Beneficial Intelligence

Dishonest Demos

September 18, 2020 Sten Vesterli Season 1 Episode 13
Beneficial Intelligence
Dishonest Demos
Show Notes

In 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, you should not allow developers to demo it. Only an actual business end user is allowed to demo. You must ask your teams "Is this demo a realistic representation of what the software can do TODAY?"  

It is your task as a CIO to root out this bad behavior that has accumulated over decades.

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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.com