Sten Vesterli's Blog

Making IT Live up to its Promise

IT Leadership has to Harness the Power of AI

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AI has finally gotten really useful inside the IT organization. Most of the examples on the internet are frivolous and amusing, like how to remove a peanut butter sandwich from a VCR, written in the style of the King James Bible. But ChatGPT is helpful for mundane tasks in IT as well.

I’ve been fixing open issues in a small open-source project recently. One of the issues was that part of the code would concatenate strings to build SQL statements. That’s a classic SQL Injection vulnerability. ChatGPT can fix these bugs faster than I can. So I tell the AI, “please rewrite the following to use bind variables,” and give it the code.

Another example is working we legacy shell scripts. My sed/awk skills are rusty, but I can give a convoluted shell statement to ChatGPT, and it will patiently explain all the options and exactly how it works.

Many of your programmers are already playing with ChatGPT, GitHub Copilot, and other AI tools. You might as well embrace it. Set up a knowledge-sharing community for those curious about how AI can help IT. Have them present to you and the rest of the IT department. You’ll be amazed if you haven’t played with ChatGPT and its ilk.

If you Think There are no IT Workers to be had, Look Again

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There is no shortage of IT workers. But there is a shortage of workers like the ones you have already. That is, young, white, and male. We are making some progress against racism and sexism in hiring, but ageism still seems to be a hidden bias.

While the IT industry is lamenting that they can’t find the people they need, I know many people in my age segment (50+) who have been laid off and can’t find their next job in IT. You need to cast your net wider if you are short of IT professionals. They are out there.

Blockchain is Still a Solution Looking for a Problem

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It turns out nobody wanted a blockchain solution. There are still crypto enthusiasts hodling their Bitcoin, but enterprise blockchain was a solution in search of a problem.

I did believe Danish shipping giant Maersk Lines and IBM had found a place where it made sense to build something blockchain-based when they announced their TradeLens platform. The idea was that all the many, many people involved in shipping a container of plastic bric-a-brac from Shenzen to Long Beach would all put their information on a blockchain. That would provide an immutable history of everything about that container.

After IBM closed down its entire blockchain business earlier this year, it was a matter of time before Maersk pulled the plug. Today, they admitted that “TradeLens did not reach commercial viability,” and the project is officially dead.

I believe a land register in a corrupt country somewhere was also planning to use blockchain, but it’s been a while since I last heard about it. In all likelihood, the existing corrupt businessmen and politicians have killed it.

If you know of any successful enterprise blockchain project, I would love to hear about it.

You Don’t Have to Move Just Because You’re Ready

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I was worried when I saw Denmark ranked no. 4 in “The Global Cloud Ecosystem Index 2022.” I was afraid that we had somehow stumbled into the cloud trap without my noticing. But it turns out the index is not about actual cloud adoption, only cloud readiness.

Being ready for the cloud means having affordable, fast internet connections, digital public services, data protection regulations, and a well-educated workforce. I’m all for that.

But the fact that we can doesn’t mean we should. Just like the fact that you could move some of your services to the cloud is not an argument for doing it. There are some systems where there is a sound business case for moving to the cloud. But for most existing systems, attempting to move to the cloud destroys value.

Good Intentions are not Enough

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“We have the ambition to test disaster recovery twice a year.” That’s not something anybody in a professional IT organization would say, is it? Ambition? I have the ambition to create a spam- and hate-speech-free Twitter alternative powered by unicorns and rainbows, but unless I act on my ambition, nothing will happen.

Nevertheless, critical Danish infrastructure was operated on that principle. The common login system that everything from banks to tax authorities to municipalities uses is operated by a company called Nets. They apparently got to write their contract with the state themselves because it contains the ridiculous “ambition” instead of an actual requirement.

They did run a test on May 28, 2020. They did not run a test in November 2020, as was their ambition. Nor in May or November 2021. Not even in May 2022 did they test it. So when they crashed the system in June 2022 due to undocumented changes and other unprofessional shenanigans, the disaster recovery unsurprisingly failed.

Please tell everyone this story. When you are done laughing at the incompetence of central Danish authorities and their vendors, make sure you are testing your own disaster recovery…

Do you Need People to Run Your Systems?

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If everybody in IT left, would your software systems still run? Of course they would. Any professional IT organization strives for hands-off, lights-out operation.

In the short term, a running system should not need any human intervention. It should automatically allocate more disk space and apply routine vendor patches. If you have a variable workload, your system should auto-scale or auto-throttle. User provisioning should be automated, as should routine password resets. System privileges should automatically follow the organizational role of an individual.

In the medium term, however, an unattended system will collapse. There will be emergency security patches that need manual attention. There will be changes in APIs you depend upon.

It remains to be seen if Elon Musk has retained enough talent to stave off the medium-term collapse of Twitter. How about you? Do you have the talent you need to maintain all your systems? Or are some of them left totally unattended, waiting for an implosion?

This 47-Year-Old Classic Will Improve Your IT Skills

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There are two kinds of people in the world: Those who know who Fred Brooks was and those who don’t. If you are an IT professional in the second group, you can step up your game dramatically by reading his seminal book “The Mythical Man-Month.”

Fred Brooks managed IBM System/360, the project that produced the first real general-purpose computer back in the 1960s. He distilled his experience from this 5,000-man-year project into the first edition of TMMM in 1975 and the expanded anniversary edition from 1995 stands on my bookshelf. When I meet other experienced IT architects, as at Software Architecture Open Space in Copenhagen this month, people will use phrases like “second-system effect” that originated with Brooks. He passed away yesterday after a long and productive life full of accolades.

To commemorate Fred Brooks, I’m inviting you to join a series of online discussions on IT best practices and what we can still learn from The Mythical Man-Month. We’ll meet on Zoom every Thursday at 5 pm CET = 11 am EST = 8 am PST. We’ll discuss one chapter from the book and how it applies to our work in IT today. I expect each meeting will be 30-60 minutes, and we’ll record it for those who can’t make it. We start next Thursday, November 24. Sign up here: https://vester.li/tmmm

Join us online to share experience and improve your IT skills

Eventually, We Will All Work in IT

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By 2057, everybody in the U.S. will work in IT. That’s because IT organizations are able to outgrow anything else. The minimum growth rate is 5-7% increased headcount per year for the same work – as every other bureaucracy. But in addition, every 6-12 months brings a new technological fad that necessitates a whole new team with new skills. Since no old code is ever retired, all the old programmers stay on. And every “simplification” initiative simply adds a new integration platform, yet somehow never reduces the existing complexity.

The radical solution by Elon Musk is to simply fire half the employees and all the contractors and see what happens. Twitter is still up as of today, though its long-term viability is still very much up in the air.

All the other tech companies had apparently been waiting for someone to go first because Amazon, Meta, and others have gotten rid of more than 100,000 employees in the last few weeks.

If there is a better way to streamline IT than a Musk-style massacre, please tell me.

Very Few Things are Impossible

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You can get anything you want. But you have to ask for it. The U.S. had an election last Tuesday, and they still don’t know the result. We had an election in Denmark on Nov 1st. As usual, our result was ready before midnight on election day.

Now, we actually count paper ballots here in Denmark, and the U.S. uses computers. But that isn’t the whole explanation of why we are so much faster. The main reason is that we have decided that we want a quick result. Thus, we have a cut-off date for advance voting three days before election day, and all the advance votes are ready to count on election day. Vote counting is easily parallelized, and we have enough people counting. The U.S. could do the same, but they have prioritized other factors.

When IT says something can’t be done, it is rarely true. It might indeed be difficult, or expensive, or require you to give up functionality of higher value. If you work in IT, don’t say something is impossible. If you request work from IT, don’t accept the answer of “impossible.”

Are You Aware of the Dangerous Tipping Points in Your Business?

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“Gradually, then suddenly.” That’s Mike explaining how he went bankrupt, in Hemmingway’s immortal voice. It’s also how cryptocurrency exchange FTX collapsed. And it’s how usage of your IT systems declines.

It happens all the time that users suddenly defect en masse from a product that used to be popular. For a while, the vendor gets away with offering a slightly worse product and charging a little bit more. Inertia and the inconvenience of switching means that for a long time, users will only slowly trickle away. But unless the vendor changes course, they reach an irreversible tipping point where their product usage crashes.

It can happen to your IT even if you don’t sell your software. When the database gets slower and slower, or the sign-in procedure becomes more and more cumbersome. One day you will realize that your users are running the business with no security and no backup in Smartsheet and Excel…