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Beneficial IntelligenceOther People's FailuresIn this episode of Beneficial Intelligence, I discuss other people's failures. They can affect you, as the recent Amazon Web Services outage showed. Cat owners who had trusted the feeding of their felines to internet-connected devices came home to find their homes shredded by hungry cats. People who had automated their lighting sat in darkness, yelling in vain at their Alexa devices for more light. More serious problems also occurred as students couldn't submit assignments, Ticketmaster couldn't sell Adele tickets and helpless investors watched their stocks tank while being unable to sell. On a personal le...2021-12-1007 minBeneficial IntelligencePeople ShortageIn this episode of Beneficial Intelligence, I discuss the people shortage. It isn't real. Complaining about a lack of people is what is known as a "half argument." You say what you want, but not what you are willing to give up. That's like a politician promising to build a new public hospital but won't say where the money will come from. The full argument for missing people is "we cannot get the people we want at the conditions we are willing to offer." If you had a crucial project that will make the business mil...2021-11-2605 minBeneficial IntelligenceData HoardingIn this episode of Beneficial Intelligence, I discuss data hoarding. Gathering too much data costs money and doesn't add value. We think we need all this data to train our AI, but hoarding data is the wrong place to start. Using a counterproductive metaphor, some say that "data is the new oil." That is a dangerous metaphor with no less than four problems:First, data is not fungible like oil is. One barrel of oil is just as valuable as the next barrel. But one data record does not have the same value as another data re...2021-10-2907 minBeneficial IntelligenceMonocultureIn this episode of Beneficial Intelligence, I discuss monoculture. Just like in farming, monoculture is efficient and dangerous.Modern farmers will plan hundreds or thousands of acres with the same crop. That gives efficiency because the entire crop will respond identically to fertilizer and pesticides. It also means that the entire harvest will be lost if some new pest or disease suddenly appears. Monoculture cost more than a million lives in Ireland in the Great Famine of the 1850s. There is also monoculture in your IT landscape. If all your systems have the same hardware a...2021-10-1509 minBeneficial IntelligenceTrust, but VerifyIn this episode of Beneficial Intelligence, I discuss trusting your vendors. You trust them to make their best effort at producing bug-free code. You probably trust that their software will perform at least 50% of what they promise. You might trust them to eventually build at least some of the features on their roadmap. But can you trust them to not build secret backdoors into the software they give you?Snowdon showed we cannot trust any large American tech company because they send our data straight into the databases of the National Security Agency. Apparently, you cannot trust...2021-10-0109 minBeneficial IntelligenceTime to RecoverIn this episode of Beneficial Intelligence, I discuss time to recover. The entire network of the justice ministry of South Africa has been disabled by ransomware, and they don't know when they'll be back. Do you know how long it would take you to recover each system your organization is running? When you have an IT outage, what the business wants most is a realistic timeline for when services will be back. If IT can confidently tell them that it will take 72 hours to restore services, the business knows what they are dealing with. They can inform t...2021-09-1708 minBeneficial IntelligenceGoal FixationIn this episode of Beneficial Intelligence, I discuss goal fixation. Richard Branson almost didn't make it back from space. His pilots had a problem and flew very close to the limit. They should have aborted. But the future of commercial spaceflight was resting on their shoulders. They were fixated on the goal, and that causes problems. The reason we are finding out is that authorities noticed the flight was outside its designated airspace because stronger winds than expected caused the flight to have a different profile. The pilots got a red light ENTRY GLIDE CONE WARN. That m...2021-09-0309 minBeneficial IntelligenceNarrow FocusIn this episode of Beneficial Intelligence, I discuss the narrow focus of IT professionals. This is an unavoidable consequence of the complexity of the technology we use. We've had to learn to give our computers very exact instructions, and that informs our thinking. The app from my local supermarket is obviously built by people with a narrow focus. If I search for "sugar," the first hit is "pickled cucumber (sugar-free)." The Amazon app, on the other hand, is built by people with a wider focus. Whatever you search for, Amazon will always give you a suggestion. ...2021-08-2008 minBeneficial IntelligenceBack to the OfficeIn this episode of Beneficial Intelligence, I discuss whether you should force people back to the office. This will be your most important leadership decision this year. Apple told everyone to report back to the office. Apple CEO Tim Cook says that "in-person collaboration is essential to our culture." Google is expecting 20% of employees to work from home in the long term, while Facebook is expecting 50% remote work. The big Wall Street banks, on the other hand, require everyone back in their New York offices five days a week. Remote working presents two problems: Culture an...2021-08-0608 minBeneficial IntelligenceHumans and ComputersIn this episode of Beneficial Intelligence, I discuss humans and computers. Jeff Bezos went to space in a fully autonomous computer-controlled rocket. Richard Branson went to space last week, and he had humans flying his spacecraft. The Silicon Valley mindset is that you can program or train computers to do anything. However, as the continuing struggle to build truly self-driving cars has shown, some things are still very, very hard for computers. Even Elon Musk, who claims his Teslas are self-driving, has manual controls on his spacecraft, SpaceX Crew Dragon.Jeff Bezos remains fully committed t...2021-07-2306 minBeneficial IntelligenceCompetitionIn this episode of Beneficial Intelligence, I discuss competition. Billionaires Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson are competing who gets to space first, with both likely to blast off within the next two weeks. Competition is one of the great forces propelling the world forward. Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic spacecraft is based on SpaceShipOne that won the Ansari X Prize back in 2004. That prize was for a private spacecraft that could go to the edge of space twice in two weeks. It seemed impossible, but aerospace genius Burt Rutan with funding from Microsoft billionaire Paul Allen claimed the p...2021-07-0910 minBeneficial IntelligencePseudo-SecurityIn this episode of Beneficial Intelligence, I discuss pseudo-security. The lock on your front door is not secure. It takes an experienced locksmith an average of 7.1 seconds to manually an average door lock, and it's even faster with a "pick gun." If locks are so bad, why don't we have even more burglaries? Because your total security does not only depend on the lock. A would-be burglar has to contend with the risk of somebody being home, neighbors noticing you, a camera on someone else's house recording you, and cops grabbing you and putting you in jail.2021-06-2507 minBeneficial IntelligenceGood EnoughIn this episode of Beneficial Intelligence, I discuss how to choose what is good enough. How do you know when something is good enough? That requires good judgment, which is unfortunately in short supply. IT used in aviation, pharma, and a few other life-and-death industries are subject to strict standards. We can lean on standards like the GxP requirements that anyone in the pharma industry loves to hate. However, in the general IT industry, we have lots of standards, but none of them are mandatory. That's why each week seems to bring a new horror st...2021-06-1807 minBeneficial IntelligenceUnnecessary RoadblocksIn this episode of Beneficial Intelligence, I discuss unnecessary roadblocks. Amazon has a problem finding enough workers, and they have decided to get rid of an unnecessary roadblock: They will no longer test people for marijuana use. As marijuana becomes legal in more and more states, Amazon decided they only need to test truck drivers and forklift operators, not everyone. IT organizations are also always complaining that they can't find the people they need. There are three reasons for this: Bad business cases, unrealistic requirements, and unnecessary roadblocks. If you don't have a good business ca...2021-06-0409 minBeneficial IntelligenceExpectation ManagementIn this episode of Beneficial Intelligence, I discuss expectation management. I was doing a small renovation project in our summer cottage, and I needed a special type of hinge. I found it on the website of our local building supplies store, but when I got to the store, it wasn't there. It turned out that this store was part of a co-branded chain. They had an aspirational website showing all the items a shop could potentially carry, but each shop would actually sell only their own idiosyncratic collection of items. The store did not meet my expectation, and I...2021-05-2807 minBeneficial IntelligenceGaming the MetricsIn this episode of Beneficial Intelligence, I discuss gaming the metrics. We measure things to be able to manage them. But when we start using metrics to reward individual employees and teams, people will start gaming them. Newton's third law for business says that for every system the organization implements, the employees will implement an equal and opposite workaround that negates the system. Amazon is managing a huge workforce of delivery drivers. To ensure they drive safely, they require drivers to be logged in to a mobile phone app. The app uses the accelerometer to measure acceleration, b...2021-05-0710 minBeneficial IntelligenceAccidental PublicationIn this episode of Beneficial Intelligence, I discuss accidental publication. There are two ways organizations lose data: Through break-ins and through carelessness. It is hard to protect your systems against determined hackers, but it should not be hard to protect yourself against carelessness. Strangely, this is just as big a source of data leaks as determined hacker attacks. Some accidental losses are the result of individual failures to follow procedures. The British MI6 is famous for losing classified laptops in taxis and having them stolen from unattended cars. In Denmark, the health authorities produced two unencrypted CD-ROMs wi...2021-04-3007 minBeneficial IntelligenceIrrational OptimismIn this episode of Beneficial Intelligence, I discuss irrational optimism. IT people are too optimistic. It is a natural consequence of our ability to build something from nothing. Our creations are not subject to gravity or other laws of physics. A builder cannot decide halfway through a construction project that he wants to swap out the foundation, but IT regularly changes the framework in mid-project. Similar optimism informs our project plans. For some reason, we assume that everything will go the way we plan it. Fred Brooks first wrote about programmer optimism in his classic "The Mythical M...2021-04-2308 minBeneficial IntelligenceRisk AversionIn this episode of Beneficial Intelligence, I discuss risk aversion. 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. There is a classic short story from 1911 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. T...2021-04-1605 minBeneficial IntelligenceBiased DataIn this episode of Beneficial Intelligence, I discuss biased data. Machine Learning depends on large data sets, and unless you take care, ML algorithms will perpetuate any bias in the data it learns from. The famous ImageNet database contains 14 million labeled images. However, 6% of these have the wrong label. The labels are provided by humans paid very little per image, so they will work very fast. Unfortunately, as Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman has shown, when humans work fast, they depend on their fast System 1 thinking that is very prone to bias. Thus, a woman in hospital s...2021-04-0907 minBeneficial IntelligencePrice transparencyIn this episode of Beneficial Intelligence, I discuss price transparency. In the U.S., a coronavirus test can cost $56 if you pay yourself, but $450 if your health insurance pays it. This lack of price transparency makes the U.S. healthcare system the most expensive in the world, costing the US 17% of GDP. Every other industrialized country is below 12%. There are now laws requiring hospitals to publish their prices, but they deliberately hide them from the search engines. You see the same kind of price obfuscation with cloud vendors, who carefully charge separately for CPU, RAM, storage, network t...2021-03-2607 minBeneficial IntelligenceBlaming the HumansIn this episode of Beneficial Intelligence, I discuss blaming the humans. It often happens that a system failure is attributed to fallible humans. In that way, you don't have to admit embarrassing shortcomings in your system. A recently declassified report showed that a weapons officer blamed for accidentally firing a missile back in the 1980s was actually the victim of a system error. Boeing initially tried to pin the blame for the 737 MAX-8 crashes on pilot error. Last year, Citibank accidentally paid out $900 million instead of just the few million they intended. They blame a back employee, n...2021-03-1907 minBeneficial IntelligenceWasting MoneyIn this episode of Beneficial Intelligence, I discuss wasting money. The business always complains that IT is costing too much. That is because we are wasting so much money. We're on track for worldwide IT spending of about 4 trillion, and surveys show that at least 25% of that is wasted. That's one trillion dollars we waste. IT organizations waste money in two ways: With what we build, and with what we run. It's a time-honored tradition in IT to never retire an old system. We keep everything running forever, even though the business benefit has long si...2021-03-1208 minBeneficial IntelligenceMoving FastIn this episode of Beneficial Intelligence, I discuss moving fast. Mark Zuckerberg is famous for saying "Move fast and break things." That was his way of communicating a preference for high speed, accepting high risk. It has become an unofficial motto of Silicon Valley, but Facebook now has billions of users and today have a different risk profile. Elon Musk, on the other hand, moves fast and breaks things. He is launching SpaceX Starships as a furious pace, and the landings often end up in spectacular fireballs. He had one rocket blow up on landing in December, an...2021-03-0505 minBeneficial IntelligenceUser Experience DisastersIn this episode of Beneficial Intelligence, I discuss User Experience disasters. Danes consistently rank among the happiest people in the world, but I can tell you for sure that it is not the public sector IT we use that make us happy. We have a very expensive welfare state financed with very high taxes, but all that money does not buy us good user experience. Good User Experience (UX) is not expensive, but it does require that you can put yourself in the user's place and that you talk to users. That is a separate IT specialty, a...2021-02-2607 minBeneficial IntelligenceContingency PlansIn this episode of Beneficial Intelligence, I discuss contingency plans. Texas was not prepared for the cold, and millions lost power. Amid furious finger-pointing, it turns out that none of the recommendations from the report after the last power outage have been implemented, and suggestions from the report after the outage in 1989 were not implemented either. As millions of Texas turned up the heat in their uninsulated homes, demand surged. At the same time, wind turbines froze. Then the natural gas wells and pipelines froze. Then the rivers where the nuclear power plants take cooling water from f...2021-02-1909 minBeneficial IntelligenceRisk and RewardIn this episode of Beneficial Intelligence, I discuss risks and rewards. Humans are a successful species because we are good at calculating risks and rewards. Similarly, organizations are successful if they are good at calculating the risks they face and the rewards they can gain. Different people have different risk profiles, and companies also have different appetite for risk. Industries like aerospace and pharmaceuticals face large consequences if something goes wrong and have a low risk tolerance. Hedge funds, on the other hand, takes big risks to reap large rewards. It is easy to create in...2021-02-1209 minBeneficial IntelligenceDo the Right ThingIn this episode of Beneficial Intelligence, I discuss doing the right thing. Google started out with a motto of "Don't be evil," but that has fallen by the wayside. Occasionally, employees remind Google of the old motto as when they forced Google to stop working on AI for the Pentagon. But they don't seem terribly committed, and their highly touted Ethical AI Team is falling apart after they fired the head researcher. Amazon never promised not to be evil, and they are forcing their delivery drivers to do 10-hour graveyard shifts starting before sunrise and going until m...2021-02-0507 minBeneficial IntelligenceAmateurs and ProfessionalsIn this episode of Beneficial Intelligence, I discuss amateurs and professionals. Recently, Gamestock shares have gone through the roof. That's because professionals were betting that the stock would fall, and amateur investors meeting on the internet decided to buy up all the stock they could. The amateurs seem to have won this battle, inflicting billions of dollars of losses on the professionals. Amateurs also build IT systems, but in IT, the amateurs always lose. At JP Morgan, a trader built a model in Excel. He made a small error in his formula, made bad trades, and the b...2021-01-2907 minBeneficial IntelligenceRobustnessIn this episode of Beneficial Intelligence, I discuss robustness. Robustness is a system's ability to keep running when parts of it are knocked out. This week we saw Parler, a social media platform used by Trump supporters, being taken out by their cloud provider Amazon. They did not have robustness.The Pirate Bay, on the other hand, has robustness. Governments and big media companies have tried to put them out of business for two decades, and they are still up and running. On-premise systems had a certain robustness built in - even if y...2021-01-1507 minBeneficial IntelligenceKnowledge DecayIn this episode of Beneficial Intelligence, I discuss knowledge decay. Knowledge decays over time, and skills you don't use become rusty. That's why it's a problem for out-of-work pilots that they're not flying. Some knowledge decays and becomes less useful because the world moves on. An old-school telephone engineer's knowledge of electro-mechanical switches became irrelevant as phone exchanges became digital. Your knowledge of last month's hot JavaScript framework might be less relevant this month because there is now a newer and hotter toolkit. But organizational knowledge decays much slower. That's why the knowledge in the he...2020-12-1108 minBeneficial IntelligenceValue for MoneyIn this episode of Beneficial Intelligence, I discuss getting value for your money. It's Black Friday, and all shops are offering incredible deals. Unfortunately, they don't necessarily provide value for money, because prices have been creeping up for months in order to be able to fall today. Similarly, we are building a lot of IT systems that don't provide value for money. We just got an app here in Denmark that will allow you to keep your driving license on your phone. I don't replace the plastic card you already have, so the only people getting value fr...2020-11-2704 minBeneficial IntelligenceExit StrategiesIn this episode of Beneficial Intelligence, I discuss exit strategies. History is full of examples of powerful countries that started military adventures without having an exit strategy. Commercial relationships also need an exit strategy. If you are running standard on-premise systems, moving away to another vendor is manageable, but if you are using specialized features that only one vendor offers, your exit is going to be expensive and difficult. This is even worse in the cloud where each vendor has specific strengths and their own way of doing things. The exit cost is part of th...2020-11-2006 minBeneficial IntelligenceToo Much TechnologyIn this episode of Beneficial Intelligence, I discuss the tendency to use too much technology. As technology enthusiasts, we must be aware of our tendency to implement technology where it doesn't really improve things. There is an Israeli startup that is building autonomous flying drones to pick apples. In my keynote "Everything that's wrong with IT," I talk about my internet-connected socks. In my house, I have various "smart" devices that allow me to control the lights. Over the past month, I've ripped out two different malfunctioning systems and replaced them with the simple on/off switches I...2020-11-1308 minBeneficial IntelligenceThe War for TalentIn this episode of Beneficial Intelligence, I discuss the War for Talent. Every organization wants the most talented programmers, administrators, UX designers, and other talent. But they want it cheaply. New salary requirements for H-1B visas in the US have companies howling that they can't get the talent they need. But there isn't a shortage of talent, there is a shortage of willingness to pay. If you have a good business case, you can afford the talent needed to make that product a reality. The problem is that IT organizations have their thinking reversed. In...2020-11-0608 minBeneficial IntelligenceSecuring Your DataIn this episode of Beneficial Intelligence, I discuss classifying and securing your data.Military forces have always needed to keep secrets, and they have hundreds of years of experience. You can learn from them. They use different classifications for different information, from UNCLASSIFIED over RESTRICTED to CONFIDENTIAL, SECRET, and TOP SECRET. That allows the organization to implement simple rules for handling and allowing access to information. Most organizations haven't changed their security policies since the only security you had was to lock important papers in a filing cabinet. You also need a security cl...2020-10-3006 minBeneficial IntelligenceHow many humans do you need?In this episode of Beneficial Intelligence, I discuss how much automated support systems can do, and how many humans you need.Thousands of customers of online brokerage Robinhood have been hacked, and have watched helplessly as hackers sold their stock and emptied their accounts. Robinhood does not have anybody you can call. We've been trying to automate customer service for a long time, and it has never worked completely. The real world is messy and requires human judgment. Customers will accept chatbots as the first line of support if they are honest about their limitations. B...2020-10-2305 minBeneficial IntelligenceDeadly incompetenceIn this episode of Beneficial Intelligence, I discuss deadly incompetence. Some people are more competent than others, and it is a leadership challenge to place people in positions where the organization can make the most of their competence. It is also the task of the leader not to place anyone in a position where lack of competence can have large negative results. Unfortunately, someone at Public Health England was placed in a critical position without the necessary competence. PHE was gathering coronavirus data from all over the country in the form of CSV files and we...2020-10-0906 minBeneficial IntelligenceVendor SelectionIn this episode of Beneficial Intelligence, I discuss vendor selection. When selecting a vendor, most organizations use vendor size as one of the criteria. Normally, the vendor gets points for being big, on the reasonable assumption that a large organization is more likely to have the resources to complete the implementation project. But it is equally important that the vendor is not too big. Small organizations have a different culture from large organizations and having a small vendor deliver to a large customer, or a large vendor deliver to a small customer causes problems. I...2020-10-0206 minBeneficial IntelligenceUndetected DowntimeIn this episode of Beneficial Intelligence, I discuss undetected downtime. Undetected downtime is one of the deadly sins of IT. If the business has to tell us that one of our systems is down, and we don't know, it undermines their trust in us. The infrastructure behind the Danish contact tracing app was down this week, and red-faced health officials had to admit that it had been down for days before news reports forced them to take the end-user reports of downtime seriously. A reason that this happens is that we might neglect to...2020-09-2506 minBeneficial IntelligenceDishonest DemosIn this episode of Beneficial Intelligence, I discuss dishonest demos. Why is it that it has become normal for IT professionals to demonstrate software in a way that misrepresents what it is capable of? One reason is that there are no negative consequences for over-promising. It has become ingrained in our way of doing business to run dishonest demos. As a CIO, you need to put a stop to this behavior. It erodes trust in IT, and it allows dishonesty to spread. When new functionality is being demoed at the end of an agile sprint, yo...2020-09-1807 minBeneficial IntelligencePermanent ChangeIn this episode of Beneficial Intelligence, I discuss handling change. The world changes constantly - have you ever been in an airport that wasn't expanding or rebuilding? You would think that we in IT would be good at handling change. After all, we are not moving tons of earth or pouring massive amounts of concrete. But we are surprisingly bad at it. It takes us a long time to make even simple changes because we have allowed ourselves to implement overly complex processes. Complexity grows by itself, and only the CIO can reduce it.When I...2020-09-1106 minBeneficial IntelligenceJetpack systemsIn this episode of Beneficial Intelligence, I discuss Jetpack systems - powerful but uncontrolled systems implemented by the business without coordination with IT. In aviation, we have learned to separate the casual traffic in small aircraft from the serious commercial traffic in large airplanes. The commercial traffic operates on detailed IFR flight plans and flies in airspace controlled by Air Traffic Control on the ground. Outside of controlled airspace, the little planes can fly using visual flight rules just like pilots did at the dawn of aviation. In IT, we have a similar distinction between th...2020-09-0406 minBeneficial IntelligenceShiny Object SyndromeIn this episode of Beneficial Intelligence, I discuss Shiny Object Syndrome - the tendency to want to replace perfectly adequate systems with something new, just because it's new. Aviation is full of this, with a new startup every month promising to disrupt air transportation with something AI-driven and autonomous built from scratch out of carbon fiber. IT also suffers from this. The problem in IT is internal, not external. Our users don't suffer from Shiny Object Syndrome - they just want their technology to work so they can do what provides value for the business. But developers a...2020-08-2805 minBeneficial IntelligenceLearning from FailureIn this episode of Beneficial Intelligence, I discuss how to learn from failure. The Boeing 737 MAX8 aircraft just returned to the skies for the first test flights this week. After two fatal crashes, Boeing has fixed the malfunctioning MCAS software, but they also looked at the design and review process that allowed the defective software to be approved in the first place. That led to other improvements, making the 737 MAX8 even safer. In IT, we sadly do not learn from our failures in this way, and still routinely fly projects into the ground in the same way w...2020-07-0205 minBeneficial IntelligenceBusiness CasesIn this episode of Beneficial Intelligence, I discuss how to evaluate business cases. In a Low Value Maturity organization, the cost of creating and running a system is not systematically compared to the benefits. In a High Value Maturity organization, the business presents the expected benefits, and IT provides the cost. It is imperative that IT presents both the initial and ongoing costs to prevent under-funding. When you bring the benefit and the cost together, the High Value Maturity organization can calculate the payback period for a project and compare it to other investment opportunities. This allows the organization...2020-06-2508 minBeneficial IntelligencePerformance MeasurementsIn this episode of Beneficial Intelligence, I discuss how to measure performance. The famous Hawthorne experiment shows that simply measuring a process affects it. This can lead to dysfunctional consequences, but if you let your employees and teams suggest goals, and ensure that the goals balance each other so they cannot be gamed, you can get the benefit of performance measurement without the drawbacks. Beneficial Intelligence is a weekly podcast with stories and pragmatic advice for CIOs and other IT leaders. To get in touch, please contact me at sten@vesterli.com2020-06-1803 minBeneficial IntelligenceThe Cost of DowntimeIn this episode of Beneficial Intelligence, I discuss how to calculate the cost of downtime. Downtime cost is not linear, so you have to consider the cost and probability of different downtime intervals. I talk about the downtime considerations you need to make when considering a cloud solution, as well as how to determine if a high availability option is worth the cost. Your job is to find the lowest total cost, and downtime cost is part of that calculation. Beneficial Intelligence is a weekly podcast with stories and pragmatic advice for CIOs and other IT leaders. T...2020-06-1106 minBeneficial IntelligenceManaging ComplexityIn this episode of Beneficial Intelligence, I discuss how to manage the complexity in IT organizations. We keep running into the wall of complexity where even the smallest change takes an immense effort. This is caused by our organization, as Melvin Conway discovered when he coined "Conway's Law" back in 1967. But we can also use Conway's Law to our advantage and step away from the wall of complexity. Beneficial Intelligence is a weekly podcast with stories and pragmatic advice for CIOs and other IT leaders. To get in touch, please contact me at sten@vesterli.com2020-06-0405 minBeneficial IntelligenceNatural ExperimentsIn this episode of Beneficial Intelligence, I tell you a few stories of how science has used natural experiments to gather knowledge that was hard to find. The changes to your processes caused by coronavirus is also a natural experiment, and you should compare the old way of doing things with the way you were doing them during the crisis. You might find that you learned a better way to do many things. 2020-05-2709 minBeneficial IntelligenceThe Speed of DecayIn this episode of Beneficial Intelligence, I discuss how the different layers in your IT architecture decays at different rates. The data layer changes slowly with a half-life of around a decade. The business logic changes every few years, and the user interface changes very rapidly. This has implications for the architecture of your systems, and you should ask your architects about the expected speed of decay of each layer in your systems. If you know the speed of decay, and when the application was written or last revised, you can better anticipate what your business is g...2020-05-2107 minBeneficial IntelligenceAvoiding Employee BurnoutIn this episode of Beneficial Intelligence, I discuss how to avoid employee burnout. I talk about What a recent analysis of GitHub activity says about work during the Corona crisisWhat leaders should do to prevent employee burnoutHow to set up a warning system so you know when your employees are at riskBeneficial Intelligence is a weekly podcast with stories and pragmatic advice for CIOs and other IT leaders.I'd love to hear your comments. Please email me at sten@vesterli.com2020-05-1306 minBeneficial IntelligenceMoving Learning OnlineCoronavirus has forced many organizations to move to online learning. In this episode, I discuss the advantages and disadvantages of online learning, what the options are, and what you should choose depending on the learning goal. Finally, I talk about how to measure the result - if you are not measuring, you are flying blind. If you have comments, you can contact me at sten@vesterli.com or connect with me on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/stenvesterli/. If you want to know how I help IT organizations succeed by providing great business value, you can a...2020-05-0706 min
Patrick Daly Interlinks PodcastSten Vesterli, one of Europe’s leading experts on software developmentToday we are off to Denmark – one of our small-country peers in the European Union and a country that is often held up by some politicians and commentators as a country that we should aim to emulate in terms of equality, social services and environmental protection.We will be talking with Sten Vesterli. Sten is a man with a long professional track record in the IT industry and one of Europe’s leading experts on software development and is one of only about 20 Oracle Ace Directors worldwide and is the author of 3 books on software development.2019-10-3026 min