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.
Showing posts with label Automation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Automation. Show all posts
2014-02-20
The Singularity
Every now and then, the conversation resurfaces: when will The Singularity occur, and what will we do when it happens?
A basic question about it is, if only the most talented of us are worthy of power, money, and recognition, and if those things are directly related to quality of life, is it ever in our best interest to enable programs to become better at what we do than we are? Of course this hinges on what people define as talent and worth. In business, value is often determined by rarity of skillset, where rarity is diffused by the availability of less expensive alternatives.
It's an important question for technologists, because most of us have spent our careers writing clever scripts or programs to do the tedious parts of what we do. This cleverness has led to business leaders and opportunists to encourage this trend as a means to reduce that rarity and pay less for technologists, or to justify having fewer of them.
It's a familiar argument to Infosec folks: the magic bullet application that protects all things so businesses can cut expenses on headcount.
So, with this observation, I have a proposal.
A basic question about it is, if only the most talented of us are worthy of power, money, and recognition, and if those things are directly related to quality of life, is it ever in our best interest to enable programs to become better at what we do than we are? Of course this hinges on what people define as talent and worth. In business, value is often determined by rarity of skillset, where rarity is diffused by the availability of less expensive alternatives.
It's an important question for technologists, because most of us have spent our careers writing clever scripts or programs to do the tedious parts of what we do. This cleverness has led to business leaders and opportunists to encourage this trend as a means to reduce that rarity and pay less for technologists, or to justify having fewer of them.
It's a familiar argument to Infosec folks: the magic bullet application that protects all things so businesses can cut expenses on headcount.
So, with this observation, I have a proposal.
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