Big Tech Monopolies, School and IT, Evaluating Cloud Services
Kevin Dominik Korte
Board Member / Angel Investor / IT Innovation & Growth Strategist / Speaker, defining and supporting execution of value-add, purpose-led strategies that deliver accelerated growth and business turnaround.
Hi there ?? Welcome to the world of a millennial technologist in the boardroom. Our world is changing. From AI and Cybersecurity to ClimateTech and Education, rapid advances in all fields have made today a different world than yesterday. Here are my stories about the things that change and don't in the boardroom and the world.
Things that Change and Will Stay
Change: The Way we see Big Tech Monopolies
Over the past few weeks, Google and Apple have received several verdicts challenging their monopolies. Simultaneously, governments worldwide are investigating AI companies' powers. These issues point to significant problems in our economic system, especially in the tech world. Our leading Tech companies have managed to entrench themselves so deeply into the world that we seldom have a?way out.
They have established their dominant position by systemically using their cash to buy out their competition, close back-door deals, and bundle their products into one. Yet, for the average consumer, the conglomeration of products seldom looks like a hindrance to innovation. Most of us wouldn't see bundling Teams with Microsoft 365 at no extra cost reducing the incentive to buy a competitor's product.
However, many of the big tech monopolistic positions aren't as clear as the ones of Standard Oil or American Steel. After all, Big Tech can trade data, act like hedge funds, or raise supplier fees to make money and harm consumers. Without the apparent need to fix and raise prices, it is hard to see the cost big tech puts on consumers. Yet, with the loss of innovation, the loss of privacy, and by forcing us into walled gardens, they make the world a little bleaker and prevent the next big thing from challenging our ideas and worldviews.
Ultimately, it is up to the customer to challenge the monopolies. However, many of us decide not to do so. Our mindset gets in the way and keeps us bound to the applications and services that have made it past the gatekeepers. Yet, once we focus on how to be most productive and efficient and what we want to accomplish, we realize that many of the big tech bundles in our toolbox are nothing more than vendor lock-ins into the respective monopolies.
Original Thought:
Stay: Cybersecurity Issues In Schools
"Intentionally or unintentionally utilizing services to circumvent network-based security is prohibited." This gem from a school IT handbook has greeted parents and students in some school districts. Even with 12 years in corporate IT, I only have a vague idea of what it means. Yet, the handbook requires a signature that parents and students read and understood the content. Amidst the complexities of cybersecurity and AI, schools often overlook that their audience comprises children and parents, many of whom are not IT experts. Schools need to change how they handle IT unless they want to be overwhelmed by cybersecurity incidents.
While the various handbooks and policies are an excellent start to questioning our relationship with IT, they go further. Support must reckon with the fact that elementary school students see the world differently than adults. We have to better understand the expectations and realities of the classroom. IT can promise the wonders of technology, a metaverse of connections, and the miracle of effortless learning. Yet, no one wins if students and parents struggle to log in.
Further, we shouldn't expect parents to pay for the latest and greatest devices to access education services. Neither most parents' wallets nor the limited resources on our planet can sustain an ever-changing zoo of computers and tablets.
Lastly, cybersecurity in schools cannot be an afterthought. It took less than a week for the first district to shut down after an attack. Students are uniquely vulnerable because they often don't understand the implications of cyberattacks and cannot opt out of data collection at school. Thus, school districts must show greater responsibility than other organizations.
The last school year brought us a multitude of cybersecurity incidents. Let us change our attitudes and postures to put an end to it.
Original Thought:
领英推荐
Change: The Way We Evaluate Cloud Services
July 19th, 2024, brought a widespread outage of Microsoft's cloud services, followed by CrowdStrike's antivirus platform breaking over eight million Windows devices worldwide. The two incidents can safely be considered the most extensive IT failure in history. Thousands of grounded flights, shuttered hospitals, and closed supermarkets laid bare the fault lines in the current IT landscape. To avoid these issues in the future, we must acknowledge the mistakes that let the problems spiral out of control and tackle the failures in risk management, gaps in business continuity, and a lack of funding for IT.
Risk management is one of the core functions of the board of directors at any company. Yet today, only a minority of board members have any technology background, and few boards have dedicated technology committees. If you run an airline, a computer outage causing a weeklong cascading chaos of cancellations and delays means that the company didn't judge its inherent risks correctly. These cybersecurity and IT management incidents point to a more profound problem in risk management. Boards today understand many of the legal, operational, and financial risks a company faces. However, information technology is still treated as an auxiliary service - a grave mistake in our hyperconnected world.
Inadequate evaluation further increases the risks. Cloud services and software-as-a-service offerings do not undergo the same rigorous planning as their on-premises counterparts. We rely on service level agreements (SLAs) to judge the risks, and the brand name standing behind such an SLA too often replaces genuine outage planning. After all, the whole purpose of outsourcing IT services to one of the leading providers is that we don't have to deal with the details of service availability.
Yet, even if the IT department desires better cloud outage planning, it often lacks funding and staffing. Our companies, our entire economy, and society run on computers. Without adequate funding for IT expertise, each service we introduce will become a new risk factor. The problem only gets exacerbated as the same overworked people are supposed to react to current issues and plan for preventing future problems.
Nobody likes to be stuck at an airport staring at a screen full of canceled flights or have the hospital cancel a medical procedure. However, this could be our new reality unless we change how we think about and handle IT.
Original Thought:
Around the Net and World
Don't Forget the End-Users
When modernizing IT, experts tend to focus on the project's great new features. Yet, for many users, the conglomeration of little things makes or breaks the experience. A button in a new place, a new background color, an additional checkbox to click - none of these seem like much. Yet, taken together, they significantly change the user experience and might lead to resistance to change.
Listening with Leaders
I had the great pleasure of discussing listening with Douglas Noll on Listening with Leaders. We dive into the world of pitches and how to ask meaningful questions of founders. We also discuss how the board room differs from other meetings and why the decorum and fixed agenda allow the directors to focus more on the discussion.
About Kevin
Kevin is a board member and IT innovation and growth strategist with a proven track record of harnessing commercial acumen and finance expertise to deliver large-scale digital transformation programs with a strong focus on identity management and open-source IT infrastructure solutions.
Companies over a certain size or with a major market share should not be allowed to acquire other companies, and should only be allowed sign non-exclusive licenses for new technologies. Several of the biggest players need to be broken into smaller and easier to regulate companies. Some companies should be stripped of patent protections and forced to place source code with appropriate comments and notes for free public access through the Library of Congress. Only allowing apps that run on their products to be purchase through their own stores should charged as restraint of trade.
Conversation - the clearest path to opportunity. Let's have one. ??
2 个月Kevin, this really is brilliant commentary.