2014-03-24

Understanding, Underachievement, and the Impact of Conformity

Work smarter, not harder does not mean you can replace all your smart employees with tools and cheap button clickers. The fallacy is, tools are not a 1:1 replacement for people. You have the cost of the tool, the cost of the people who use the tool, and the cost of the people who install, maintain, and support the tool.

You can attract the right talent if you pay them what they are worth, treat them with respect, and enable them to support your organizational mission. Consider that as an alternative to silver bullet solutions with complex back ends and major licensing fees.

I have worked within IT for nearly twenty years, and after sacrificing more of my personal life than was reasonable to long hours and countless weekends spent in support of organizational missions, I decided to stay in information technology and join the information security discipline. I did this because I wanted make things better for the millions of people who daily entrust organizations with our financial and personal details either in naiveté (that we cannot be impacted by the loss of the information we share), or in the belief that these organizations are using the data we give them prudently and with due care to protect it.