Random Acts of Architecture

Wisdom for the IT professional, focusing on chaos that is IT systems and architecture.

Tag Archives: Careers

Rebranding Corporate Politics

Leave a comment Posted by on January 16, 2017

politicsThe term “corporate politics” conjures up images of sycophantic, self-serving behavior like boot-licking and backstabbing. However, to some IT professionals’ chagrin, we work with humans as much as computers. Dismissing humans is dismissing part of the job.

The best way to “play” corporate politics is solve big problems by doing things you enjoy and excel at.

“Big problems” means problems faced not just by your team but by your boss’s boss, your boss’s boss’s boss and so on. If you don’t know what they are, ask (easier than it sounds). Otherwise, attend all hands meetings, read industry literature or look at your leaders’ social network posts, particularly internal ones.

This is not just for those wanting promotions into management. Individual contributors still want better benefits and higher profile or challenging projects. These come easiest to those known to be providing value and not the strict meritocracy some IT professionals think they work in.

Start by solving small problems as side projects. Choose something impacting more than your own team and minimize others’ extra work. Build up to bigger problems once you have demonstrated ability and credibility.

You need not be the leader. Assisting others making an effort can be just as effective. You can own part of it or bask in the halo effect. If not, recognize those that are. This creates a culture of recognition that may recognize you in the future.

While some IT professionals solve big problems everyday, communicating and evangelizing their work “feels” wrong. This what salespeople do, not IT professionals. Many also think their work is not interesting.

Being successful requires people knowing what you do. This may be as simple as a short elevator chat, a brown bag talk or a post on the corporate social network. It also helps get early feedback and build a like-minded team. Others will be interested if you are working on the right things.

What about the potentially less savory aspects of corporate politics like work social events, sharing common interests with management, supporting corporate charities and so on? These are as much an art as a science. Focus on common goals and building trust, internally and externally. People like to deal with people at their level and contact builds familiarity.

However, this is no substitute for solving big problems. If you are delivering value, interactions with senior decision makers and IT professionals with similar goals should occur naturally. Build on that.

Be aware that problems change over time. Problems get solved by others. The market changes. Competitors come and go. Understanding organizational goals is an ongoing process.

Also realize decision makers are human. They make mistakes. They want to emphasize their achievements and not their failures, just like software developers’ fundamental attribute error bias for their own code and against others’.

However, if your organization makes decisions regularly on “political” grounds, leave. Culture is rarely changed from the ground up and many organizations are looking for good IT staff.

Ignoring the worse case scenario and IT professionals’ bias against self evangelism, the biggest problem with “corporate politics” is actually its name. The concepts behind “agile” and “technical debt” came into common usage once the correct metaphor was found. Corporate politics needs rebranding from something avoided to a tool that IT professionals use to advance themselves. It badly needs a dose of optimism and open mindedness.

Image credit: http://thebluediamondgallery.com/p/politics.html. Usage under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Information Security, Op-Ed, Software Architecture, Software Development , , , ,

InfoSec: Not just for hackers

Leave a comment Posted by on January 8, 2017

everybody-needs-a-hackerI recently read Troy Hunt’s blog post on careers in information security. Troy makes good points about information security as a potential career and the benefits of certifications like the Certified Ethical Hacker. Hackers are getting increasingly sophisticated, requiring specific knowledge to counter, and cryptography is hard. We need more information security specialists.

However, one criticism of the post, indeed the information security industry, is its implication hacking is the sole information security career path. This binary viewpoint – you are either a security person or not and there is only one “true” information security professional – does more harm than good.

Hacking is technology focused. However, security’s scope is not just technical. Information security needs people that can articulate security issue impact, potential solutions and their cost in terms non-security people can understand. This requires expertise and credibility in multiple disciplines from individual contributor level to management to boardrooms.

Security solutions are not just technical. We live in societies governed by laws. These can be standardized government security requirements as FedRAMP or IRAP. These can be contractual obligations like PCI-DSS, covering credit card transactions. These can hold organizations accountable, like mandatory breach disclosure legislation, or protect or privacy, like the European Union’s Data Protection laws. Effective legislation requires knowledge of both law and information security and the political nous to get it enacted.

We are also surrounded by financial systems. Financial systems to punish those with weak security and reward those with good security will only evolve if we (consumers and investors) value security more. Cyber insurance has potential. Cryptographic technologies like bitcoin and block chain algorithms are threatening to disrupt the financial sectors. Information security has and will continue to impact finance.

The list goes on. Law enforcement needs to identify, store and present cybercrime evidence to juries and prosecute under new and changing laws. Hospitals and doctors want to take advantage of electronic health records..

The security technology focus drives people away non-technology people. In a world crying out for diversity and collaboration, the last thing information security needs is people focusing solely inward on their own craft, reinforcing stereotypes of shady basement dwellers, and not on systems security enables.

Bringing this back to software, many organizations contract or hire in information security experts. Unfortunately, the OWASP Top 10 changed little from 2010 to 2013 and some say is unlikely to change in the 2016 call for data. According to the Microsoft Security Intelligence Report, around half of serious, industry wide problems are from applications. Developers make the same mistakes again and again.

Education is one solution – security literate developers will avoid or fix security issues themselves. A better solution is tools and libraries that are not vulnerable in the first place, moving security from being reactive to proactive. For example, using an Object-Relational Mapping library or parameterized queries instead of string substitution for writing SQL.

Unfortunately, security people often lack skills to contribute to development and design beyond security. While information security touches many areas, information security expertise is not development (or networking or architecture or DevOps) expertise.

Information security needs different perspectives to succeed. As Corey House, a Puralsight author like Troy Hunt says in his course Becoming an Outlier, one route to career success is specialization. Information security is a specialization for everyone to consider, not just hackers.

Image credit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/adulau/8442476626

Information Security, Op-Ed, Software Architecture, Software Development , , , , , , ,

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