Grace Hopper Is Really Smart

Written on: 2024-10-01

I'll try to keep this post short - it's more of a rant than anything else.

I work at a pretty big company. I'm still employed there so I'm going to avoid saying too much so I don't get fired but... God. I've been here nearly a month and I've already become very annoyed at some of the ways that we do things.

Rear Admiral Grace Hopper gave a lecture on information management at the NSA in 1982 (they recently released it to the public and you can find it on YouTube here). First of all: she's really smart. Like, wow, she had amazing insight and deserves to be up there with Ada Lovelace and the unsung women of Bletchley Park you never hear about. She's seriously amazing.

A key point brought up in her lecture was this: we don't design around information flows and we really should. We design for immediate needs, without considering our future needs or how our system will grow and develop. This really struck a chord with me, because so many of the systems, tools, workflows, processes that we use were designed and developed almost as a plaster to solve a problem but never actually address the underlying problem. And it's so frustrating. Our tools are crippling, outdated, dysfunctional and have limited capacity to expand or grow. They can't answer our questions. The data they store, the information they contain, is wrong because the methods to interact with/create/modify the data, our basic CRUD functions, are nearly useless and do nothing to validate input or format output appropriately. It's genuinely frustrating.

But it doesn't stop at our tools. Oh no. (Some of) our processes, at their core, are fundamentally broken and are either:

I'll give examples of both.

We had an audit a few weeks ago. The person who took the lead of the audit, rather than following some kind of standard plan/process (which is what I would have expected), instead hounded other team members for notes about "what we gave the auditors last year". Why? Because the person who ran the audit last year left, and apparently all their notes and evidences left with them. Why? Because we didn't have a documented process on how to carry out this audit and what the results of that audit actually was. It felt like we were kids trying to cram exam content, guessing what will come up on the paper rather than learning the underlying concepts behind what was being assessed and answering questions based on that. We floundered through that audit and (in my opinion) we shouldn't have gotten away with a lot of the things we did but... I'm not the auditor. The thing that frustrates me the most is this: we didn't have a process in place that was repeatable and recorded.

We have a process for approving certain technologies for use in our environment. Part of the process involves using a risk scoring process which categorises the technology into low/medium/high/critical. Our process states the following:

The first question I asked on seeing this was: "what about medium?". To which I was told "we don't know". "We don't know"? Are you kidding me?! You know that the risk scoring method produces one of those 4 categories, why do you not know what to do for that category? Why is that not part of the process? "Because we haven't come across that usecase yet?" So!?! It will come up, why not build out the process to account for that? We didn't plan for a certain outcome to happen, and when it (inevitably) did, we were unprepared.

In her lecture, Grace said the most common excuse for not designing systems to handle information with a good amount of foresight was: "we've always done things that way". I can think of a few more:

That last one is a real killer. You NEED to communicate (important) things. Effectively. Tools and systems are all about communication. An Excel spreadsheet, a PowerPoint presentation, a fancy dashboard with all the bells and whistles under the sun - none of these will save you if you fail to properly communicate what you actually need to. These tools serve one purpose and one purpose only: document previous decisions to enable you to make future decisions. They cannot do that for you. All they do is provide you with the data that you need to make a decision. That is what information is. Managed effectively, it can be a game changer for an organisation. Managed ineffectively (or not managed at all) and all you have is pixels on a screen and ink on a piece of paper. Nearly useless.

Grace Hopper realised this in nineteen eighty two. Granted, she's very smart and the NSA didn't release this lecture until a few weeks ago. But we've also had forty two years to figure this out. Why are we only realising this now?

So here's my promise: from now on, I will look at the data and think to myself "What do I actually want to do to transform this from useless stuff to useful information? How can I manage that information so it works for me? How will it interact with all the other bits of data that I already have?". I implore you to at least try the same. All corporates are steaming hot messes, yes. But hopefully they can be cleaned up just a little.