The two biggest mistakes I see enterprises make today:

 1.      Not having good patching strategies and standards (Technology Hygiene)

This is an age-old issue

This has plagued security teams since the dawn of technology and is, believe it or not, a relatively easy fix. This is an age-old issue, everybody wants 100% uptime and quality on their servers and services while IT departments are forced into smaller budgets year on year to attain these business outcomes. A simple standard to allow for round robin patching fixes this technology issue instantly. The build and upkeep of the service is a lot less than you may think initially. But for this to work it must be supported by the second issue!

2.      IT department's working in isolation and not building for customer outcomes. (Culture)

Technology teams work more like custodians than partners

This is the most common mistake I find. Organisations have IT leadership teams that build systems and rank them in importance to how the system operates without the input of the customer facing business. Working more like custodians than partners. Systems should always be ranked by the outcomes for the customer paying for your business’ service. I’ll give you a real world example;

During a workshop I ran for a large retailer in Australia. The CIO was explaining how eftpos (credit/debit card transactions) and POS (Point of Sales) networks were the MOST important technologies that his department managed. Which, I think, most people would agree with this logic at first glance. However, the CEO and COO explained that the customer rewards system was in fact the most important and could not have any down time. The reason being was with the two networks the CIO was speaking about there was procedures and local workarounds to these going down however if loyalty program was to fail there was a wealth of data (very important to the business for many reasons), and customer discounts which is why most people were regular shoppers at the retailer. 

It pays to work closely with you peers and work as a partner and college. Calling the business departments, a ‘customer’ is what makes these unnecessary divides and only hurts reputations.

Lets get through 2020 with culture and partnerships as our takeaways from all the disruption.

If you want to know more about how you can implement the fix to either of these problems feel free to contact me.

#leadership #cyber #solutions