Sten Vesterli's Blog

Making IT Live up to its Promise

Category: IT Leadership

Control Your Tools

IT Leadership, Technology That Fits

Do you know which tools your developers are using? Many of them are using low-code/no-code (LCNC) tools, whether officially sanctioned or not. The latest State of the Developer Nation report from SlashData delves into LCNC tool usage and finds that 46% of developers are using them. 12% of professional developers use them for more than half of their work, but developers with 10+ years of experience shun them.

Developers can pick up cloud-based low-code/no-code tools without anybody noticing and deploy production applications using free-tier functionality. By the time IT management figures out what is happening, you might have dozens of small and medium-sized applications running.

You cannot prevent these tools from being used. You can get your developers to decide on one tool and make that the officially sanctioned low-code/no-code platform. That means you can manage all the applications on one platform, and developers can help each other use the tool. Trying to ignore these tools does not make them go away.

(image source: SlashData State of the Developer Nation, 22nd edition)

Are Security Issues Ignored in your Organization?

IT Leadership, ,

Delete production database, go to jail, do not pass GO, do not collect $200.

A disgruntled Chinese sysadmin wiped his company’s servers after feeling ignored. He had complained about a lack of basic IT security, but found no understanding from his boss. He then wiped out most of their infrastructure, paralyzing a $6 billion company with 120,000 real estate brokers. He did prove his point. He was rewarded with a 7-year jail sentence.

The person with the most detailed knowledge of the vulnerabilities in your IT landscape is not the CISO. It is the database administrator or the network engineer. Do you have a process to ensure that potential security issues can be raised anonymously and will come to the attention of the CIO?

Are You Still Building Things That Don’t Scale Automatically?

IT Leadership, Technology That Fits

There is no excuse for a modern system to be slow. I’m at a 5,000-people conference this week, and their official networking app is totally overloaded and almost unresponsive.

You might still have legacy systems with scalability issues, but everything you build today should be cloud-native. As a first-class citizen of the cloud, a modern app has access to automatic scaling, monitoring, robustness, and many other features.

Ask the architects building new systems in your organization about how the application will scale. If the answer is that it will scale automatically, good. If the answer is that somebody has to notice response time increasing and manually do anything, you are still building to the old paradigm.

Do You Understand What You are Running?

IT Leadership, Technology That Fits, ,

Don’t run systems you don’t understand. Some people had placed billions of dollars into a cryptocurrency called TerraUSD. They were told this was a “stablecoin” that would keep a value of $1. Underlying this claim was a clever algorithm that interacted with investors and another cryptocurrency in complex ways. Until its magic no longer worked and the supposedly stable TerraUSD dropped 80%. Trading in it is now halted.

In the global financial crisis of 2008, people had invested in complex financial instruments that they didn’t understand. Many billions were lost and large institutions went bankrupt. The banks who came out of the crisis unscathed were those who had stuck to simple banking products that everyone could understand.

Take a look at your IT landscape. Can you find somebody who understands your operating infrastructure? Or have generations of DevOps engineers just googled problems and tweaked your Kafka and Kubernetes configuration until it somehow seemed to work?

Perimeter Defense is Dead

IT Leadership

Yet again, a critical vulnerability in commercial, high-end network equipment. This time, BIG-IP gear offers any hacker the ability to remotely access the management interface. The intruder doesn’t need authentication and can run any command. It’s rated a scary 9.8 (CRITICAL) on the CVSS scale, and it is being actively exploited.

If you still needed convincing that your network needs micro-segmenting or a zero-trust architecture, here is another piece of proof. This is not cheap consumer-grade gear. This is a highly reputable vendor of expensive equipment used by most large companies around the world. They can’t keep their devices secure, even though they are supposed to implement best practices in secure software development.

Depending on perimeter defense today is like being France in 1939 believing in the Maginot line. If you are a CIO, today would be a good day to chat with your network team about just how securely segmented your network is.   

Why Employee Surveillance Doesn’t Work

IT Leadership, Technology That Fits, ,

Do you know what a “mouse jiggler” is? Your most innovative employees do. It is not a device to shake a rodent in a cage. It is a small USB device that sends random mouse movements to a computer.

Who would want such a thing? Employees subjected to tracking software, that’s who. With the mouse moving, the software will record “productivity.” The pandemic led to a boom in surveillance tech, euphemistically called “employee productivity software.” As workers return to the office, that tech is not removed from corporate laptops. But workers are pushing back, in accordance with Newton’s Third Law of IT systems: Whenever the organization implements a policy, the employees will implement an equal and opposite workaround.

Techno-optimists keep trying to replace humans with technology. There are some places where that works. Replacing human leadership with surveillance technology is one of the places where this strategy doesn’t work.

Security is Somebody Else’s Problem

IT Leadership

There is good reason security is invisible: It is Somebody Else’s Problem (SEP). In his geek classic “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Universe,” author Douglas Adams describes how the secret to making something invisible is to surround it with an SEP field.

Security is not actually invisible – I’m at an event in Copenhagen with 3000 security professionals this week. But it is still considered Somebody Else’s Problem by the rest of IT. Except for basic Authentication and Authorization, security is not on the minds of developers and system administrators.

We cannot magically make people care. We already know that to get good testing, we have to add professional testers to each team. To get a good User Experience, we need to add UX professionals to each team. We won’t get improved security until we also add security professionals to each team.

Do You Trust Amazon?

IT Leadership, Technology That Fits,

The default is no trust. You shouldn’t trust a random USB stick you pick up in the parking lot, and your customers and users don’t trust you. If you want trust, you have to be transparent in a way your users understand and appreciate.

Somewhere in the Amazon terms & conditions it probably says in illegible legalese that everything you say to your Alexa smart speaker can and will be used against you. Researchers have shown that your interactions with Alexa are reported to dozens of advertisers, and Amazon says the research is flawed. Who do you believe?

Amazon have hundreds of lawyers and are probably within the law. The problem is that they are not complying with users’ expectations. If you want any kind of goodwill from your users and customers, you have to meet their actual expectations. Hiding behind reams of legalese doesn’t cut it.

Unnecessary Complexity

IT Leadership, Technology That Fits,

Why use a proper screwdriver when you have a multi-tool? It is true that it is a lousy screwdriver, but it can do a dozen other things. That’s the thinking behind using Microsoft Windows for Point-of-Sale terminals. It turns out to be a bad idea. It can take up to 40 minutes for a Windows 11 machine to install the latest update, and in the meantime you are unable to do business.

The problem is not throwing an overpowered machine at the task. A Raspberry Pi works fine for a home weather station even though it is only using 0.01% of its capacity. The problem is adding unnecessary complexity. A Windows 11 workstation is running literally hundreds of services, 98% of which are not necessary for Point-of-Sales functionality. The more components you have, the more potential problems you will have, and the harder it will be to find them when they occur.

You would never allow your IT architects to use over-complicated components with dozens of unnecessary interactions, would you?

Online Makes Meetings Worse

IT Leadership,

When did you last walk out of a useless meeting? Never, right?

When did you last participate in a meeting where you got no benefit and contributed nothing? Last week, right?

We were slowly learning from trailblazers like Elon Musk to cut down on meetings. Then the pandemic and the associated video meetings teleported us back to the stone age of meetings. We have more meetings than ever, they start late and drag on, and involve too many people. Analyzing the video of online meetings shows that 50% of participants show up late, 40% have low engagement and 24% of participants don’t say a word during the entire meeting.

When something becomes easier, people do more of it. It takes a conscious effort to get back to focused meetings without clear agendas and only the absolutely necessary participants. Are you tracking how many meetings you have in your organization? If you aren’t, you can be sure you have too many.

(image: Kit-Kat ad mockup by Sam Hennig, creative strategist at Something Big)