Sten Vesterli's Blog

Making IT Live up to its Promise

Category: IT Leadership

Why Should the Business Trust You With Their Money?

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“Give us a bag of money and go away.” That seems to be the thinking of most in the #NoEstimates movement. They have, of course, misunderstood the original concept, just like people who claim to do Agile when all they’ve done is to do away with the documentation. I agree that estimation is hard and software is complex, but asking the business to commit money for unknown benefits in the uncertain future represents monumental hubris. The real world works by comparing costs and benefits, even though both cannot be evaluated exactly.

I’ll be meeting some of the best and brightest IT architects in Denmark at the annual Software Architecture Open Space next week. This is an open-format conference, and I noticed some of the other participants have already brought up estimation and #NoEstimates as a topic. I’m looking forward to an interesting discussion. If you are in the vicinity of Copenhagen on Nov 3rd, I encourage you to participate in SAOS as well. You’ll surely learn something.

The Problem is the Humans, Not the Technology

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The weakest link is the human. Microsoft does keep the software in their Azure cloud up to date with the latest patches but still managed to lose 2.4 terabytes of data belonging to 65,000 customers in 111 countries. The reason is that someone at Microsoft misconfigured a storage container.

This story became public because a security company wanting to sell its scanning solution posted it. They also informed Microsoft, who quickly secured the container. But for every white-hat hacker scanning the internet for unsecured storage, there are ten black-hat hackers siphoning off your secrets and selling them.

By buying a high-level cloud service from a reputable vendor, you can be sure that it runs on well-patched servers without known vulnerabilities. But you’ll have no idea when your cloud vendor fails to secure some lower-level service until you read about it in the news.

There are Many Reasons Not to Move to the Cloud

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You don’t save anything by moving to the cloud. Ask around – how many of the organizations you know who moved to the cloud have reduced operations headcount? Some things are simpler in the cloud, but many others are more complicated.

You enforce some good security practices because there is no way to NOT install the latest security patches. And you can quickly spin up an extra testing environment.

But unless you really have a highly variable load, or you are starting something new where you don’t have a clue how much power you’ll need, the cheapest option is to buy some hardware and put it in your server room.

The next time one of the vendors tells you how much you save by moving to the cloud, take a really good look at the calculation. I’ll be happy to help you. You will likely find out that there isn’t a business case for moving.

Yet Another Project With No Business Case

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There is nothing so good that you cannot do it badly. Case in point: Recycling. I’ve just received five new recycling containers in my summer cottage. The point is for me to sort plastic, cardboard, metal, paper, dangerous items, organic waste, and the remainder in separate compartments. I’m all for recycling, but I was curious about the business case for providing new plastic containers for summer cottages with limited amounts of waste and driving around with more big trucks on little dirt roads to collect the stuff.

It turns out there isn’t one. The danish Engineer’s Association has a weekly newspaper, and they have been running stories on this. Dispassionate calculation shows that the cost in money and CO2 of collecting and sorting several of these waste fractions far exceeds the benefit of recycling. For plastic waste, it turns out that we have to drive it – in trucks – to neighboring Germany because we don’t have a facility to reuse it in Denmark.

Surely, the government that invented this process would have a good counterpoint? Nope. I’ve been looking through several government websites. There is a lot of greenery and nice words, but no business case for recycling as much as we currently attempt to do.

So here in Denmark, recycling is a project with a worthy goal, political backing, and no business case. Have you ever seen something like that happen in IT?

Can You Trust Your Vendor?

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Did you invite the hackers in yourself? Hundreds of German companies are waking up to the revelation that “German” cyber-security company Protelion is a front for a Russian company with links to Russian intelligence.

The hapless boss of the German IT Security agency even invited Potelion to sit on the German Cybersecurity Council. He is facing an unceremonious sacking…

Being able to roam freely inside the firewall and install agents with admin privileges is the dream of any hacker. There are at least one million devices running Protelion’s “security” software and the companies who invited Protelion in face a wholesale scrubbing of their entire IT infrastructure.

How do you plan to ensure that your security audits do not worsen your security?

Are you Dependent on Freelancers?

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Using freelancers is dangerous. It starts innocently enough with just a single developer experienced in your chosen tool. But soon, you’ll be hiring a few more freelancers to fill positions you couldn’t hire anyone to do. Suddenly you wake up to the fact that the only people who know how to use half of the cloud services in your product are freelancers, who will be gone next time there is a funding squeeze.

I’m in favor of temporarily using freelancers to augment your team – I’ve been an external consultant most of my working life. But use them responsibly. Freelancer.com showed a 40-50% increase on a year-over-year basis last quarter for various categories, while postings for permanent employees on other sites grew only 12%. That sounds like many organizations are becoming dependent on freelancers. So ask yourself if you can maintain and run your systems without freelancers.

What Sicily can teach you about IT architecture

IT Leadership,

I’m back from Sicily, and it has been Greek, Roman, Arab, Norman, French, German, and Spanish before becoming Italian. Each civilization re-used whatever was bequeathed to it by its predecessors. That’s why you find a Baroque church incorporating columns taken from a ruined Greek theater and a Palazzo built partially from lava stones taken from a Roman villa.

I remembered a quote from Ellen Ullman: “We build our computer systems the way we build our cities: over time, without a plan, on top of ruins.”

We cannot see through the layers beneath our buildings in the physical world. That makes it hard to figure out if you can safely build higher. In IT, we can see the foundation. That allows us to know what changes we can make. As long as we have the source code and the people to understand it…

Letting a System Give Ridiculous Answers

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Here is another example of a computer giving a ridiculous answer. When I book a hotel, Booking.com will automatically suggest an airport transfer. OK, but not when the airport is 200 kilometers and a long ferry ride away. Providing meaningless answers to your users is not a trivial problem that you can brush off. It undermines the confidence your users have in a system, usage drops, and shadow systems in excel proliferate. Do you have a policy to build sanity checks into your systems?

Are You Afraid Robots Will Take Your Job?

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Robots are not taking our jobs. It’s a good story to create eye-catching headlines and generate clicks, but the numbers do not support it in any way.  Michael Handel of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics has published a paper where he carefully analyzes job losses across many professions. He finds that job losses follow long-term trends, and there is no hint of the dramatic changes predicted by people who make a living from predicting that the sky will shortly fall.

That matches what I see in the organizations I work with. Traditional IT projects regularly fail, and AI projects have an even higher failure rate. They might deliver something, but too often, it turns out to be impossible to move an AI experiment out of the lab and into productive use.

Additionally, in the cases where AI does provide real business benefits, it handles one specific task and not a whole job. All of our AI today is very narrowly trained for one task. That frees up workers to do more useful things with their time, making them more productive.

For example, the illustration for this post is made by me and the Midjourney AI. It was told to illustrate “the robots are not taking our jobs.” We ran a few iterations where I selected the best of its suggestions until we came up with this image.

Well-led Employees Don’t Leave

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When a company changes hands, the tree is shaken. Some of the employees that weren’t really attached to the company leaves. That’s what is happening at Twitter right now, and that will happen whenever there is uncertainty in your organization.

But have you noticed that some teams experience a lot of turnover in turbulent times, and some teams are solid as a rock? The difference is leadership. Members of a well-led team will continue to do their job through whatever tsunami of social media opprobrium, whereas members of badly led team will jump ship at the first sign of trouble.

Are you tracking the turnover in each part of your organization? It will tell you something important about the leaders.