The combination of these two fields is an exciting place to be. I am not there right now. But being away gives me a chance to learn away from the field for a while, and helps provide perspective. Time and distance are my favorite remedies for nearly all problems.
IT is a new-ish field, and has nothing like the maturity which benefits other defined business fields. This is great because it affords many opportunities for innovation. This is a disaster because it affords many opportunities for innovation. Most new ideas are no damned good, and in IT, we try them all.
I am fond of a quote from somebody about the Last Big Thing. We spend our energy seeking a new solution while nobody masters the solutions we have. While I have endured my share of junk applications (mostly due to flawed database design), I am still amazed at how many problems with “junk software” are actually caused by junk users. It’s easy to not master the material and then say that the system sucks. I am fond of pointing out that the company spent a gazillion dollars on this crap — you should know how to use it.
I am going through a lot of the training available to our workforce so that I can show them how much they do not know. This is far from malice — I hope to inspire them. The workforce is critically undertasked. They have tasks enough to fill their time, but that is because they are busy busy busy doing what the software will do for them if they only learn how. So this is obviously not the fault of the workforce. They don;t work for me, because if they did, things would be different. That makes it a management issue. The unprepared state of the workforce is what I intend to use to show management that they are not doing their own job. Many opportunities for low-cost improvements around here.
Which brings me to risk management. But more on that later. You would think that companies are good at risk management. They are not. Nobody is except insurance companies and gambling outfits. It’s not rocket science, but even NASA has shown appalling shortcomings in risk management.
To be continued.
IT and Risk Management
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I had breakfast with someone working on IT at P&G. He was telling me that using Adobe Acrobat would solve some of their communication problems. It is important to get everyone on the same page.
Ball, we have talked before. People forget that the basements are the most important parts of the “building”. If you don’t have the right foundation you have no ability to grow cheaply and efficiently.
In general some of the biggest problems come for assuming things. One should always go back to first principals and make sure they are correct. The “barn door” should always be checked to see that it is closed. One should realize hay and horseshoes are no longer needed if you drive a car. A good person is nice but that does not make a person competent. A good carpenter does not break his tools when mistakes happen.
No, some of the biggest problems come from “new and improved”. Every time a new version of some software comes out, it generally makes little sense compared to the old, cuts out stuff that was kool, reapproaches things in a new way that makes no sense whatsoever to those NOT in IT.
People do not think in 1’s & 0’s. Our brains are far too developed to go back there. 1/0 logic may be some version of pure logic, but it bears no relationship to regular people logic.
eg. going back a page ought to ALWAYS be the same ([ESC] comes to mind as a great key to simply back out when you are lost). But it’s not. Sometimes it’s one thing, sometimes another.
Passwords. IT absolutely has its shorts tied in a knot over passwords. In places where there is little at risk, you STILL get the password change every 3 months. Or two months. Or sometimes EVERY month. ?Who in tarnation can remember THAT many passwords. So you write them down somewhere, which is a HECK of a lot worse than keeping the same password for a year! Try to explain that to any IT. Watch their heads spin.
Good to see you, Beloved Admin, bringing fresh air, sunlight, and uncommon common sense to the ‘basement’…S/F, S/G, & oh, yeah: S/Q, for sure! :-)
Having been in the field from wiring boards in glorified adding machines to mainframes to minis to pcs to networks to client server and Y2k, played with email from the darpanet days and watched the web unfold, actually carried a phone which took up half my briefcase and lugged a portable PC which outweighed a sewing machine, I look on that time fondly before I got into the game of solving companies as systems,
The old days were fun, when I could hire music majors who became coding savants and few understood the foundation we were building.
Good to see it has not changed much.
When machine time was scare and programmers were cheap, the paradigm was to design it to death and think it through before you wrote the code. When the scarcity flipped on it’s head, design went out the door along with careful architecture of the data.
I get amused at the compute power people carry in their hand while they still do not organize their contacts list.
Such is the making of a curmudgeon.