Sten Vesterli's Blog

Making IT Live up to its Promise

Tag: Outside opinion

Where is the Profit

IT Leadership, Technology That Fits, , ,

“But we’re a startup!”

“That’s not enough anymore. How will you become profitable?”

This is the essence of discussions between startups and their VC funders today and increasingly between big companies and their shareholders. Unfortunately, Ford’s CFO didn’t get the memo because he is still trying to pass off their $3 billion loss on electric vehicles with the “consider-us-a-startup” excuse.

Increased shareholders’ attention is also forcing all the big tech companies to kill off many of their loss-making projects that do not have any path to profitability, with an accompanying bloodbath of firings.

An audit showed that 47 of the 98 Danish municipalities were running AI projects. Two of these had provided value.

Do you have realistic business cases behind your projects? Or is the business case a collection of rosy assumptions retrofitted onto a project someone just wanted to do? It is better to find and kill vanity projects than to be called to the CEO’s office to explain why you are frittering away the company’s money. Contact me if you want an independent outside opinion on your project portfolio.

There are Many Reasons Not to Move to the Cloud

IT Leadership, Technology That Fits, , , , , , ,

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.

Clueless Developers are Dangerous

IT Leadership, ,

A company used by 83% of the Fortune 500 is clueless about security. Scary. I’m talking about Atlassian, whose Confluence product was discovered to have a secret admin account with a hardwired password. It is worrying that any company would hire developers that could simply get the idea. It is more worrying that this got through code review. And it is very worrying that Atlassian doesn’t seem to have anyone who does a separate security review.

If you are an IT leader, take a look at your systems list. Make sure there is a name and a date in the “last security review” column for each and every system. If you have home-built systems without a separate security review by someone outside the development organization, you might be the next Atlassian.

Are You Making a Fool of Yourself?

IT Leadership, Technology That Fits, ,

You’d think that an official digital ID project would be subject to a careful security review. Not in Australia. The government of New South Wales in Australia has rolled out a digital driver’s license that contains no less than five different security issues. Together, these make it trivially easy to alter any data on your ID, effectively creating a fake ID. That is good news to Australian identity thieves and underage would-be drinkers. The official response is “it’s illegal to make changes to your ID.”

Are there any embarrassing security oversights in the products you roll out? How would you know?

Don’t Ask Half Questions

IT Leadership, ,

Asking half questions leads to dangerous outcomes. We just saw an example when irresponsible Reuters pollsters looking for a scoop simply asked Americans “should NATO establish a no-fly zone over Ukraine.” They got a resounding 74% approval.

Another pollster asked the question with the qualifier “knowing that this will lead to direct war with Russia” and support dropped to 34%.

A complete question asks “are you willing to accept this downside to gain this upside?” Organizations get an idea, focus on the upside, take a cursory glance at the downside, and then take erroneous or even disastrous decisions. Who has the job of ensuring the downside is examined as well as the upside? You might need someone external to provide this.

Don’t Ignore Bad News

IT Leadership, ,

You should not create products that kill people. And when you find that you’ve accidentally done so, you should not continue to sell them.

After initially refusing the strong recommendation from the US Consumer Product Safety Commission, Peloton has now stopped sales and started offering refunds. Their treadmill product has injured 72 children and pets and has tragically caused one death. This product is so much more dangerous than other treadmills because it has to look cool. Peloton didn’t like the look of a regular treadmill that has skirts to prevent children and pets from getting pulled under the machine. Instead, they created a dangerous object and wrote in the manual to keep children and pets away.

When you have invested a lot of time and money and built something you are proud of, you don’t want to hear that it doesn’t work. That’s why Peloton didn’t immediately recall their deadly treadmills. That’s Kryptonite was in denial for months even after it was proven that their expensive bicycle locks could be opened with a Bic pen.

As a CIO or CTO, you need to have someone who can talk to you honestly about the problems with your IT systems and products. It is your leadership decision what to do about it. But you can’t make a good decision if you don’t know there is a problem. That’s why my customers get me to help them evaluate systems that don’t provide the expected business benefit.