Sten Vesterli's Blog

Making IT Live up to its Promise

Experiment on Yourself

Spiritual Programmer

Many self-trackers run science experiments on themselves. You should, too. I don’t recommend injecting yourself with strange drugs from the internet. I am talking about making changes to your diet and tracking the outcome.

Science has shown that improved diet can have as much effect as the latest innovation from the pharmaceutical industry. To improve your life, try an experiment.

Like Newton and Da Vinci, you’ll need a notebook. For one week, write down how you feel. That is your baseline. Then make a simple diet change. You already know what a better diet looks like. For example, you can replace an unhealthy snack with nuts and raisins. Continue writing down how you feel. After a few weeks, examine your notes and see if you feel better than the baseline before you made the change. If you do, great! Keep the change. If you don’t feel any improvement, that doesn’t mean the experiment failed. It means the experiment was successful and you proved that this change was not right for you. Make another change and repeat the experiment.

Use science to improve your life!

Imprecise Language

IT Leadership, ,

Elon Musk understands the danger of imprecise language. He builds spacecraft, and that is an unforgiving business. NASA does not use precise language, causing them to crash the $125 million Mars Climate Orbiter. SpaceX does use precise language.

Twitter uses imprecise language. You used to get banned for wishing violence on anyone. After the war started, they decided to make an exception for people who wish death on Russians. And then they had to clarify that you were still not allowed to wish death on good Russians, only bad Russians. And Twitter will be the arbiter of who is good and who is bad.

Elon Musk is so unhappy about Twitter’s imprecise language that he is willing to spend 45 billion dollars to buy the whole thing and fix it. His proposed fix: A short, clear list of banned conduct.

Whenever I am called in to do a post-mortem on a failed IT project, the root cause is always imprecise language. The specification calls for something vague like “easy to use.” But it does not provide the precise detail to evaluate if the system meets its goals. Systems must also be “fast,” “mobile-friendly,” and be “visually attractive.” Vagueness allows different people to get different messages from the same document. In diplomacy, agreements are sometimes worded so both sides can read it as a victory for them. That doesn’t work in IT systems. Are you using imprecise language in your communication?

Vulnerability Chains

IT Leadership, Technology That Fits,

Are you sure you own your devices? Or do you just have a temporary ability to use them that could vanish any second?

Smart home enthusiasts taken by Insteon marketing found out the hard way that their devices function at the suffering of the Insteon servers. When the company abruptly shut down, users found none of their devices worked because everything depended on a connection to servers that were no longer there.

This is an example of a vulnerability chain where the Insteaon servers proved the weakest link. Every networked device has a vulnerability chain from the client endpoint through multiple network devices until it reaches the server. Are you aware of the vulnerability chain from the card readers that control access to your building? Don’t be blindsided by a risk you hadn’t even considered.

Optimization to Powerlessness

IT Leadership, Technology That Fits, ,

Here in Denmark, we were surprised to find that the Russians have rendered our military combat ineffective. When NATO asks what we can provide, we can offer a hundred special forces soldiers, some past-due-date antitank weapons, and an armored brigade without armor. The reason is not lack of money. We spend many millions. We just don’t spend it on things that matter.

The Russians did not have to attack us kinetically or subject us to a devastating cyber-attack to achieve this. They simply needed to infiltrate the Ministry of Defence with spreadsheet-wielding MBAs supported by a fifth column from McKinsey. We have now optimized our way to warfighting impotence.

Many organizations have similarly found that they have optimized themselves to powerlessness. A ship stuck in the Suez or a war in Ukraine will bring their entire production to a halt.

The only way to resilience, as any capable army knows, is to have extra. You have more supplies on hand than the absolute minimum, and more different suppliers than you need. You have spare warehouses and production capacity. If you let the MBAs with their spreadsheets run the business, you might suddenly find you have no business.

Documentation is Unnecessary Until You Need It

IT Leadership,

If you have a fire in your server room, your insurance pays out. Insurance is expensive, but a necessary part of your risk management strategy. For many risks, there is a way to get almost free insurance. Yet few people take it. I am talking about documentation.

A chocolate factory in Belgium didn’t follow its own processes and did not document its production. When kids started falling sick with salmonella all over Europe, suspicion fell on the Kinder egg factory in Arlon. The authorities asked for the production documentation. Because the factory couldn’t provide it, the whole plant was shut down. If they had had documentation, they would have been insured against this risk. They could have shut down just one production line instead of the whole plant.

So the reason you might not be able to get chocolate eggs this Easter is bad documentation.

Productivity at 10 pm?

IT Leadership, ,

They call it “productivity” but it’s more likely just busyness. Microsoft research into the use of their Teams product has discovered there are now three peaks in a day. It used to be only mid-morning and early afternoon, but now another peak has appeared at 10 pm. Euphemistically, Microsoft equates keyboard activity with productivity, but keyboard activity at 10 pm is unlikely to add much value for most people.

The workday has expanded by 46 minutes since the start of the pandemic, and most of that has been after normal office hours. It is a leadership task to preserve the health and productivity of your people. Do your employees work at 10 pm? Are you okay with that?

You Need 8,000 Steps per Day

Spiritual Programmer,

You don’t need 10,000 steps a day. But 8,000 steps a day cuts your risk of dying prematurely by 40%. A big meta-study published in The Lancet gathers data from 15 large studies. They conclude that mortality – your risk of dying in any given month – at 8,000 steps is only 40% of that at 5,000 steps. Every 1.000 steps above 5.000 give you a 10% improvement.

If you believe you already take 8,000 steps per day, I have bad news for you: You don’t. Most people significantly overestimate their activity level. There is only one way to know and increase your number of steps: Count them. Get an app for your phone, or use a smartwatch or fitness tracker. Set a goal of 8,000 steps and find a way to track your progress. You will find that it also improves your productivity and your mood.

What Can and Cannot Be Said

IT Leadership,

Can you say “pay rise” in your company? At Amazon, that would not be possible. The internal social media app they plan to roll out for warehouse workers will filter out words like “union,” fairness,” and “plantation” (!)

Russian author Fyodor Dostoyevsky said, “The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.” Similarly, the degree of civilization in an organization can be judged by its internal social media.

What does your internal communication platform and its rules say about your organization?

Focus on the Action

Spiritual Programmer,

You control the effort, not the results. If you want to change your life, you can take action today. There is no guarantee where your actions take you – your environment, other people and chance all play a part, too.

That is why the focus of your daily review before bed should be on the action you took today, not the results you experienced.

What Happens if You are Locked Out?

Uncategorized

If the software at your cloud vendor has a bad day, it’ll lock you out of your account. And there is nothing you can do about it.

Many Facebook users discovered their accounts disabled last week, supposedly due to a violation of Facebook’s secret “Community Standards.” Even users who had posted nothing or commented on nothing. Facebook says it is investigating.

What will happen if your cloud vendor suffers a similar glitch? Do you have a business continuity plan, or do you simply pause your business until your cloud vendor gets its act together?