you talk to users. That is a separate IT specialty, and many teams try to do without it. It doesn't end well. Systems with bad UX do not deliver the expected business value, and sometimes are not used at all. A system that is functionally OK but that the users can't or won't use is known as a user experience disaster.
We have a web application for booking coronavirus testing here in Denmark. First you choose a site, then you chose a data, and then you are told there are no times available at that site on that d…
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Feb 19, 2021
Contingency Plans
In this episode of Beneficial Intelligence, I discuss contingency plans. Texas was not prepared for the cold, and millions lost power. Amid furious finger-pointing, it turns out that none of the recommendations from the report after the last power outage have been implemented, and suggestions from the report after the outage in 1989 were not implemented either.
As millions of Texas turned up the heat in their uninsulated homes, demand surged. At the same time, wind turbines froze. Then the natural gas wells and pipelines froze. Then the rivers where the nuclear power plants take cooling water from froze. And finally the generators on the coal-powered plants froze. They could burn coal, but not generate electricity. You can built wind turbines that will run in the cold, and you can winterize other equipment with insulation and special winter-capable lubricants. But that is more expensive, and Texas decided to save that money.
The problem could have been solved if Texas could get energ…
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Feb 12, 2021
Risk and Reward
In this episode of Beneficial Intelligence, I discuss risks and rewards. Humans are a successful species because we are good at calculating risks and rewards. Similarly, organizations are successful if they are good at calculating the risks they face and the rewards they can gain.
Different people have different risk profiles, and companies also have different appetite for risk. Industries like aerospace and pharmaceuticals face large consequences if something goes wrong and have a low risk tolerance. Hedge funds, on the other hand, takes big risks to reap large rewards.
It is easy to create incentives for building things fast and cheap, but it is harder to create incentives that reward quality. Most organizations don't bother with quality incentives and try to ensure quality through QA processes instead. As Boeing found out, even a strong safety culture does not protect against misaligned incentives.
As an IT leader at any level, it is your job to consider the impact of your incent…
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Feb 5, 2021
Do the Right Thing
In this episode of Beneficial Intelligence, I discuss doing the right thing. Google started out with a motto of "Don't be evil," but that has fallen by the wayside. Occasionally, employees remind Google of the old motto as when they forced Google to stop working on AI for the Pentagon. But they don't seem terribly committed, and their highly touted Ethical AI Team is falling apart after they fired the head researcher.
Amazon never promised not to be evil, and they are forcing their delivery drivers to do 10-hour graveyard shifts starting before sunrise and going until mid-day. They are trying to avoid tired drivers causing accidents by installing cameras and AI in the vans so the computer can detect when the worker is falling asleep behind the wheel and can wake him up.
Consulting giant McKinsey don't consider themselves evil either. They are just good at increasing profits for companies. While they claim no wrongdoing, they just settled a lawsuit paying $600 million for the advice t…
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Jan 29, 2021
Amateurs and Professionals
In this episode of Beneficial Intelligence, I discuss amateurs and professionals. Recently, Gamestock shares have gone through the roof. That's because professionals were betting that the stock would fall, and amateur investors meeting on the internet decided to buy up all the stock they could. The amateurs seem to have won this battle, inflicting billions of dollars of losses on the professionals.
Amateurs also build IT systems, but in IT, the amateurs always lose. At JP Morgan, a trader built a model in Excel. He made a small error in his formula, made bad trades, and the bank lost $6 billion. In the UK health service, a coronavirus tracking system was built on an ancient version of Microsoft Excel, and people got ill and died because of bad contact tracing.
The amateurs build systems because they can do it faster than IT. They are faster because they have less testing, failure handling and other things professionals implement.
As the CIO, it is your job to establish a good collab…
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Jan 15, 2021
Robustness
In this episode of Beneficial Intelligence, I discuss *robustness*. Robustness is a system's ability to keep running when parts of it are knocked out. This week we saw Parler, a social media platform used by Trump supporters, being taken out by their cloud provider Amazon. They did not have robustness.
The Pirate Bay, on the other hand, has robustness. Governments and big media companies have tried to put them out of business for two decades, and they are still up and running.
On-premise systems had a certain robustness built in - even if you got into an argument with your database vendor over licensing, your application would continue to run. But if you get into a dispute with a cloud vendor, your system can be terminated at any time.
As the CIO, you need to take a look at your systems list and determine which systems are the priority systems that are essential for your business to run. Then as your architects to verify that these systems are robust, and ask what it would take to m…
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Dec 11, 2020
Knowledge Decay
In this episode of Beneficial Intelligence, I discuss knowledge decay. Knowledge decays over time, and skills you don't use become rusty. That's why it's a problem for out-of-work pilots that they're not flying.
Some knowledge decays and becomes less useful because the world moves on. An old-school telephone engineer's knowledge of electro-mechanical switches became irrelevant as phone exchanges became digital. Your knowledge of last month's hot JavaScript framework might be less relevant this month because there is now a newer and hotter toolkit.
But organizational knowledge decays much slower. That's why the knowledge in the heads of your experienced developers is still valuable, and you cannot just replace them with someone with the right tools on their CV.
It is your job as an IT leader to manage the knowledge of the people in your organization. For rapidly decaying technical knowledge, you need to offer constant learning opportunities so you don't lose the valuable long-term kn…
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Nov 27, 2020
Value for Money
In this episode of Beneficial Intelligence, I discuss getting value for your money. It's Black Friday, and all shops are offering incredible deals. Unfortunately, they don't necessarily provide value for money, because prices have been creeping up for months in order to be able to fall today.
Similarly, we are building a lot of IT systems that don't provide value for money. We just got an app here in Denmark that will allow you to keep your driving license on your phone. I don't replace the plastic card you already have, so the only people getting value from this is the people who remember their phones, forget their license, and get pulled over.
Is it really a good use of $7 million to build a system to prevent a few forgetful drivers from getting fined for driving without carrying their license? Or could that money have been spent better on more Coronavirus vaccines?
All IT projects should publicize the value they are providing so they can justify the cost. If you make that the sta…
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Nov 20, 2020
Exit Strategies
In this episode of Beneficial Intelligence, I discuss exit strategies. History is full of examples of powerful countries that started military adventures without having an exit strategy.
Commercial relationships also need an exit strategy. If you are running standard on-premise systems, moving away to another vendor is manageable, but if you are using specialized features that only one vendor offers, your exit is going to be expensive and difficult. This is even worse in the cloud where each vendor has specific strengths and their own way of doing things.
The exit cost is part of the total cost of ownership, and you need to calculate upfront what it will cost you to get out again.
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Beneficial Intelligence is a weekly podcast with stories and pragmatic advice for CIOs and other IT leaders. To get in touch, please contact me at sten@vesterli.com
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Nov 13, 2020
Too Much Technology
In this episode of Beneficial Intelligence, I discuss the tendency to use too much technology. As technology enthusiasts, we must be aware of our tendency to implement technology where it doesn't really improve things.
There is an Israeli startup that is building autonomous flying drones to pick apples. In my keynote "Everything that's wrong with IT," I talk about my internet-connected socks. In my house, I have various "smart" devices that allow me to control the lights. Over the past month, I've ripped out two different malfunctioning systems and replaced them with the simple on/off switches I used to have. And now I can control my lights again.
We need to do a proper cost/benefit analysis and to evaluate the added risk by replacing humans (with common sense) with computers (without common sense). Our natural optimism leads us to underestimate the costs, overestimate the benefits, and under-appreciate the risks. We need to be aware of this so we can compensate for our own bias and…
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Nov 6, 2020
The War for Talent
In this episode of Beneficial Intelligence, I discuss the War for Talent. Every organization wants the most talented programmers, administrators, UX designers, and other talent. But they want it cheaply. New salary requirements for H-1B visas in the US have companies howling that they can't get the talent they need.
But there isn't a shortage of talent, there is a shortage of willingness to pay.
If you have a good business case, you can afford the talent needed to make that product a reality. The problem is that IT organizations have their thinking reversed. Instead of going from business case to budget, they go from budget to business case.
So what can you do? Long-term, you need to orient your mindset towards business value and engage the business in a discussion of the value of every new project. Short-term, you need to set a strategic direction together with your leadership team and your employees, so you can direct your efforts and grow your own talent with the skills you have…
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Oct 30, 2020
Securing Your Data
In this episode of Beneficial Intelligence, I discuss classifying and securing your data.
Military forces have always needed to keep secrets, and they have hundreds of years of experience. You can learn from them.
They use different classifications for different information, from UNCLASSIFIED over RESTRICTED to CONFIDENTIAL, SECRET, and TOP SECRET. That allows the organization to implement simple rules for handling and allowing access to information.
Most organizations haven't changed their security policies since the only security you had was to lock important papers in a filing cabinet. You also need a security classification, and you need the business owner for each system to determine what the most sensitive information in each system is. When you have that information, ask the technical person responsible for the system for the security plan. You don't want to examine the details, but you want to make sure that more sensitive information is better protected.
If you have a secu…
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Oct 23, 2020
How many humans do you need?
In this episode of Beneficial Intelligence, I discuss how much automated support systems can do, and how many humans you need.
Thousands of customers of online brokerage Robinhood have been hacked, and have watched helplessly as hackers sold their stock and emptied their accounts. Robinhood does not have anybody you can call.
We've been trying to automate customer service for a long time, and it has never worked completely. The real world is messy and requires human judgment. Customers will accept chatbots as the first line of support if they are honest about their limitations. But you need to offer an option to talk to a human.
If you have a significant volume of requests, do play with chatbots. But if you can't build a business case based on saving less than 10% in support manpower, you need to way for the technology to improve. Wait for the automated solution to take over a significant volume of requests before you reassign anybody from customer service. And you will still need h…
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Oct 9, 2020
Deadly incompetence
In this episode of Beneficial Intelligence, I discuss deadly incompetence.
Some people are more competent than others, and it is a leadership challenge to place people in positions where the organization can make the most of their competence. It is also the task of the leader not to place anyone in a position where lack of competence can have large negative results.
Unfortunately, someone at Public Health England was placed in a critical position without the necessary competence. PHE was gathering coronavirus data from all over the country in the form of CSV files and were gathering all of the data into an ancient Excel spreadsheet. That old version had a limitation of 65,000 rows. That meant that over a period of eight days, more than 15,000 cases were silently discarded. They were not reported to the contact tracing teams, no contact tracing happened, more people will have gotten ill, and some of them will die.
As a CIO, you need to make sure you know which systems on your systems…
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Oct 2, 2020
Vendor Selection
In this episode of Beneficial Intelligence, I discuss vendor selection.
When selecting a vendor, most organizations use vendor size as one of the criteria. Normally, the vendor gets points for being big, on the reasonable assumption that a large organization is more likely to have the resources to complete the implementation project.
But it is equally important that the vendor is not too big. Small organizations have a different culture from large organizations and having a small vendor deliver to a large customer, or a large vendor deliver to a small customer causes problems.
Ideally, your vendor size should be in the same order of magnitude as your IT organization. If you have hundreds of people in your IT organization, you will have the smoothest project if your vendor has a total headcount in the hundreds. If your IT organization is in the tens of thousands, look for a vendor that also has a headcount in the tens of thousands.
As a CIO, you should check if your vendor selection…
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Sep 25, 2020
Undetected Downtime
In this episode of Beneficial Intelligence, I discuss undetected downtime.
Undetected downtime is one of the deadly sins of IT. If the business has to tell us that one of our systems is down, and we don't know, it undermines their trust in us.
The infrastructure behind the Danish contact tracing app was down this week, and red-faced health officials had to admit that it had been down for days before news reports forced them to take the end-user reports of downtime seriously.
A reason that this happens is that we might neglect to build monitoring capability into custom-built components in our environment. But that should not cause undetected downtime. We can monitor all the standard components like databases. We normally only monitor if the load is too high, but we should also monitor if the load is too low. If suddenly nobody is accessing the database, we have something we should investigate.
As a CIO, you should ask your operations team if they are monitoring both ends of the heal…
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Sep 18, 2020
Dishonest Demos
In this episode of Beneficial Intelligence, I discuss dishonest demos. Why is it that it has become normal for IT professionals to demonstrate software in a way that misrepresents what it is capable of?
One reason is that there are no negative consequences for over-promising. It has become ingrained in our way of doing business to run dishonest demos.
As a CIO, you need to put a stop to this behavior. It erodes trust in IT, and it allows dishonesty to spread. When new functionality is being demoed at the end of an agile sprint, you should not allow developers to demo it. Only an actual business end user is allowed to demo. You must ask your teams "Is this demo a realistic representation of what the software can do TODAY?"
It is your task as a CIO to root out this bad behavior that has accumulated over decades.
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Beneficial Intelligence is a weekly podcast with stories and pragmatic advice for CIOs and other IT leaders. To get in touch, please contact me at sten@vesterli.com
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Sep 11, 2020
Permanent Change
In this episode of Beneficial Intelligence, I discuss handling change. The world changes constantly - have you ever been in an airport that wasn't expanding or rebuilding? You would think that we in IT would be good at handling change. After all, we are not moving tons of earth or pouring massive amounts of concrete. But we are surprisingly bad at it.
It takes us a long time to make even simple changes because we have allowed ourselves to implement overly complex processes. Complexity grows by itself, and only the CIO can reduce it.
When I work with organizations to increase their responsiveness, I ask each team how fast they can implement a simple change. There is a lot of variation, and the slowest teams can very often learn from the faster teams. Some teams can move a change from idea to code running in production in less than an hour.
If you don't constantly fight to make your IT organization faster, the business will implement their own systems to the detriment of the organizat…
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Sep 4, 2020
Jetpack systems
In this episode of Beneficial Intelligence, I discuss Jetpack systems - powerful but uncontrolled systems implemented by the business without coordination with IT.
In aviation, we have learned to separate the casual traffic in small aircraft from the serious commercial traffic in large airplanes. The commercial traffic operates on detailed IFR flight plans and flies in airspace controlled by Air Traffic Control on the ground. Outside of controlled airspace, the little planes can fly using visual flight rules just like pilots did at the dawn of aviation.
In IT, we have a similar distinction between the serious enterprise systems - carefully controlled with change management procedures and detailed go-live plans - and ad-hoc systems, typically built by the business without coordination with IT.
Sometimes, the two worlds collide, as when a Jetpack apparently intruded into controlled airspace near Los Angeles International Airport. Similarly, the business sometimes buys a powerful jetpa…
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Aug 28, 2020
Shiny Object Syndrome
In this episode of Beneficial Intelligence, I discuss Shiny Object Syndrome - the tendency to want to replace perfectly adequate systems with something new, just because it's new. Aviation is full of this, with a new startup every month promising to disrupt air transportation with something AI-driven and autonomous built from scratch out of carbon fiber.
IT also suffers from this. The problem in IT is internal, not external. Our users don't suffer from Shiny Object Syndrome - they just want their technology to work so they can do what provides value for the business. But developers always want to use the latest language, framework or architecture, in part because it will look good on their CV.
Unique among aviation startups, and despite their Star Wars-sounding name, X-Wing doesn't suffer from Shiny Object Syndrome. They are taking a solid workhorse aircraft with a proven safety record, the Cessna Grand Caravan, and adding the few bits that are missing.
When you need something in yo…
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Jul 2, 2020
Learning from Failure
In this episode of Beneficial Intelligence, I discuss how to learn from failure. The Boeing 737 MAX8 aircraft just returned to the skies for the first test flights this week. After two fatal crashes, Boeing has fixed the malfunctioning MCAS software, but they also looked at the design and review process that allowed the defective software to be approved in the first place. That led to other improvements, making the 737 MAX8 even safer.
In IT, we sadly do not learn from our failures in this way, and still routinely fly projects into the ground in the same way we did 20 years ago. To fix this, IT leaders need to show interest in the failures that happen in the organization. If you ask for the after-action report for every priority 1 bug and outage, and every retrospective hits your desk, your organization will start implementing improvements and learn from failure.
Beneficial Intelligence is a weekly podcast with stories and pragmatic advice for CIOs and other IT leaders. To get in tou…
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Jun 25, 2020
Business Cases
In this episode of Beneficial Intelligence, I discuss how to evaluate business cases. In a Low Value Maturity organization, the cost of creating and running a system is not systematically compared to the benefits. In a High Value Maturity organization, the business presents the expected benefits, and IT provides the cost. It is imperative that IT presents both the initial and ongoing costs to prevent under-funding. When you bring the benefit and the cost together, the High Value Maturity organization can calculate the payback period for a project and compare it to other investment opportunities. This allows the organization to make good decisions about IT investments.
Beneficial Intelligence is a weekly podcast with stories and pragmatic advice for CIOs and other IT leaders. To get in touch, please contact me at sten@vesterli.com
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Jun 18, 2020
Performance Measurements
In this episode of Beneficial Intelligence, I discuss how to measure performance. The famous Hawthorne experiment shows that simply measuring a process affects it. This can lead to dysfunctional consequences, but if you let your employees and teams suggest goals, and ensure that the goals balance each other so they cannot be gamed, you can get the benefit of performance measurement without the drawbacks.
Beneficial Intelligence is a weekly podcast with stories and pragmatic advice for CIOs and other IT leaders. To get in touch, please contact me at sten@vesterli.com
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Jun 11, 2020
The Cost of Downtime
In this episode of Beneficial Intelligence, I discuss how to calculate the cost of downtime. Downtime cost is not linear, so you have to consider the cost and probability of different downtime intervals. I talk about the downtime considerations you need to make when considering a cloud solution, as well as how to determine if a high availability option is worth the cost. Your job is to find the lowest total cost, and downtime cost is part of that calculation.
Beneficial Intelligence is a weekly podcast with stories and pragmatic advice for CIOs and other IT leaders. To get in touch, please contact me at sten@vesterli.com
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Jun 4, 2020
Managing Complexity
In this episode of Beneficial Intelligence, I discuss how to manage the complexity in IT organizations. We keep running into the wall of complexity where even the smallest change takes an immense effort. This is caused by our organization, as Melvin Conway discovered when he coined "Conway's Law" back in 1967. But we can also use Conway's Law to our advantage and step away from the wall of complexity.
Beneficial Intelligence is a weekly podcast with stories and pragmatic advice for CIOs and other IT leaders. To get in touch, please contact me at sten@vesterli.com
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May 27, 2020
Natural Experiments
In this episode of Beneficial Intelligence, I tell you a few stories of how science has used natural experiments to gather knowledge that was hard to find. The changes to your processes caused by coronavirus is also a natural experiment, and you should compare the old way of doing things with the way you were doing them during the crisis. You might find that you learned a better way to do many things.
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May 21, 2020
The Speed of Decay
In this episode of Beneficial Intelligence, I discuss how the different layers in your IT architecture decays at different rates. The data layer changes slowly with a half-life of around a decade. The business logic changes every few years, and the user interface changes very rapidly.
This has implications for the architecture of your systems, and you should ask your architects about the expected speed of decay of each layer in your systems. If you know the speed of decay, and when the application was written or last revised, you can better anticipate what your business is going to ask of you.
I'd love to hear your comments. Please email me at sten@vesterli.com
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May 13, 2020
Avoiding Employee Burnout
In this episode of Beneficial Intelligence, I discuss how to avoid employee burnout. I talk about
* What a recent analysis of GitHub activity says about work during the Corona crisis
* What leaders should do to prevent employee burnout
* How to set up a warning system so you know when your employees are at risk
Beneficial Intelligence is a weekly podcast with stories and pragmatic advice for CIOs and other IT leaders.
I'd love to hear your comments. Please email me at sten@vesterli.com
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May 7, 2020
Moving Learning Online
Coronavirus has forced many organizations to move to online learning. In this episode, I discuss the advantages and disadvantages of online learning, what the options are, and what you should choose depending on the learning goal. Finally, I talk about how to measure the result - if you are not measuring, you are flying blind.
If you have comments, you can contact me at sten@vesterli.com or connect with me on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/stenvesterli/. If you want to know how I help IT organizations succeed by providing great business value, you can also visit my website www.vesterli.com
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