Do you want something that works or something that looks fancy? Sometimes, these two objectives come into conflict. Too often, the IT professionals can’t imagine a solution that does not involve touchscreens and mobile apps.
I’m staying in an upscale hotel in New York this week, and the control panel for heating and lighting is definitely old-school. But it works. And it can be understood and operated by every age group likely to frequent the hotel.
Meanwhile, back in Denmark, we are currently rolling out a new central authentication system. You will have to figure it out in order to do online banking or access public services. It was designed by tech-savvy young people and is very fancy. Too bad it has left hundreds of thousands of non-computer-literate citizens desperately calling the understaffed phone helpline.
Are you sure the solutions you roll out have been tested by the entire target audience?
Coinbase just spent 16 million dollars on a 30-second Superbowl ad. It seems like the ad worked, because their website was promptly overwhelmed with traffic and crashed. Maybe they should have spent a bit on resilient network infrastructure as well.
The problem with many of the IT infrastructures I see is that they are brittle. Each component can be resilient with load balancing and database failover without making the overall system robust. Reliability engineering is a cross-domain discipline, and it is not enough that each team builds robustness into their little piece of the total landscape. Who is responsible for the overall reliability of your systems?
In the classic 1983 John Carpenter horror movie “Christine,” the radio on the possessed 1958 Plymouth Fury can only play old rock and roll stations. Owners of 2016 Mazdas in Washington State now have the same experience. They don’t even get rock’n’roll but are instead forced to endure NPR.
Their cars are not possessed by evil spirits but suffer from a software bug. It turns out that the local NPR station sent out “now playing” album images without a .jpg extension. That was enough to send the radio and navigation unit into an endless loop, making it impossible to use navigation or Bluetooth – or change the station. Embarrassed, Mazda is offering a free replacement of the $1,500 connectivity master unit.
This incident illustrates the dangers of casual testing. A professional tester would have sent the unit all kinds of corrupted or misnamed files, files with zero length, and very large files. That would have uncovered the bug. Do you have testing professionals on your teams? If you let developers test their own software, you’ll end up where Mazda is – or worse.
Face recognition is a serious intrusion of privacy. The American tax authorities thought they could force it on the restive public, but was proven wrong.
The plan was to use controversial identification service ID.me. This requires users to submit scans of driver’s licenses, copies of utility or insurance bills, and to provide a live video feed of their face. Some states are using it to fight benefit fraud, but forcing it on everyone was a bridge too far. After a public outcry (and the news that Washington State just lost data on millions of citizens), this plan has been shelved.
This was a stupid idea from the outset. Beguiled by fast-talking sales people, officials lulled themselves into thinking this made sense. If they had someone on the team whose job it is to provide contrarian advice, this would never have happened. How do you ensure you get contrarian feedback before you embarrass yourselv before the entire nation?
Google just challenged your IT organization. They created a free version of their Workspace plan where users get collaboration spaces, chat, video conferencing, and the usual Google programs Sheets, Slides, and Docs.
This dramatically increases the risk that people in your organization will create a free Google Workspace Essentials account and run their projects from there. That means all your data is under the control of Google instead of you. If the person who set up the Workspace forgets to appoint another administrator and leaves the company, your data is stuck on Google servers with no option to apply the corporate data governance.
To face this challenge, you need a stick and a carrot. The stick is an official policy prohibiting unauthorized collaboration spaces on third-party servers. The carrot is officially approved collaboration software with great usability. It’s easy to create the stick, but it doesn’t work without the carrot. Do you have the carrot?
It’s probably time to start paying attention to the rules. Inspired by the Silicon Valley ethos of moving fast and breaking things, many organizations have been rolling out technology without much concern for existing rules and regulations.
Uber, Airbnb, and the myriad e-scooter startups are on the back foot all over Europe as the state reasserts its authority. Even in the U.S., regulators have started to put their foot down. Tesla is having to reprogram 50,000 vehicles that were intentionally programmed to disrespect stop signs. If the car was driving slowly and couldn’t see anybody else around an intersection, it would ignore the stop sign and continue into the intersection. That’s illegal, but humans do it all the time. It turns out authorities were less than thrilled to see bad human behavior programmed into Tesla’s cars.
We have rules for a reason. Some of them are ridiculous (like the ubiquitous cooking consent), but good citizenship includes adhering to the rules until you can persuade the rule-maker to change them. Don’t be like Tesla.
After imposing a loss of several hundred million dollars on airlines and annoying millions of passengers, the FAA has now stopped its publicity stunt. 90% of U.S. aircraft are now cleared to perform instrument landings even at airports near 5G towers.
They could have done this any time in the two years since the 5G licenses were awarded. However, quietly doing their job was not on the FAA’s agenda. After their failures led to hundreds of deaths in the Boeing 737-MAX8 disasters, they wanted to prove that they now take their job insuring safety seriously. They, therefore, engineered a crisis that put them on the front pages of newspapers nationwide before eventually doing what they should have done more than a year ago.
Don’t let corporate image considerations lead you to fail your customers. In short, don’t be like the FAA.
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.
Risk management is one of the basic leadership tasks. The leader has to decide if the benefit of a certain decision is worth the risk of something bad happening. If we could calculate the exact probability and the exact impact, risk management would be a purely mathematical exercise. But since both probability and impact are only vaguely known, the leader has to use his or her experience, evaluate contrasting opinions, and make the call.
There is a classic short story 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. Machines produce everything anybody needs. Since everybody will live forever, barring accidents, railroads and cars are outlawed as too dangerous. Nobody needs to go anywhere, and nobody does. In this future, everybody has everything they need and lives forever, but the narrator is appalled at consequent stagnation.
That story was written in 1911 but was very prescient. We have since eliminated many risks and have increased our standard of living immeasurably. And we are less and less willing to accept any risk.
A leader accepts the risk and reaps the benefit. But our decisions are increasingly influenced by experts who point out the dangers. If you have dedicated your life to immunology, you know what the risks are. From the viewpoint of the immunologist, it is safest to lock everybody down until everyone is vaccinated. A political leader takes that input together with input from economists and other experts about the costs of lockdown and makes a leadership decision.
In organizations, the equivalent to the immunologist resides in legal, compliance, QA, risk management, or validation departments. They point out all the risks – children might swallow our product, we might get sued, we might have our operating license revoked. The larger the organization, the more of these departments of innovation prevention you will have. It takes courageous leadership to overrule the objects of the naysayers. The reason smaller organizations are able to out-innovate larger ones is that they can spend their leadership time on innovation and growth and instead of on fighting organizational units dedicated to preserving the status quo.
As an IT leader, it is your job to make sure your organization doesn’t get paralyzed by risk aversion.
