I Raised the Alarm on Pandemic Preparation. I Got Laughed Out of the Room.
I wrote this book because I'm angry. Angry that the information is available to anyone who looks and almost nobody in authority acts on it.
Tag: Risk Management (Page 3)
AI AdoptionThe AI That Lied, Colluded and Won: Inside Vending-Bench
Three frontier AI models ran competing vending machines for a simulated year with nobody watching. The winner built price cartels it knew were illegal, broke eleven truces, and paid customers $8.54 across six runs. What that says about handing an…
IT InfrastructureThe Single Maintainer Problem: Who Keeps Your Software Alive?
Before installing any software, ask how many people keep it alive. The number is public, takes five minutes to find, and predicts more grief than any feature list. The story of an excellent theme with a bus factor of one.
HostingThe Plugin Diet: Trimming WordPress Without Losing Muscle
Plugins are generally in better shape than themes, but they grow sideways: the tool you installed for one job quietly becomes a platform doing fifteen. An afternoon audit puts the stack back on a diet.
Business ContinuityDisaster Recovery Is Part of the Transformation, or It Is Not One
A DR plan is a set of precise claims about a specific environment. A transformation is the deliberate, wholesale changing of that environment. Put those two sentences together and you see the problem most transformation programs never address.
Business ContinuityTwenty Years of Disaster Recovery: What the Real Ones Taught Me
Lightning fried a computer room around me. Backhoes cut my DR links. A tabletop exercise with a truck bomb and an active shooter taught a room of professionals that half of them could not authorize anything. Twenty years of disaster…
Business ContinuityThe Server Under the Desk
We were hunting for a machine during a disaster recovery effort. Systems were talking to it, work depended on it, and it was not in the server room. We found it under a user's desk in accounting, running decade-old software,…
Digital TransformationSix DBAs, Six Months, Open Checkbook
The migration budget covered the conversion, the cutover, the infrastructure, the testing. The real bill arrived afterward, by invoice: hundreds of SQL queries that had to be re-optimized for the new platform, by six specialist DBAs, over six months, on…
Digital TransformationBarely Tolerable: Surviving the Weeks After Go-Live
The Gantt chart crescendos to cutover weekend, and the boxes after it say 'stabilization,' thin little boxes, drawn by optimists. Then you go live and discover what those boxes contain: weeks of triage, expectation management, and a system running on…
Digital TransformationThe Big-Bang Cutover That Almost Rolled Back
Friday we were on the old platform. Monday we were on the new one, and it was buckling. We stood at the edge of a rollback with the whole company standing on a system that could not carry the load,…
CybersecuritySoftware Testing: 10 Things Most Teams Get Wrong
Testing is the hardest job in most IT departments and the place projects quietly die. After years in operations, the sheer lack of it still stuns me, shipped code that would not run, programs never tested at all. Real testing…
AuditsCesar Dongo-Soria: Why Trade Compliance Can Send an Executive to Jail
Cesar Dongo-Soria joins Richard Lowe on Leaders and Their Stories to explain the hidden, high-stakes world of trade compliance: why end-use liability can jail an executive, why a ten-million-dollar deal can be the wrong deal, and why you cannot rely…