Sten Vesterli's Blog

Making IT Live up to its Promise

Category: IT Leadership

AI Agents are a Stupid Idea

IT Leadership, ,

AI agents are a stupid idea. Consider that we’ve had the option to program deterministic agents to handle most of the suggested AI workflows for a long time. Yet we didn’t do it? Why? Because it turned out to be hard. We did not have good data or good APIs for the actions we wanted to take, and we always encountered lots of difficult edge cases.

Yet the AI vendors are proposing that we now try again. This time with stochastic algorithms that we are never quite sure what will do.

Agentic AI means that we take a problem that we could not solve with deterministic programming, and add another problem on top. And that is supposed to be the future? I don’t think so.

Find Cause or Just Reboot?

IT Leadership, , ,

Are you going to solve the problem, or just reboot the server? This is one of the many places where IT professionals come into conflict with the business.

The technical expert wants to figure out what’s wrong rather than just wipe all the evidence and hope for the best. But as Tim Gorman pointed out in a comment on another post, that takes time and expertise.

Most systems are not so critical that it makes business sense to investigate the root cause, especially if a nightly reboot solves the problem. As a technologist, it grates on me to accept that a system doesn’t work well and that I cannot investigate further. However, as a consultant tasked with helping organizations maximize scarce IT manpower, I often find that recommending a simple reboot is the most practical advice.

Make sure you use your resources where it makes business sense.

Intentional Analysis

IT Leadership, ,

Isn’t it funny that the only people saying AI will take over the world are those selling the stuff? Of course, supported by the usual coterie of consultants looking for a gig, academics looking for attention, and clueless journalists looking for a sensationalist headline.

When I was in high school, we learned to do intentional analysis – considering what motivations the author of a text might have. That skill seems to be widely forgotten when discussing AI.

It also applies to programmers dissing AI as glorified autocomplete – they have an interest in telling everyone that they are still indispensable.

Elle King sang that there are “always two sides and the truth.” It is your job as an IT leader to look at the messengers on both sides, evaluate their claims and credibility, and figure out approximately where the truth lies.

What are the Essential Dependencies of your Critical Systems?

IT Leadership, , ,

You have two kinds of systems: Those where you can wait for Cloudflare, Amazon, or Microsoft to come back up, and those where you can’t.

For critical systems, your developers and operations people must carefully examine the code and document all dependencies. Once you know what you depend on, you can decide whether to build in automatic mitigation or establish a limited-functionality mode.

To concentrate your efforts in the right place, your systems list must identify the truly critical systems and their dependencies. Does it?

UX Makes the Difference

IT Leadership,

Why don’t more people use open source? Because the User Experience sucks. Not always, but often. And the UX in an open source project is always at least a little worse than in the corresponding payware.

The really successful Open Source projects are the ones used by technical people. A system administrator wants a command line and scripting capability, not a fancy GUI.

But everyday users want something that is modern-looking and intuitive to use. Good UX, in short. That has never been a focus in open source projects, and is unlikely to ever become so.

The reason lies in the economics of software development. A commercial software developer has a good business reason to improve UX. If the added revenue from more user-friendly software exceeds the investment in UX experts, there is a business case, and that investment will be made. And management will enforce that UX improvements are implemented.

Open source UX improvement depends on a UX expert deciding to donate time to the project, AND that developers will decide to make the effort to implement UX improvements. But the typical developer considers good UX optional, so improvements keep getting pushed down the backlog. Eventually, the UX expert leaves the project to spend his or her time elsewhere.

If you want to implement end-user-facing open source, for financial or ideological reasons, you need serious management support to quell the inevitable backlash from users who have to endure the UX regression.

Believe the user, not the vendor

IT Leadership, ,

If the users say the system doesn’t work and the project sponsor says it does, believe the users. IT history is full of stories of malfunctioning systems being covered up – the most egregious case is one where 900 British postmasters were falsely convicted of theft and fraud because the Post Office’s fancy new IT system didn’t work. Look up “Horizon IT scandal” for that sad story.

Those with careers and positions to save will go to extraordinary lengths to deny any problems. The people who told the truth about the Vietnam War were the draftees who did not have a military career to protect.

What is your process for monitoring issues with the software your business is running? Do not rely on the number of tickets raised with the service desk. There is unavoidable friction involved in raising a ticket because the IT people will want screenshots and exact software versions. The average user has no clue which version of the internet browser he is using and has more important things to do. If you don’t have a simple system like the four-smiley button panels in shops and airports, you do not know if your software works for the users.

Investing and Throwing Money

IT Leadership,

There are three ways to spend money on new technology. Two good and one bad.

  • Trying it involves spending a small amount of money and time to determine if it has reached a maturity that can be useful in the organization.
  • Investing in it involves preparing a business case outlining expected business benefits and then spending a lot of money implementing it at scale in the organization.
  • Throwing Money at it is just like investing but without the business case.

I am always amazed when I see CIOs declaring that they are investing in some fancy new technology (AI these days) but failing to articulate any specific business goals when asked. That’s not investing; that’s throwing money.

A Teachable Moment

IT Leadership, ,

We remember stories. And the Crowdstrike-caused massive Windows outage is a good story.

If you work in Delta Airlines IT, you won’t forget this story anytime soon. As millions of passengers are stranded and separated from their luggage, you will probably see your CEO hauled in front of Congress for public shaming.

If you are responsible for some of the around 10 million Windows computers that Crowdstrike, in their incompetence, managed to bring down, you are also likely to remember.

But if you dodged the bullet this time, the whole debacle will become just another tech story in your news feed and quickly forgotten.

However, there are lessons to be learned about canary deployment, robustness against poisoned data, and undocumented software dependencies. To ensure your organization makes the most of this opportunity, have someone read the Crowdstrike Preliminary Post Incident Review and tell the story at your next department meeting. Have them tell everyone why it happened and why it couldn’t happen to you. Or why it could have happened to you, but for the grace of God.

A continually learning organization needs a way to make knowledge stick in its people’s brains. Storytelling is an excellent way to do that. Always be on the lookout for good stories.

Avoiding Project Failure, the Frank Gehry Way

IT Leadership, ,

Projects by famous architect Frank Gehry are always completed on time and on budget. That’s not because he only does small and easy things – for example, he designed the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao.

But what he does do is prepare carefully. It might take several years for Mr. Gehry to plan, build scale models, and solve engineering challenges. That all happens cheaply before the construction team moves in with thousands of people and heavy machinery. Sometimes, this preparation means a project is not done. That’s because Gehry will discover in advance that the project as envisioned cannot be completed with the time and budget available.

We’ve just wasted $10 million of taxpayer money for several years in a row here in Denmark because nobody here works like Frank Gehry. The politicians decided to allocate money for “AI signature projects,” and nothing came of them in 2020. So, they allocated another $10 million in 2021. Same result. In 2022, another $10 million was wasted.

The money would not have been wasted if these projects generated new knowledge. But they didn’t. They spent money on data scientists and programmers only to discover afterward either that they did not have the data they needed to train their AIs or that their use of AI violated existing legislation and citizens’ rights.

That could have been discovered cheaply before the programmers started coding. But everybody wanted to run the project. When you are considering a project in your organization, especially in a fashionable technology like AI, you need an independent outsider to review your business case. That’s one of the things I do for my customers. Get in touch to hear more.

Blocking AI is an Unwinnable Battle

IT Leadership, ,

Using AI is not cheating. It is a way to become more productive. You pay your employees because they perform tasks that create value for the organization. So it makes sense to let them use the best tools available to do their jobs.

Just like some schools are trying to prevent students from using AI, some companies are trying to outlaw AI. It won’t work. Research shows that 47% of people who used AI tools experienced increased job satisfaction, and 78% were more productive. You can’t fight such dramatic numbers with a blanket prohibition. If you try, your employees will use AI on their phones or in an incognito browser session while working from home.

By all means create rules about how and where employees can use AI, and explain them thoroughly. But trying to ban AI is futile.