Ruminations

Bitpourri - Pay Attention or Pay The Price

Welcome to Bitpourri, where we post tidbits that aren’t lengthy enough to warrant a full blog post of their own but still merit sharing. These (usually) unrelated vignettes are quick and easy reads for when you're interested in some food for thought but are feeling more “snackish” than ready for a full meal. You can find more of our Bitpourri series here.

In this edition of Bitpourri we have a scary data problem, an international bus stop and adding up workarounds.

• Friday the 13th
• Belgium vs. Japan
• The Dedication Is In The Details

I am not a superstitious person. Which explains why I treat Friday the 13th as merely a harbinger of Saturday the 14th. And yet, I happen to have a small Friday the 13th horror story of my own.

One Friday the 13th, shortly after a system upgrade, I was at a client. I was informed of what appeared to be some minor data corruption in new data records. Minor as it seemed, it was a major source of angst for the employee who had to contend with it. She had reported it to her supervisor 10 days prior, but her supervisor deemed it as inconsequential.

"minor data corruption" is like being off by a penny in accounting. You don’t have any idea how bad it is, only that it seems to be insignificant until you find it.

As it turns out the upgrade caused a hard to find, but easy to fix, bug. This bug was wreaking havoc on new records, even though the affected data visible to the users seemed to be minimally impacted. Finding the bug took a few hours; fixing it took a few seconds. Repairing the data - a mere 20 or so records - took well over an hour. If no one had told me this issue would have gotten out of hand very quickly.

The little things matter. Especially when ignoring them makes an employee feel disparaged and inconsequential. Data integrity matters. Morale always matters.

That goal. That goal Japan scored against Belgium in the 52nd minute. Takashi Inui, a Forward for Japan, was amongst five Belgian defenders who looked like they were waiting for a bus. From 18 yards out, Inui fired a shot past Thibaut Courtois, the Belgian goalkeeper. Courtois's reaction said it all.

Courtois's reaction. I've seen it before. I know how that feels. That's how data security works when your client is staffed with a bunch of Belgium defenders waiting for a bus.

If everyone is standing around expecting somebody else to protect them, then you're fighting a losing battle. The overall danger is inversely proportional to the level of everyone's engagement. You can't just be on the lookout for intruders – you need to be watching for complacency as well.

Recently, I was on a client call with several of their managers. One of the issues we covered was workarounds they were creating due to their failure to report issues encountered by their staff. These weren’t technical issues, but rather the byproduct of poor initial requirements for a new addition to their system. Rather than having me address the problems, the managers instructed their staff to use workarounds. The result of these workarounds? More issues and more workarounds. Workarounds beget workarounds. The law of unintended consequences strikes again.

While emphasizing the importance of reporting issues without delay, I was told by one of the managers that I take these things too personally. They felt that their staff having to deal with some of these things wasn't a big deal. I responded the only way appropriate for this type of mindset – with math.

I pointed out that the feature in question had been used more than 5,000 times in the few short months the new functionality had been live. And that the workarounds had been used approximately 16% of the time. That was 800 times their staff had to deal with the issue unnecessarily. I also reminded them that over the course of a year their staff had used the entire system for over 150k page views. And if there happened to be a problem with part of the system that was used on every page, their users would have had to deal with it over 150k times unnecessarily. These things should be taken personally – by management.

Workarounds desensitize users to system problems. Dismissing the effect that persistent or frequent system problems have on user morale is shortsighted. If the users don’t feel the system is reliable or trustworthy then their faith in the system decays. It erodes confidence like rust. And if your users don’t care then your data will suffer. And that is a big deal.

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