Beneficial Intelligence
A weekly podcast with stories and pragmatic advice for CIOs and other IT leaders.
Episodes
53 episodes
Other People's Failures
In 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 devic...
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Season 2
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Episode 30
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7:35
People Shortage
In 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...
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Season 2
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Episode 29
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5:43
Data Hoarding
In 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. Usi...
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Season 2
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Episode 28
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7:29
Monoculture
In 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...
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Season 2
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Episode 27
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9:04
Trust, but Verify
In 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 t...
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Season 2
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Episode 26
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9:34
Time to Recover
In 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 ...
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Season 2
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Episode 25
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8:28
Goal Fixation
In 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 spacef...
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Season 2
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Episode 24
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9:10
Narrow Focus
In 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 tha...
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Season 2
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Episode 23
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8:28
Back to the Office
In 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 T...
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Season 2
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Episode 22
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8:38
Humans and Computers
In 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.
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Season 2
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Episode 21
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6:42
Competition
In 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...
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Season 2
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Episode 20
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10:18
Pseudo-Security
In 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 gu...
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Season 2
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Episode 19
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7:53
Good Enough
In 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 avia...
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Season 2
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Episode 18
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7:55
Unnecessary Roadblocks
In 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 marij...
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Season 2
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Episode 17
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9:08
Expectation Management
In 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, bu...
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Season 2
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Episode 16
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7:50
Gaming the Metrics
In 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 f...
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Season 2
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Episode 15
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10:31
Accidental Publication
In 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 sh...
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Season 2
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Episode 14
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7:55
Irrational Optimism
In 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 physi...
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Season 2
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Episode 13
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8:05
Risk Aversion
In 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....
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Season 2
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Episode 12
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5:23
Biased Data
In 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 databa...
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Season 2
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Episode 11
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7:29
Price transparency
In 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 sys...
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Season 2
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Episode 10
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7:00
Blaming the Humans
In 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 rece...
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Season 2
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Episode 9
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7:35
Wasting Money
In 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 surv...
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Season 2
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Episode 8
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8:51
Moving Fast
In 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 unofficia...
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Season 2
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Episode 7
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5:55
User Experience Disasters
In 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 ...
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Season 2
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Episode 6
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7:20