Sten Vesterli's Blog

Making IT Live up to its Promise

Excel Addiction

IT Leadership,

It’s not your data, it’s the company’s data. That’s why it belongs in a database or some other kind of managed data store, not in your personal Excel files. But it turns out to be very difficult to break a 40-year habit of circumventing Central IT and hacking something together with a few macros.

There is any number of well-documented disasters caused by excessive Excel use, including during the Coronavirus pandemic, where the UK health authorities used an old version to track infections. It took days before anybody noticed that the number of cases was stuck at exactly 65,536.

Everybody is talking about having an AI policy. You need that. But you also need a data policy. And part of that policy is going to be placing limits on Excel.

Simple Health

Spiritual Programmer, , ,

To improve your health, do the simplest thing that could possibly work. Don’t start an intricate supplement regimen or try to follow a complex set of dietary guidelines. The traveling snake oil salesman has moved online and is now a health influencer, but that doesn’t remove the quackery.

Decide on one parameter you want to track (weight, sleep, whatever) and make one simple change to your life. For weight loss, it could be preparing more meals from scratch. For sleep, it could be putting down your phone one hour before bedtime. Track your adherence to your chosen change and the tracked parameter for two weeks.

If you got results, good.

If you didn’t, either your adherence wasn’t strong because you couldn’t implement the change consistently, or the change didn’t affect the tracked parameter. Never mind. Choose another change and try again.

Digital Sovereignty

IT Leadership, ,

You need to think about Digital Sovereignty. Unless you are in the U.S., of course. For everybody else, this is a very salient topic. Especially for us in Denmark these days.

This doesn’t mean that you have to free yourself from every American cloud provider. But it does mean there is a new item in your risk evaluation: Ending up on the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) blocklist.

Likelihood is Rare (1) for almost everybody. But if Impact is Catastrophic (5), you end up with a medium risk: Mitigate if cost-effective.

Switching costs almost always make it not cost-effective to transition a running system. But when you are building anything new, you don’t have switching costs. And an effective mitigation is to avoid using U.S. providers.

You Can Do One Minute

Spiritual Programmer, ,

There are two possible outcomes of this day: One is that you did no work towards your goals. And the other one is that you did.

You want every day in 2026 (and the rest of your life) to fall into the second category. The way to achieve that is to lower the bar. Yes, lower it. Decide that even one minute working towards your goals counts.

But one minute doesn’t make a difference, does it? Well, on its own, it’s still 6 hours more than nothing over a year. But the interesting thing is that once you get started on the one minute, it leads to another, and another. The hard thing about hard things is to get started. One minute counts.

Another Place Not to Use AI Chatbots

IT Leadership, , ,

Alaska wanted an AI chatbot to give legal advice. Anybody care to guess how that went?

Yes, not well. They are now 15 months into a 3-month project, but expect it to go live this month.

I’ll make a prediction: This project will end up in the bucket of IT projects that sink without a trace, leaving only cost and no business benefit whatsoever. Sadly, one in four IT projects still end in that bucket. My hunch is that this number is increasing, as AI is incorrectly applied to more and more use cases.

If you are going to implement AI with an LLM, don’t do it in a critical application like giving legal advice to citizens. There is no way to stop an LLM from hallucinating. The only way to automate advice and be sure it is correct is with old-school expert systems.

Good AI Advice

IT Leadership, , ,

Who advises you on AI? Don’t say ChatGPT. Also, don’t take advice from random blowhards on LinkedIn. You need advice from someone who has a realistic view of your situation and your business.

As a consultant, I’m all for having external advisers to bring you an outside perspective. But it is equally important to have a well-founded inside perspective.

I recommend establishing an internal AI advisory board within IT. Appoint some people interested in AI and give them a modest time budget to keep up to date with what is happening in the field. Make it as diverse as possible – juniors, seniors, developers, sysadmins. If you are fortunate enough to have diversity in gender and ethnicity in your IT organization, also utilize that. Have your AI board meet with the CIO/IT leader regularly, and also have them present at department meetings.

Inside people are much more invested in finding AI tools that can truly help in your specific situation. They are also the ones who will suffer if you implement bad AI. That gives them a very good ability to see through exaggerated vendor claims.

Looking Backward

Spiritual Programmer,

We keep looking forward, but we should also look backward. A new year means new resolutions and new plans. But very few of such plans come to pass. As you approach the New Year, look back at 2025 and note what happened and what didn’t. Reflect on why the things you had planned didn’t happen. It might show you how you sabotage your own progress. If this happened in 2025, identify a mitigation strategy you can implement in 2026. It is much better to improve your goal-achievement habits than to just set another goal.

The Right and the Wrong Way to Use LLMs

IT Leadership

There are two ways to use Large Language Models. One works well, the other much less well. Over the holidays, I’ve been talking to a lot of family and friends about AI, and it turns out that many people conflate these two approaches.

The way that works well is to use LLMs deductively. That means starting with a lot of text and distilling some essence or knowledge from it. Because you are only asking the AI to create something from a text you have given it, it has much less room to run off on a tangent, making stuff up. At the same time, it can show off its superhuman ability to process large amounts of text. In an IT context, this is when you give it dozens of interlinked files and ask it to explain or find inconsistencies or bugs.

The way that doesn’t work well is using LLMs inductively. That is when you ask it to produce text based on a short prompt and its large statistical model. This allows it to confabulate freely, and the results are hit-or-miss. In an IT context, this is where you ask it to write code. Sometimes it works, often it doesn’t.

Whenever you discuss LLMs with someone, set the stage by defining the inductive/deductive difference. If people already know, no harm done. If they don’t have this frame of reference, establishing it makes for much better conversations.

Mainframe Mindset

IT Leadership, ,

Several dozen Danish banks were down for five hours yesterday. Due to incompetence, not Russian hackers.

They were running on robust mainframe systems, because these have proven over decades that they never go down. But it turns out that running critical systems takes both hardware and skill. And the skill was lacking.

The reason mainframes have historically had very high availability is that they are really well-engineered and they’ve been run by really competent people. But those people have reached retirement age, and their jobs are gradually taken over by people with a different mindset. That’s how the mainframe hosting provider managed to run a poorly tested capacity management system that accidentally deallocated resources from all their customers.

There is mainframe hardware, and there is the mainframe mindset. The “this can never, ever, be allowed to fail” mindset. Which is retiring.

Are you sure you are transferring not only skills but also attitude when training new people to take over your critical systems?

Journaling

Spiritual Programmer, ,

I hope there is something you want to change in your life. If there isn’t, there are two possibilities.

Either you are completely healthy, happy, and successful (unlikely)

Or you haven’t thought about what you want to change (much more likely)

If you want to change, you need to define a goal and track your progress. The goal-setting is the easy part – in two weeks, many people will easily produce a list of New Year’s resolutions. The problem is that most of these will be the same as last year’s.

It’s the progress tracking that makes the difference. You can use habit tracking apps and all sorts of brain hacks, but the simplest and most effective is to keep a journal. Every morning, write down what you intend to do today to move closer to your goal. Every evening, write down how it went. For inspiration, read up on Benjamin Franklin’s journaling. You have a note-taking app or a piece of paper. You can start today.