"Data professionals hate this. We’re trained to believe that good analysis leads to good decisions, that facts win arguments, that rationality prevails."
For a man to get a business case approved, just like any sale, the number one influencing factor is the credibility of the man making the sale.
Board members do not buy from men they don't trust.
The fact is that "data professionals" can not be trusted.
Trust is EARNED. It takes years to for a man to establish his reputation as an honest man of honour and integrity. It takes one lie to destroy it.
Men in the "data" area have destroyed their own credibility. Indeed, they have destroyed the credibility of honest men of honour and integrity like me. I have been tarred with the same brush as the snake oil salesmen.
In 2000 our airline, QANTAS, had their cargo division have a THIRD failed data warehousing project. The project manager was fired and the FOURTH project was given to a man with 20+ years in QANTAS Cargo. He was told if he failed he would be fired too.
So he called about 10 of his pals in the industry and explained his job was on the line with the new QANTAS Cargo Data Warehouse project. He asked his pals to please recommend who he should talk to for the project when it was his job on the line.
He was given my name FOUR TIMES and no other man was mentioned twice.
I eventually got the project. Why? The CEO and the senior managers trusted me because I EARNED their trust during the 8 week prototype phase. It did not hurt that 4 trusted advisors gave my name and said that if the project absolutely HAD to be successful they should hire me.
I was not surprised the prior projects failed. There were issues that were VERY complex. It was the toughest technical project I had done to that date. We actually had to invent new techniques to make it work.
It went on to be called "The most successful IT project QANTAS had ever run."
Indeed, during the interview process I gave the CFO an idea that he said was worth a couple of million dollars profit.
One thing that helped me earn credibility and trust was by giving them an idea saving them a couple of million dollars a year in the first two weeks.
When we did the demo at 8 weeks the CEO commented that I looked like I had been working there for 10 years. The CEO and senior managers were SHOCKED at my level of business knowledge of how the Cargo division worked in just 8 weeks. They could not believe my level of understanding of their business.
In short, when I asked for the $A1.7M budget I had EARNED their respect and their trust.
There is more to that story and I have published that.
The bottom line is that to get a million dollar plus "data project" budgeted the man presenting the business case has to be believed by those he is selling to. He has to be respected and trusted by the men voting on the decision.
Sadly, in our industry segment, men have focused on becoming better liars than becoming better at our profession.
After all? It is FAR easier to become a better liar than it is to become better at the "data" profession as it is so falsely called now.
Our industry segment is in a very sad state. Even my good friend Bill Imon has commented on this recently.
I can’t speak for James (though I suspect he’ll more or less agree with you too), but I tend to agree with you. There’s a huge % of data and IT people that think their job is to just build tech, and refuse to meet their business stakeholders where they’re at (let alone learn about the business)
James’ article (and most of my own writing) presupposes that our readers have already made that first leap, or are working on it. We’re not speaking to the arrogant (and frankly helpless) IT crowd that keep blaming the business for their own failings.
Thanks for your comment and the restack Peter! It’s a harsh message, but one more folks need to hear. And also welcome to the DPM community, I saw you just joined us 😊
I am 62 now. So I will not be around to see our profession become a "profession" if it ever does. Personally, I think our "profession" is doomed and will never hold any level of professional respect ever again. Today we are less than plumbers professionally.
Back in the early 80s many of us sincerely believed that the profession of building large computer systems might, one day, be on a par with the profession of building large buildings and similar things.
One of my uncles was a builder and I used to labour for him on his houses. I was first allow to stand out side the building sites when I was 6. And I was first allowed to actually step on site when I was 7.
As a little boy was I totally fascinated how it was possible to build houses like my uncle did. I had a hard enough time building anything with my building blocks. So you can imagine a 5 year old boy wanting to "help" his uncle build houses.
It was along slow process. I had to learn the name of every tool. I had to learn what it was used for. I had to learn where each tool was in each builders truck. They would call out from the building site and my cousin and I had the job of fetching the right tool from the right truck when we were 7.
Finally we were allowed to watch closely as the builders went about their work. And when they needed a tool they had in their truck we were to fetch it and watch how it was being used. We were taught about blueprints and plans. We sat with my uncle, his father, as the drafted up plans at his amazing desk.
We saw the attention to detail that went into building a house close up and personal. My uncle built 7 houses in 7 years and I laboured on them all. Of course I was much more useful when I was 14 than when I was 7. I also worked at the "mobile home" factory her worked at. They build homes and then delivered them on site. So I saw many homes built at the factory. Our job was to make the concrete blocks the homes sat on.
So I spent from 7 to 16 years watching homes being built. From descriptions of the home, to the first sketches, to the plans and blue prints, to the turning of the first sod, to the finished product.
When I started my first programming job in 1982 it very quickly became obvious to me what parallels existed between building a house and building a computer system. Indeed, Barry Boehm release a book called "Software Engineering Economics" in which he compared building software systems to building buildings.
The first system I worked on from 1982-85 was very badly built and very buggy. In 1983-4 I was the sole support guy for the 750KLOC system, the largest in the country, and I was getting 50-60 calls a day for problems I had to solve. I was working 60 hours a week plus doing a full time univeristy load in 1984. In 1984 there was not a night I got more than 4 hours sleep and there were plenty of sleepless nights too.
When I joined IBM in 1986 I joined the international software development lab in Australia. I joined a project called COBRA. The Common Billing and Reconciliation Application. As the name implies, it produced invoices. And it was to be installed in 26 countries including Canada, Japan, Australia as well as all south east asian countries and all south american countries.
It was the first international software development project in IBM Australia and our reputations were riding on it. I was blessed to be given a trainee position on that project. My manager, Terry, gave me the break of my life letting me work on that project.
Anyway, in my first week my manager asked me what I would like to work on as part of deciding what work I should be assigned to. I told him I wanted to work on testing and improving the quality of the system we produced because high quality software was important.
He actually laughed at me and said that I would not have anyone argue with me if I wanted to do testing. In the end he said "If you want to do testing? Knock yourself out." It was the least popular job in software development. I was introduced to the Business Analyst who ran the testing team. His name was George. Terry said: "He's all yours, do with him whatever you will, he actually wants to do testing."
George was of the same mind as me, that quality in software mattered. I then worked from 9am to past midnight all year. There was almost no day I went home earlier than midnight even when my girlfriend moved into my house. She often asked why she bothered since the only thing I did there was sleep.
We also often worked weekends. I was, of course, a first year trainee at the time and no one took much notice of me. But I worked my arse off testing the system as it was being developed. I had a photographic memory so I read all 300KLOC and when I found a bug I would write out what the code should look like and give it back to the development team.
Over time I earned respect as "this crazy guy who knows every line of code and works insane hours in the hope of finding more bugs to fix." Most of the team thought I was quite insane. Only the other guys in the testing team were actually even friendly. I was "crazy" as far as all the "normal" people were concerned.
But do you know what happened next? We committed COBRA 1.0 to the release tapes in January 1987, on schedule, under budget, and we installed it into 7 countries including Canada, Hong Kong / China, Singapore, New Zealand. And not one country reported one bug. This was a 1.0 BILLING SYSTEM that was 300KLOC and no one who worked for any of the IBM countries found a bug in it.
The system ran for over three years in IBM New Zealand before the upgrade and not one problem report was created. Not even one.
This, of course, was unprecedented. Everyone wanted to know "how could this be possible?". And the answer was that the man most responsible was George who was even more crazy than me. We got along like a house on fire. LOL!
After the success of Cobra 1.0 the next release, 2.0, was a disaster of unmitigated proportions. The IBM Manager lied to us about how it was going, the project manager lied to us about how it was going. And I wound up in the office of the Billing Manager for IBM Malaysia with the CFO and the project manager being grilled as to the results of what was happening in the Philippines install...that I had been told was going perfectly ok.
I was able to rescue that install and when I got back to Australia I wrote a VERY damning report on COBRA 2.0 and presented it to three levels of management. They were NOT HAPPY at my report and presentation. My position was that the entire labs future was on the line and there was no reason why IBM Corp would give us funding if we produced crap software.
So I campaigned inside IBM for software development methodologies to be more akin to building buildings. I campaigned very hard inside IBM to improve our development methods to be more like we had done on 1.0 and less like we had done on 2.0.
As part of my campaigning I was dragged into IBM HR numerous times and scolded and told I would be fired if I did not "ease up on the women" because I was "creating a toxic work environment". In the end, in December 1989, I could see that our development lab was going to be shut down. I told Terry I was leaving because I believed the lab would be shut down inside 5 years. I was wrong. It took 6 years before it was shut down.
More than 300 good paying software development jobs were sent to Malaysia because you can develop crappy buggy software anywhere with cheap people. That lab was later relocated again to India and finally IBM gave up on developing it's own software and went with SAP because the software being developed was crap.
The same happened across IBM labs. I worked in the DB2 lab and I had many friends in the DB2 lab. They all complained of the same thing. Lowering software development standards.
When I moved to IBM Marketing in 1990 I then promoted high quality software development processes to our customers...a bit hypocritical I know given what we were doing internally. And I continued to promote high quality software development until 2002. This included the area of data warehousing that I moved into by complete accident in 1991.
As you know, most development projects are fixated on an end date. But my mentor on COBRA 1.0 taught me "The users complain about the bugs in a system years after they have forgotten the implementation date."
In the end the model of "develop crappy buggy software using cheap people where ever they live and sell that to the marketplace" won the day. That's what we have today. We have cheap, crappy, buggy software that was more likely than not developed by poor underpaid programmers in India that crashes more often than I have a good nights sleep.
After 44 years in this industry? If we built houses like we build software our houses would fall down by the end of the first week.
If we built aeroplanes like we build software all transatlantic flights would have to land in Greenland to reboot the operating system for the next portion of the flight.
And the area of "data" has not been immune from this same "cheap and buggy" approach.
Yes, these are harsh words. But if our industry segment is not willing to listen to men like Bill, Ralph, Sean Kelly and I? Then harsh words are warranted.
@Peter, I share your cynicism about the industry at large. BUT I've also worked with enough data professionals and leaders that do things the right way (in all the different ways you describe above) that I know that it's possible. And a lot of the firms that win in the market are the ones that have commercially-savvy, value-focused data teams to help them win.
It's a big reason why I quit my job (where I was one of those commercially-focused data leaders) to train others on how to do the same. Do I think I'll transform every data department? Absolutely not. But I'm already seeing the impact across many orgs, some big, some small.
AI is also lighting a huge fire under the seats of a lot of those complacent technical leaders. I don't believe Claude Code can automate the role of a GOOD data professional end to end, but it certainly can replace the code monkey archetype of the person who doesn't bother to understand the context of the business problem, and just executes what's written on a ticket. And as you say, a LOT of data teams are built up by that archetype, and their days are numbered.
"AI is also lighting a huge fire under the seats of a lot of those complacent technical leaders. "
I have been chatting with my good friend Eric Kavanaugh about AI. My opinion on that is that AI has severely exposed the issue of poor data quality. It's a case of "garbage in garbage out".
If you feed an AI data that is incorrect then it gives you incorrect answers. Eric is saying he is seeing this everywhere he looks. People are trying to put AI on top of data warehouses and they are spitting out garbage because the data is garbage.
There are so many bad data warehouses out there it's insane. And this whole focus on "Data Vault" and "data pipelines" and "medalion architecture" has only made things much worse.
The bottom line is that my segment of so called "data professionals" have less professional credibility than "bad plumbers" because bad plumbers will be kicked out of their trade by the good plumbers.
When board members and senior managers of large companies want to sustainably grow their profits in an ethical manner?
They will call me.
And they will get over all the slander out there about me for being willing to risk my life to save other mens lives. They will do what is best for their businesses long term.
But so far? Directors and senior managers of large companies are more concerned about how many more DEI hires they can make...like the one who managed to land an aeroplane on it's roof in Canada recently. Great DEI hire that one.
Personally Nick? I see no evidence that directors of large, or even smaller companies, want to sustainably grow their profits based on using their data and doing it in an ethical manner.
I see PLENTY of evidence that directors of large companies want to act unethically and virtue signal and try and make sales based on DEI or by deceiving their customers.
Only problem is?
"Go woke go broke".
Budweiser saw that. Jaguar saw that. And there will be others.
I take the very simple position.
When Board members, CEOs and senior managers of large to mid-tier companies want to sustainably increase their profits ethically? They will call me. So far? There is very little interest in doing that from them.
Personally? I wouldn't even really bother talking to a "data team" in a company. They can have my software for free and read my blog posts for free. They are part of the problem, not part of the solution in my humble opinion.
Simple question. In the last 20+ years? How much "interest" have you seen from "data teams" in actually sustainably increasing the profit of the company they work for?
Everyone knows who Vodafone is. Back in the 2000-2010 period they were HUGE. Not a small enterprise.
Vodafone Ghana spent USD2M and a year trying to get a data warehouse built before they canned the project. I was asked to help write the NEW tender for IBM, Teradata, Oracle and one other to receive and bid on.
The CIO gave me a copy of the failed vendors proposal and asked me if I could please review it and let him know if there were any issues they missed and should have known the vendor was not legit.
Right in front of him I went to the index to find the project plan, went to the page, and then opened the summary project plan. In it they had 8 weeks for ETL. Vodafone Ghana had FOUR billing Systems as they also bought the landline government telco.
I held up the project plan to the CIO and said.
“This project plan says 8 weeks. Anyone who knows what they are doing knows that is 8 months work.”
I said even if they used my ETL software the fastest that the ETL could possibly be written was six months.
I said to him that I had offered to review any tender from any major vendor and provide my opinion, for free, for years, because I wanted to stop these snake oil salesmen getting away with selling such ridiculous lies.
I told him it astounded me that Vodafone could possibly buy such a pack of lies when even the project plan was so obviously a lie. He was not happy I said that to him.
Later on we were having a meeting with the CFO on how to approach the project to define the requirements. I told the CFO that the terms of my contract was that my company, and no one I was associated with, could bid on the project. I asked him if he would insist that I respected those terms. He said yes.
So I told him I would give Vodafone Ghana a copy of our telco data models for free and we would use them in the tender preparation to define the business requirements.
He agreed. So I approached the preparation of the tender by using our models as the starting point.
The result was we covered 90%+ of all requirements. Many of the senior management were shocked to know models like these even existed. We got the tender prepared much more quickly than was expected to a far greater level of detail than was expected.
The CFO, on getting such positive feedback about me, asked me to please come and oversee the project when it was awarded to keep an eye on the vendors. That was to be a year long contract. I would be free to do some remote work for other customers. But I would be guaranteed the years work which would fill up my bank account again.
What happened next?
Their head of revenue assurance was also Australian. He had been a lawyer working in the Armed services whose job it was to hunt down fraud from vendors selling in to the armed services. You will be aware that the head of Revenue Assurance in a large telco has the primary role of find fraud. These are VERY smart men who are VERY suspicious by nature.
Given we were both Australian he decided to google me and have a look around. He found all the slander about me on the web.
The next morning I came in. He had me escorted by two armed guards to a meeting room. He grilled me as to whether I had any vodafone materials in my hotel room. I didn't.
He then insisted on standing there as I copied all my vodafone materials on my laptop to a USB drive and then deleted them all off my laptop.
He then had me frog marched off the premises by the two armed guards. Luckily they paid my invoices and didn't leave me out of pocket for all my expenses.
That is how senior management of global companies deal with the very best of honest men of honour and integrity. Men of impeccable character, who are willing to expose the crimes being committed by governments.
I asked him why he was removing me and he refused to answer many times over. In the end he said: “You are a man of some controversy and we do not want men of controversy working here.” Meaning, I exposed crimes of his old pals in the Australian government.
Men like me are marched off their premises by armed guards.
You will know that the head of Revenue Assurance in a telco reports directly to the CFO and that I could not have been marched off premises without the expressed consent of the CFO who knew very well the excellent work I had done.
I have not worked for a large company since then. I have had four national governments trying to murder me since 2012.
So no. I have seen PLENTY of evidence that senior managers in large companies want to go along with the "woke political agenda".
I have seen ZERO evidence that senior managers from large companies are actually focussed on ethically improving their profits over the long term.
In 2011 Sean Kelly and I were the number one and two guys in the world at helping telcos make more money using data. Sean died in 2012 from Cancer.
When telcos want to improve their profits again? They know my name. They know how to reach me. Our telco data models are still the best in the world and I don’t know anyone else who knows how to do fraud detection in a telco as well as I do.
But I can’t work for them because I stood up against criminals in governments and the telcos need the support of those criminals in governments.
That's where we are Nick. Woke politics is still ruling the day and it's going to end badly for a lot of people.
The bit about the implausible bids doesn’t surprise me at all. I've seen the same thing happen over and over.
For me the primary root cause is the conflict of interest between vendors who make money by billing you for as much time and materials as possible nor for solving your problem in the most cost-effective way. In some cases billing for time and materials makes sense because there's a lot of uncertainty. But increasingly I'm seeing the trend of fixed pricing being demanded by clients, though not hard enough, and vendors, especially the largest consultancies, still getting away with selling snake oil.
He agreed that sounded good and asked me to write it whenever I had time and submit it to him for review. The only problem was I was in the US on a very difficult project and I was working to 3-4am every day. And when I had to leave the US due to not having a work visa I went on holidays with my family for 3 months so there was no time to write the article then either. So I finally got home in late September for the kids to start school and I took about 3 days to write the article and sent it to Ralph as a first draft.
He said the article was brilliant but that he had decided to end his role of writing columns for DBMS magazine and so the article would not go forward. We chatted back and forth on email about the article because there were some things he didn't undertand in detail and how that would work.
The top two features were it should be mappingless and typeless meaning that it should discover the mappings and the data types at run time. I could look it up I guess.
Anyway, we were just talking back and forth and Ralph made the comment that changed my life. He said to me:
"Well? If you are such a smart guy, why don't you write this ETL tool?"
I had never considered trying to write a second ETL tool but immediately Ralph said that I knew that if I COULD write what the article had defined I would make a LOT of money.
The short story is that I did. And then I sold three copies to an old customer of mine in Australia, the richest man in the country. I sold them for EUR20K each. And then, finally, in 2007, I sold a copy for ERU30K to a german company where I had helped them for the last 8 years. They could see my ETL software would reduce their current development and support costs for their clients by 50% and that would give them a bidding advantage on new deals. They paid EUR30K plus 20% mainteance.
All that time the standard price remained the same 300K of whatever was the local currency, $A, USD, EUR.
We gave fixed price quotes and now that I had ETL software that I could sell for EUR30K a copy I was set. That was when my wife attacked me in the divorce courts because she was dumb enough to think the courts would give her half of my software revenues. What she got was a copy of the software on a DVD and told she was welcome to go and sell it herself.
Then in 2009 we did carphone warehouse. This is the video reference for it.
And in 2010 we did Sky Talk in the UK. Both on Netezza. In 2009 we upgraded my ETL software to generate SQL as the ETL system rather than using C++. This means the data never came out of the database so the ETL ran MUCH faster, up to 100X faster for fact table processing depending on how fast the database was.
All that time the mapping rate was 1,000 fields per work month and all that time, 1996-2017, the fixed price was 300K. Much lower than anyone else. When we sold Carphone they just didn't believe us despite our reputation and so we had to give them a 12 week gate for the payment of our data models. Sean and I were selling the data models for EUR100K with EUR300K implementation fees.
We even created what we called "variable priced capped projects". That meant that we gave them a daily rate and if we came in under they kept the difference and if we came in over we ate the extra. If you can believe this at Carphone we quoted GBP300K services and we we came in at GBP200K total. It was the smoothest running project ever and we just didn't use that much time or money. They were so impressed that they felt they needed to pay us the other GBP100K and gave us more work that was not really our area but we took it.
In 2017 I made a new invention and our mapping rate went to 6K-8K fields per month. And 2 years ago I made another invention and our mapping rate is now 12K-15K per month. I have had days where I have mapped more than 1K fields. Very long days that I can't do now I am 62. But never the less. What used to take me 220 hours I have done in a 15 hour day.
This latest set of inventions is what makes "Mega Models" for large operational systems even doable. With "Mega Models" the top data warehousing guys will be able to use my software to build the worlds largest data models and ETL at 90% less than doing it any other way. And they maintenance will be 90% less than doing it any other way. We have a data model that has now passed 100,000 fields and we expect it to get to 250K fields this year. We will see how that goes.
So, for example? Because I am broke today? I would happily do a telco for EUR100K. I know I can get it done in 4 months so why not? We used to sell just the data models for EUR100K.
You have all these guys talking about "data vault" and how knowledgable and expert they are. But if you ask them: "So, say you have a telco running Single View. How much are you going to charge them for a Data Vault?"
And the answer is. "Well that depends on a lot of things. But the starting price would be EUR/USD500K but if we ran over it would cost more."
My answer is: "I will do that for you from home for EUR100K". If you want me on site you have to pay T&A.
Who sounds like he knows best what he is doing?
I spent so much time in telcos and I did Single View at Carphone Warehouse. I have done many other Telco Billing Systems as well. I could deliver a telco data warehouse for EUR100K in my sleep.
But I am "woke cancelled" and I can't even GIVE AWAY my data models and software because men in my industry are afraid women wll attack them if they use my FREE software. Hopefully a few men will grow a spine and finally start using my free software and hire me "behind the scenes" where the don't know about me. LOL!
A separate comment on the topic of fixed price data warehousing deals.
Back in 1995 I was doing my second star schema data warehouse for the IBM Global Banking System under development in our Sydney lab. I realised that there were design patterns for fact tables and dimension tables. So I bought a cobol compiler and I wrote templates that could be used for future projects.
Then in April 1996 I was hired by Hitachi to launch the data warehousing practice in Asia Pacific. I brought on board one of the guys I had trained on my IBM project. He was the second best cobol programmer I ever met. Much better than me.
He said that he felt he could write a code generator. Meaning, what we would feed the code generator was the templates modified and a dictionary and the code generator would generate the cobol code necessary. I gave him a week to determine if he could do it and to come back to me with an estimate of the actual effort. By Friday 5pm he came back with the finished generator!! LOL!
So what we could do with this generator was to create a dictionary which was just a set of text files. They described the staging area tables and the target data warehouse views. And it generated the finished cobol code for all the tables needed in a star schema.
I knew how much this was worth and I knew this meant that we could offer fixed price projects. The price was $A300K services in Australia and USD300K services in Asia because we had to include travel and accomodation in Asia for the team.
So I sold my first fixed price data warehouse to Manulife Hong Kong in 1997 for USD300K and we came in just a little under budget. I think about USD20K. We sold a 4 CPU Sequent System and a terabyte of disk. That was my first Terabyte data warehouse. But what we had proven was that with my ETL software we could pretty much guarantee the $A300K / USD300 price point.
I sold a number of projects at that price point for Hitachi. When I moved to PwC I was not allowed to use my software because PwC wanted billable hours, not "effiencies". And after PwC I took over the Asia Pacifice Professional Services for Ardent (Makers of DataStage). This was just after they bought Bill Inmons PRISM Solutions. Australia was one of the most successful countries in the world for Bill.
The owner of the reseller was a guy named Mark who was VERY good and he had a sales rep named Kevin who was also VERY good. Mark and Kevin ran the largest consulting team in Australia. I sold Bills software and put their people into the largest deal of the year in 1997 and so we were all pals. I basically said that since they were selling Bills software I would help them out to help Bill. So getting into the largest deal of the year in 1997 was something they appreciated me doing for them.
So when Prism was bought out by Ardent both Mark and Kevin had to leave under the terms of the deal. They cashed out and made a LOT of money each and moved on and started another company. They both recommended me to Ardent to take over their business which I did. And Ardent Australia was the most successful Ardent country by comparison to GDP in the world. The day we were bought by Informix we had 50 installed DataStage accounts vs 2 Informatica. And those two Informatica sites were customers of Hitachi and PwC who refused to buy DataStage because that would involve me. So essentially we were 50 to 0 against Informatica the day we were acquired.
Of course, while at Ardent I could not promote my own ETL Software. I gave the Ardent lab all my code and asked them if they could build a generator that would generate datastage jobs like we generated cobol code. The answer came back that it was not technically possible. So we left it at that.
In 2001 I relocated to Dublin Ireland and the idea was to travel to locations around the world to implement Sybase IWS models. The Sybase partner was Informatica but resellers often sold DataStage because it was better.
Anyway. In late 2001 I was a guest author for Ralph in his column in DBMS magazine. My article was very well received world wide so Ralph asked me if I could write another article. That was in early February. We talked about what would be a good topic. I said I was so frustrated with Informatica because I had to actually change the data models to be able to load them with Informatica. It was not "data model agnostic". And just in chatting I said a really interesting article would be:
"The top 10 features all ETL tools should have".....
These situations where millions of dollars are at stake are very complex, very political, and other vendors and companies had no problems making false allegations as I found out later on the St. George deal. That was the first time an IBM customer had actually made a false allegation about me trying to harm my career but it was certainly not the last.
On a broader social scale the issue is this Nick. In the 70s "honesty, honour and integrity" were character traits in men that were respected. If a man falsely called another man a liar "them were fighting words". I saw grown men say "Let's step outside and settle this like men" and they did. To disparage another man, in any way, falsely, were "fighting words".
There was a code of conduct between men. That code of conduct was that "honesty, honour, and integrity" were valued in men. It was best explained to me by my WW2 veteran grandfather in 1978 when I was 14. He fought the Japanese for the duration. He put the steel in my spine. It was he, more than anyone else, who wrapped up and presented to me what it was to "be a man". I had other examples in my life, but to have a WW2 veteran as my grand father tell me what it was to "be a man" left a great impression on me. I measure myself against my grand father and no one else. He is the yardstick by which I have lived my life. He is the greatest man I ever knew personally.
Alas, we had given women the vote. We had given women a voice in public. Indeed, 1975 was the UN International Year of Women and they made Helen Reddys "I am Woman" song the theme song of the year. A song packed with lies like "women are invincible".
Men get their way by being honest men of honour and integrity. Real Men never lie to get their way. That is the standard. A man caught lying and who was unrepentant was called a liar and he was socially ostracised and no longer respected. As a man you got one chance at telling a lie and if you were caught you had to "fix what you broke" and be truly repentant. That's how men work. Sure, there have been men successful at lying in the past, but they very often get their “come uppance”.
Women and girls do not work like that. Women and girls get what they want by lies and deception. It was a woman who taught me that “no woman is capable of honesty”. She was actually surprised I thought it was even possible for a woman to be honest.
She said to me herself: “Us women get what we want from men by lying to them.”
I was first falsely accused by girls when I was 6 in 1970. Along with every boy in my class. The girls made up false allegations about us boys to get us caned.
Girls and women have lied to me and lied about me all my life. It's "normal" that girls and women lie. It's "normal" that women and girls steal property. This has been observed throughout history.
It's the reason why in a Sharia Law court a woman’s word is worth half a mans word and an allegation by a woman against a man is not considered credible if the man denies it.
But in the west? We chose to allow women to claim "equality". In the history of the feminist movement there has never been a woman write an essay to enumerate what she means by "equality". Not one. Not ever. I guess the "oppressive patriarchy" did not let woman have access to a pen and some paper. Women have never enumerated what they mean by "equality" for the exact reason they wanted to be able to move the goal posts over time.
Given that all women achieve their goals by lies and deception, once we gave them the vote, once we gave them a voice in public, once we gave them jobs, once we allowed them to invade men’s spaces?
They lied. Gee? What a surprise?!
Today, a woman nominated for the US Supreme Court can't even tell you what a woman is. Women doctors can't even tell you whether a man can get pregnant or not.
Once you accept women’s lies and do not punish women who lie? Indeed, if you richly reward women who lie? Guess what? The men will cotton on to that and emulate that behaviour. Indeed, men are now so interested in gaining the rich rewards of being a woman that they will even "become women" for all that free money and attention.
So, very slowly, bit by bit, since some time around the mid 70s, if not sooner, we have seen the erosion of the idea of "An honest man of honour and integrity" being respected in western society.
We have seen the rise of the "smooth talking snake oil salesman" who is a known liar and criminals. Hell, Hillary Clinton ran for president!! There is no person on the face of this planet who is better known as a liar and a criminal than Hillary Clinton!!! But she got the nod because she was a woman. Her lies and crimes were overlooked because she was a woman.
Who followed? Joe Biden!! A man so well known to be a liar and a criminal they were making JOKES about him on late night TV in the 80s!! LOL!
So in western societies now the "smooth talking snake oil salesman who is a liar and a criminal" can become president of the United States of America. The liar and criminal can become the richest man in the world. People, men and women alike, have prescribed how much money a man has as being correlated, indeed, signifying, moral virtue.
We live in world where liars like Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, Jeff Bezos and many others are “revered” and "respected".
Hell….We live in a world that made Taylor Swift a billionaire!! LOL!
And men like me? The honest men of honour and integrity? The men of impeccable character? Well? We are thrown in jail as political prisoners. Our houses are stolen. We are driven into poverty. We are driven into debt. And even our own peers, who know our character, who men like me made rich? They will turn their backs on us in fear that if they help us the women in their lives will destroy their lives as well.
Indeed Nick, even my own FATHER supported my criminal abuse. How about that?
Once you give women the vote, a voice in public, political power, they will destroy that society. This is so well known that there is even a Greek Play called "Assembly Women" where the women put on fake beards and go into the assembly and vote in communism.
Companies live inside social environments.
And once the external social environment supports and rewards women’s lies? It was only a matter of time before men adopted the same tactics. When men are not punished for lying and stealing? Surprise, surprise, they will lie and steal.
That's where we are Nick. And there is no way back to the 1960s. We are going to go “forward”. And by "forward" I mean take a long hard look at the Roman Empire and what happened to them after they allowed women more social freedom. That is where the west is headed and there is no way to stop it. All this talk of “AI” is just nonsense because AI is not going to stop what is coming next. “AI” will pander to womens lies just as much as men did.
On the down hill run?
Personally? I am just focussed on earning money to pay off the loans I took out from the man who helped me save my life in April 2008. I owe him USD200K. Then I need some money for retirement.
But my fellow men? Even the men who know me well and who I helped along the way? My fellow white western men won't help me because they fear women will attack them for helping me.
So now my allies are muslim men who do not take the lies women tell seriously.
Muslim men are not afraid of womens lies because when women lie about a muslim man all his peers know not to take her seriously.
I won’t do any more comments on the political side on your substack because I presume you do not want them there. But what is happening in the business sector, including in our “data segment” is downstream from the social environment. And the social environment is collapsing with no way to turn it around at this late stage.
I tried and failed. And it has costs me USD5M+ to be “woke cancelled” since 2010. I made USD330K in 2006 at the age of 42. Today I am in debt for the very reason I am a man of impeccable character.
Oh, I could give you all sorts of "war stories" about companies being unethical. I hit that early on when I moved to IBM Marketing in March 1991. Teradata was the worst of the lot. On the deal we were trying to sell to my customer, the Mutual Life Company in Australia, they also talked to Teradata.
Teradata was selling them a machine "as new". At IBM we had a practice that we photographed the serial numbers of all competitive equipment in our customers data centers because so many other companies sold hardware "as new" that had been already used. It was a common practice. Indeed IBM bought and paid for floor space in large customers so that when the mainframe was resold it was resold as "only ever having been on IBM owned floorspace and serviced by IBM Systems Engineers". We got higher resale values for our customers when we did that. Of course, we told the prospects for the second hand machine that was the situation. We didn't hide it.
Anyway, Teradata was selling this machine "as new" and it had been used by one of our customers in a pilot and returned We had the photographs of the machine in the customer site and the serial number photograph. We gave that to the Mutual Life Company and they had the Teradata rep in. They asked him to confirm the machine was "as new" and he said yes. They gave him the photographs and asked him if he knew he was lying. He said yes. They asked him why he lied to them and he said: "Because you might have not found out about the lie and bought the machine." Obviously the rep thought that was ok because he did it.
The Mutual Life Company was owned by a company called Lend Lease that was run by a man called Stuart Hornery at the time. It was a construction company and ran the ethics of builders, as I alluded to about my Uncle. There was a standard at Lend Lease. If you were caught lying you were very publicly fired and you would not get a reference from Lend Lease. Everyone would know you were a liar. So no one who worked at a Lend Lease company lied. Those who did and were caught were publicly fired. That ended their careers.
I could tell you all sorts of stories about how Teradata reps lied to customers to make sales. In 1992 Teradata sold a machine to Telecom New Zealand that was never going to work. They sold the first machine for USD5M and the upgrade for another USD5M. The machine never went into production.
In 1993 Teradata sold a machine in a head to head with me at the St. George Bank, the 5th largest bank in Australia. They lied through their teeth the whole way. Indeed, I took the evaluation team to the MLC and the manager at MLC got permission from his legal department to tell the story above.
I was then FALSELY accused of telling the story by one of the St. George people in the room. I was never told who the person was. The IBM rep and branch manager knew and they took the position of not telling me. I had to sit through an internal tribunal hearing, again, falsely asccused of repeating that story to St. George. The man who told the story was called as a witness and he was scathing to my manager and the finance branch manager that he should have to come to our office and defend my good name.
He absolutely let fly at them for not taking my word about what happened and said that if he was me he would have resigned having his word questioned like this. He was a good friend of mine and he didn't hold back at that meeting. He was FURIOUS on my behalf. But I had a wife and four kids, including a newborn and a 2 year old to support so I needed my job. 1993 was a deep recession and so I chose to defend my good name rather than resign and my friend understood I needed the money to support my growing family.
As an IBMer I was not allowed to tell customers about teradata or other competitors and what they were doing. It was in our employment contracts to never disparage a competitor and that included saying things that were true that were negative.
I had many times where my customers demanded to know my opinion about a competitor and I told them my employment contract forbid me from any negative comment about any competitor. I almost got fired once for what could easily be perceived as a "negative comment" about IBM!! It wasn't meant that way. I was empathising with my customer on the tender preparation for a deal that was worth $A8M that I was trying to win for IBM to smooth over "issues" we were having.
IBM had very strict rules about "tender preparation" so that we could not be accused of having "influence" in the tender. I was in the very difficult position that I was the IBM Systems Engineer who was advising the team who were preparing the Tender on many other matters. I had won the trust and respect of the team by my hard work and they were asking me to contribute to the tender preparation because they knew my level of skills in what the tender was about.
I actually faced an internal tribunal hearing with my job on the line for that comment that was overheard by my customers secretary and reported to my rep and branch manager. I had to get the my customer to stick up for me at that tribunal too. He said my comment was not at all negative about IBM, and that I was very clearly trying to be empathetic to a very difficult situation. He actually told the tribunal that our meeting behind closed doors was quite "heated" and that I had very professionally handled the conflicts of interests and made him understand why I could not do what he was asking me to do.
This was a VERY senior tech manager and a VERY smart man. His team had complained to him that I was "not being as helpful as they wanted" and he had called me into his office to explain my side of the story. They wanted my help on the tender preparation and I was saying no because it was $A8M and we wanted to bid on it. We felt we had a very good chance of winning it. I made my customer understand that there was a conflict of interest here and that IBMs position was that where there is the possible perception of a conflict of interest we must err on the conservative side.
So at the tribunal hearing the customer explained all this and said that as far as he could tell I was doing what I felt was in the best interests of both parties and NOT creating a situation where a possible conflict of interest could be alleged if the contract went to IBM.
He actually said: "Peter is between a rock and a hard place and he is doing the best he can, which is very good just by the way."
So my management decided that my comment was perfectly reasonable under the very complex circumstances in which it was made where there was an $8M tender on the line that MANY companies would want to bid on. Emotions run high when vendors lose an $A8M contract and if we won and any of the losing vendors ever found out I had contributed to the tender they could easily accused IBM of "conflict of interest" and raise a fuss in the marketplace, or even take it to court…..
The issue with "data projects" not being approved is not the above, though the above is all true.
The issue with "data projects" not being approved is that IT people in general and "data people" in general have zero credibility on the business side of the house.
Nor should they have any credibility.
We have managed our profession like a joke and so now "data professionals" are a joke on the business side of the house.
Not that long ago I was in a meeting with a CEO of a smallish company. She could see I was 60 years old and had long term experience. She was about my age. She asked me how it was possible for IT people to be so ignorant and so arrogant at the same time. She pointed out that most of her IT consultants would not know a debit from a credit.
I told her that 40 years of IT people telling themselves how smart they were while actually being very ignorant has led to a level of arrogance that was, frankly, embarrassing.
I told her that in the 90s I had tried very hard to promote honesty and hard work in my profession.
I told her that I tried very hard to have men take the position that we should name and shame the snake oil salesmen. I told her I failed and by 2002 I had given up. I just went about my business as best I could while snake oil salesmen got the majority of the attention in our profession.
And now? Every board member of every large company, every senior manager of every large company, knows full well that people in the "data area" are not to be trusted.
They know men like me exist in our segment, honest men, but they also know men like me are as rare as hens teeth and not even our own industry segment respects honest men of honour and integrity.
So they are not about to trust anyone in the "IT" area in general or the "data area" specifically, which is my area.
When the men in "data" want to be taken seriously by board members? They will take my advice that I have freely offered since the 80s.
Step one is "Be honest".
If a man in our segment is not even willing to be honest? Then I don't want to talk to him. I only want to talk to the very few honest men in our segment. Maybe they will take my advice, maybe they will not.
But any man presenting a business case for a "data project" should know that he is considered to be a "snake oil salesman" today by the men he is presenting to. And justly so.
Look at the failure rates of "data projects". Still over 50%. And we don't name the culprits. We let them go and commit other failures on other projects. We have no professional standards. We have less professional standards than plumbers.
Hi James and other readers.
"Data professionals hate this. We’re trained to believe that good analysis leads to good decisions, that facts win arguments, that rationality prevails."
For a man to get a business case approved, just like any sale, the number one influencing factor is the credibility of the man making the sale.
Board members do not buy from men they don't trust.
The fact is that "data professionals" can not be trusted.
Trust is EARNED. It takes years to for a man to establish his reputation as an honest man of honour and integrity. It takes one lie to destroy it.
Men in the "data" area have destroyed their own credibility. Indeed, they have destroyed the credibility of honest men of honour and integrity like me. I have been tarred with the same brush as the snake oil salesmen.
In 2000 our airline, QANTAS, had their cargo division have a THIRD failed data warehousing project. The project manager was fired and the FOURTH project was given to a man with 20+ years in QANTAS Cargo. He was told if he failed he would be fired too.
So he called about 10 of his pals in the industry and explained his job was on the line with the new QANTAS Cargo Data Warehouse project. He asked his pals to please recommend who he should talk to for the project when it was his job on the line.
He was given my name FOUR TIMES and no other man was mentioned twice.
I eventually got the project. Why? The CEO and the senior managers trusted me because I EARNED their trust during the 8 week prototype phase. It did not hurt that 4 trusted advisors gave my name and said that if the project absolutely HAD to be successful they should hire me.
I was not surprised the prior projects failed. There were issues that were VERY complex. It was the toughest technical project I had done to that date. We actually had to invent new techniques to make it work.
It went on to be called "The most successful IT project QANTAS had ever run."
Indeed, during the interview process I gave the CFO an idea that he said was worth a couple of million dollars profit.
One thing that helped me earn credibility and trust was by giving them an idea saving them a couple of million dollars a year in the first two weeks.
When we did the demo at 8 weeks the CEO commented that I looked like I had been working there for 10 years. The CEO and senior managers were SHOCKED at my level of business knowledge of how the Cargo division worked in just 8 weeks. They could not believe my level of understanding of their business.
In short, when I asked for the $A1.7M budget I had EARNED their respect and their trust.
There is more to that story and I have published that.
The bottom line is that to get a million dollar plus "data project" budgeted the man presenting the business case has to be believed by those he is selling to. He has to be respected and trusted by the men voting on the decision.
Sadly, in our industry segment, men have focused on becoming better liars than becoming better at our profession.
After all? It is FAR easier to become a better liar than it is to become better at the "data" profession as it is so falsely called now.
Our industry segment is in a very sad state. Even my good friend Bill Imon has commented on this recently.
I can’t speak for James (though I suspect he’ll more or less agree with you too), but I tend to agree with you. There’s a huge % of data and IT people that think their job is to just build tech, and refuse to meet their business stakeholders where they’re at (let alone learn about the business)
James’ article (and most of my own writing) presupposes that our readers have already made that first leap, or are working on it. We’re not speaking to the arrogant (and frankly helpless) IT crowd that keep blaming the business for their own failings.
Thanks for your comment and the restack Peter! It’s a harsh message, but one more folks need to hear. And also welcome to the DPM community, I saw you just joined us 😊
Hello Nick,
I am 62 now. So I will not be around to see our profession become a "profession" if it ever does. Personally, I think our "profession" is doomed and will never hold any level of professional respect ever again. Today we are less than plumbers professionally.
Back in the early 80s many of us sincerely believed that the profession of building large computer systems might, one day, be on a par with the profession of building large buildings and similar things.
One of my uncles was a builder and I used to labour for him on his houses. I was first allow to stand out side the building sites when I was 6. And I was first allowed to actually step on site when I was 7.
As a little boy was I totally fascinated how it was possible to build houses like my uncle did. I had a hard enough time building anything with my building blocks. So you can imagine a 5 year old boy wanting to "help" his uncle build houses.
It was along slow process. I had to learn the name of every tool. I had to learn what it was used for. I had to learn where each tool was in each builders truck. They would call out from the building site and my cousin and I had the job of fetching the right tool from the right truck when we were 7.
Finally we were allowed to watch closely as the builders went about their work. And when they needed a tool they had in their truck we were to fetch it and watch how it was being used. We were taught about blueprints and plans. We sat with my uncle, his father, as the drafted up plans at his amazing desk.
We saw the attention to detail that went into building a house close up and personal. My uncle built 7 houses in 7 years and I laboured on them all. Of course I was much more useful when I was 14 than when I was 7. I also worked at the "mobile home" factory her worked at. They build homes and then delivered them on site. So I saw many homes built at the factory. Our job was to make the concrete blocks the homes sat on.
So I spent from 7 to 16 years watching homes being built. From descriptions of the home, to the first sketches, to the plans and blue prints, to the turning of the first sod, to the finished product.
When I started my first programming job in 1982 it very quickly became obvious to me what parallels existed between building a house and building a computer system. Indeed, Barry Boehm release a book called "Software Engineering Economics" in which he compared building software systems to building buildings.
The first system I worked on from 1982-85 was very badly built and very buggy. In 1983-4 I was the sole support guy for the 750KLOC system, the largest in the country, and I was getting 50-60 calls a day for problems I had to solve. I was working 60 hours a week plus doing a full time univeristy load in 1984. In 1984 there was not a night I got more than 4 hours sleep and there were plenty of sleepless nights too.
When I joined IBM in 1986 I joined the international software development lab in Australia. I joined a project called COBRA. The Common Billing and Reconciliation Application. As the name implies, it produced invoices. And it was to be installed in 26 countries including Canada, Japan, Australia as well as all south east asian countries and all south american countries.
It was the first international software development project in IBM Australia and our reputations were riding on it. I was blessed to be given a trainee position on that project. My manager, Terry, gave me the break of my life letting me work on that project.
Anyway, in my first week my manager asked me what I would like to work on as part of deciding what work I should be assigned to. I told him I wanted to work on testing and improving the quality of the system we produced because high quality software was important.
He actually laughed at me and said that I would not have anyone argue with me if I wanted to do testing. In the end he said "If you want to do testing? Knock yourself out." It was the least popular job in software development. I was introduced to the Business Analyst who ran the testing team. His name was George. Terry said: "He's all yours, do with him whatever you will, he actually wants to do testing."
George was of the same mind as me, that quality in software mattered. I then worked from 9am to past midnight all year. There was almost no day I went home earlier than midnight even when my girlfriend moved into my house. She often asked why she bothered since the only thing I did there was sleep.
We also often worked weekends. I was, of course, a first year trainee at the time and no one took much notice of me. But I worked my arse off testing the system as it was being developed. I had a photographic memory so I read all 300KLOC and when I found a bug I would write out what the code should look like and give it back to the development team.
Over time I earned respect as "this crazy guy who knows every line of code and works insane hours in the hope of finding more bugs to fix." Most of the team thought I was quite insane. Only the other guys in the testing team were actually even friendly. I was "crazy" as far as all the "normal" people were concerned.
But do you know what happened next? We committed COBRA 1.0 to the release tapes in January 1987, on schedule, under budget, and we installed it into 7 countries including Canada, Hong Kong / China, Singapore, New Zealand. And not one country reported one bug. This was a 1.0 BILLING SYSTEM that was 300KLOC and no one who worked for any of the IBM countries found a bug in it.
The system ran for over three years in IBM New Zealand before the upgrade and not one problem report was created. Not even one.
This, of course, was unprecedented. Everyone wanted to know "how could this be possible?". And the answer was that the man most responsible was George who was even more crazy than me. We got along like a house on fire. LOL!
After the success of Cobra 1.0 the next release, 2.0, was a disaster of unmitigated proportions. The IBM Manager lied to us about how it was going, the project manager lied to us about how it was going. And I wound up in the office of the Billing Manager for IBM Malaysia with the CFO and the project manager being grilled as to the results of what was happening in the Philippines install...that I had been told was going perfectly ok.
I was able to rescue that install and when I got back to Australia I wrote a VERY damning report on COBRA 2.0 and presented it to three levels of management. They were NOT HAPPY at my report and presentation. My position was that the entire labs future was on the line and there was no reason why IBM Corp would give us funding if we produced crap software.
So I campaigned inside IBM for software development methodologies to be more akin to building buildings. I campaigned very hard inside IBM to improve our development methods to be more like we had done on 1.0 and less like we had done on 2.0.
As part of my campaigning I was dragged into IBM HR numerous times and scolded and told I would be fired if I did not "ease up on the women" because I was "creating a toxic work environment". In the end, in December 1989, I could see that our development lab was going to be shut down. I told Terry I was leaving because I believed the lab would be shut down inside 5 years. I was wrong. It took 6 years before it was shut down.
More than 300 good paying software development jobs were sent to Malaysia because you can develop crappy buggy software anywhere with cheap people. That lab was later relocated again to India and finally IBM gave up on developing it's own software and went with SAP because the software being developed was crap.
The same happened across IBM labs. I worked in the DB2 lab and I had many friends in the DB2 lab. They all complained of the same thing. Lowering software development standards.
When I moved to IBM Marketing in 1990 I then promoted high quality software development processes to our customers...a bit hypocritical I know given what we were doing internally. And I continued to promote high quality software development until 2002. This included the area of data warehousing that I moved into by complete accident in 1991.
As you know, most development projects are fixated on an end date. But my mentor on COBRA 1.0 taught me "The users complain about the bugs in a system years after they have forgotten the implementation date."
In the end the model of "develop crappy buggy software using cheap people where ever they live and sell that to the marketplace" won the day. That's what we have today. We have cheap, crappy, buggy software that was more likely than not developed by poor underpaid programmers in India that crashes more often than I have a good nights sleep.
After 44 years in this industry? If we built houses like we build software our houses would fall down by the end of the first week.
If we built aeroplanes like we build software all transatlantic flights would have to land in Greenland to reboot the operating system for the next portion of the flight.
And the area of "data" has not been immune from this same "cheap and buggy" approach.
Yes, these are harsh words. But if our industry segment is not willing to listen to men like Bill, Ralph, Sean Kelly and I? Then harsh words are warranted.
@Peter, I share your cynicism about the industry at large. BUT I've also worked with enough data professionals and leaders that do things the right way (in all the different ways you describe above) that I know that it's possible. And a lot of the firms that win in the market are the ones that have commercially-savvy, value-focused data teams to help them win.
It's a big reason why I quit my job (where I was one of those commercially-focused data leaders) to train others on how to do the same. Do I think I'll transform every data department? Absolutely not. But I'm already seeing the impact across many orgs, some big, some small.
AI is also lighting a huge fire under the seats of a lot of those complacent technical leaders. I don't believe Claude Code can automate the role of a GOOD data professional end to end, but it certainly can replace the code monkey archetype of the person who doesn't bother to understand the context of the business problem, and just executes what's written on a ticket. And as you say, a LOT of data teams are built up by that archetype, and their days are numbered.
Hi Nick,
"AI is also lighting a huge fire under the seats of a lot of those complacent technical leaders. "
I have been chatting with my good friend Eric Kavanaugh about AI. My opinion on that is that AI has severely exposed the issue of poor data quality. It's a case of "garbage in garbage out".
If you feed an AI data that is incorrect then it gives you incorrect answers. Eric is saying he is seeing this everywhere he looks. People are trying to put AI on top of data warehouses and they are spitting out garbage because the data is garbage.
There are so many bad data warehouses out there it's insane. And this whole focus on "Data Vault" and "data pipelines" and "medalion architecture" has only made things much worse.
The bottom line is that my segment of so called "data professionals" have less professional credibility than "bad plumbers" because bad plumbers will be kicked out of their trade by the good plumbers.
When board members and senior managers of large companies want to sustainably grow their profits in an ethical manner?
They will call me.
And they will get over all the slander out there about me for being willing to risk my life to save other mens lives. They will do what is best for their businesses long term.
But so far? Directors and senior managers of large companies are more concerned about how many more DEI hires they can make...like the one who managed to land an aeroplane on it's roof in Canada recently. Great DEI hire that one.
Personally Nick? I see no evidence that directors of large, or even smaller companies, want to sustainably grow their profits based on using their data and doing it in an ethical manner.
I see PLENTY of evidence that directors of large companies want to act unethically and virtue signal and try and make sales based on DEI or by deceiving their customers.
Only problem is?
"Go woke go broke".
Budweiser saw that. Jaguar saw that. And there will be others.
I take the very simple position.
When Board members, CEOs and senior managers of large to mid-tier companies want to sustainably increase their profits ethically? They will call me. So far? There is very little interest in doing that from them.
Personally? I wouldn't even really bother talking to a "data team" in a company. They can have my software for free and read my blog posts for free. They are part of the problem, not part of the solution in my humble opinion.
Simple question. In the last 20+ years? How much "interest" have you seen from "data teams" in actually sustainably increasing the profit of the company they work for?
I have seen ZERO such interest Nick....ZERO.
Hi Nick,
please allow me to give you a real world example.
Everyone knows who Vodafone is. Back in the 2000-2010 period they were HUGE. Not a small enterprise.
Vodafone Ghana spent USD2M and a year trying to get a data warehouse built before they canned the project. I was asked to help write the NEW tender for IBM, Teradata, Oracle and one other to receive and bid on.
The CIO gave me a copy of the failed vendors proposal and asked me if I could please review it and let him know if there were any issues they missed and should have known the vendor was not legit.
Right in front of him I went to the index to find the project plan, went to the page, and then opened the summary project plan. In it they had 8 weeks for ETL. Vodafone Ghana had FOUR billing Systems as they also bought the landline government telco.
I held up the project plan to the CIO and said.
“This project plan says 8 weeks. Anyone who knows what they are doing knows that is 8 months work.”
I said even if they used my ETL software the fastest that the ETL could possibly be written was six months.
I said to him that I had offered to review any tender from any major vendor and provide my opinion, for free, for years, because I wanted to stop these snake oil salesmen getting away with selling such ridiculous lies.
I told him it astounded me that Vodafone could possibly buy such a pack of lies when even the project plan was so obviously a lie. He was not happy I said that to him.
Later on we were having a meeting with the CFO on how to approach the project to define the requirements. I told the CFO that the terms of my contract was that my company, and no one I was associated with, could bid on the project. I asked him if he would insist that I respected those terms. He said yes.
So I told him I would give Vodafone Ghana a copy of our telco data models for free and we would use them in the tender preparation to define the business requirements.
He agreed. So I approached the preparation of the tender by using our models as the starting point.
The result was we covered 90%+ of all requirements. Many of the senior management were shocked to know models like these even existed. We got the tender prepared much more quickly than was expected to a far greater level of detail than was expected.
The CFO, on getting such positive feedback about me, asked me to please come and oversee the project when it was awarded to keep an eye on the vendors. That was to be a year long contract. I would be free to do some remote work for other customers. But I would be guaranteed the years work which would fill up my bank account again.
What happened next?
Their head of revenue assurance was also Australian. He had been a lawyer working in the Armed services whose job it was to hunt down fraud from vendors selling in to the armed services. You will be aware that the head of Revenue Assurance in a large telco has the primary role of find fraud. These are VERY smart men who are VERY suspicious by nature.
Given we were both Australian he decided to google me and have a look around. He found all the slander about me on the web.
The next morning I came in. He had me escorted by two armed guards to a meeting room. He grilled me as to whether I had any vodafone materials in my hotel room. I didn't.
He then insisted on standing there as I copied all my vodafone materials on my laptop to a USB drive and then deleted them all off my laptop.
He then had me frog marched off the premises by the two armed guards. Luckily they paid my invoices and didn't leave me out of pocket for all my expenses.
That is how senior management of global companies deal with the very best of honest men of honour and integrity. Men of impeccable character, who are willing to expose the crimes being committed by governments.
I asked him why he was removing me and he refused to answer many times over. In the end he said: “You are a man of some controversy and we do not want men of controversy working here.” Meaning, I exposed crimes of his old pals in the Australian government.
Men like me are marched off their premises by armed guards.
You will know that the head of Revenue Assurance in a telco reports directly to the CFO and that I could not have been marched off premises without the expressed consent of the CFO who knew very well the excellent work I had done.
I have not worked for a large company since then. I have had four national governments trying to murder me since 2012.
So no. I have seen PLENTY of evidence that senior managers in large companies want to go along with the "woke political agenda".
I have seen ZERO evidence that senior managers from large companies are actually focussed on ethically improving their profits over the long term.
In 2011 Sean Kelly and I were the number one and two guys in the world at helping telcos make more money using data. Sean died in 2012 from Cancer.
When telcos want to improve their profits again? They know my name. They know how to reach me. Our telco data models are still the best in the world and I don’t know anyone else who knows how to do fraud detection in a telco as well as I do.
But I can’t work for them because I stood up against criminals in governments and the telcos need the support of those criminals in governments.
That's where we are Nick. Woke politics is still ruling the day and it's going to end badly for a lot of people.
And it SHOULD end badly for a lot of people.
Wow, that is W-I-L-D! Thanks for sharing Peter.
The bit about the implausible bids doesn’t surprise me at all. I've seen the same thing happen over and over.
For me the primary root cause is the conflict of interest between vendors who make money by billing you for as much time and materials as possible nor for solving your problem in the most cost-effective way. In some cases billing for time and materials makes sense because there's a lot of uncertainty. But increasingly I'm seeing the trend of fixed pricing being demanded by clients, though not hard enough, and vendors, especially the largest consultancies, still getting away with selling snake oil.
Hi Nick, I will get back to you with a more detailed response.
Part 02.
He agreed that sounded good and asked me to write it whenever I had time and submit it to him for review. The only problem was I was in the US on a very difficult project and I was working to 3-4am every day. And when I had to leave the US due to not having a work visa I went on holidays with my family for 3 months so there was no time to write the article then either. So I finally got home in late September for the kids to start school and I took about 3 days to write the article and sent it to Ralph as a first draft.
He said the article was brilliant but that he had decided to end his role of writing columns for DBMS magazine and so the article would not go forward. We chatted back and forth on email about the article because there were some things he didn't undertand in detail and how that would work.
The top two features were it should be mappingless and typeless meaning that it should discover the mappings and the data types at run time. I could look it up I guess.
Anyway, we were just talking back and forth and Ralph made the comment that changed my life. He said to me:
"Well? If you are such a smart guy, why don't you write this ETL tool?"
I had never considered trying to write a second ETL tool but immediately Ralph said that I knew that if I COULD write what the article had defined I would make a LOT of money.
The short story is that I did. And then I sold three copies to an old customer of mine in Australia, the richest man in the country. I sold them for EUR20K each. And then, finally, in 2007, I sold a copy for ERU30K to a german company where I had helped them for the last 8 years. They could see my ETL software would reduce their current development and support costs for their clients by 50% and that would give them a bidding advantage on new deals. They paid EUR30K plus 20% mainteance.
All that time the standard price remained the same 300K of whatever was the local currency, $A, USD, EUR.
We gave fixed price quotes and now that I had ETL software that I could sell for EUR30K a copy I was set. That was when my wife attacked me in the divorce courts because she was dumb enough to think the courts would give her half of my software revenues. What she got was a copy of the software on a DVD and told she was welcome to go and sell it herself.
Then in 2009 we did carphone warehouse. This is the video reference for it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D-ro74y_Ud4
And in 2010 we did Sky Talk in the UK. Both on Netezza. In 2009 we upgraded my ETL software to generate SQL as the ETL system rather than using C++. This means the data never came out of the database so the ETL ran MUCH faster, up to 100X faster for fact table processing depending on how fast the database was.
All that time the mapping rate was 1,000 fields per work month and all that time, 1996-2017, the fixed price was 300K. Much lower than anyone else. When we sold Carphone they just didn't believe us despite our reputation and so we had to give them a 12 week gate for the payment of our data models. Sean and I were selling the data models for EUR100K with EUR300K implementation fees.
We even created what we called "variable priced capped projects". That meant that we gave them a daily rate and if we came in under they kept the difference and if we came in over we ate the extra. If you can believe this at Carphone we quoted GBP300K services and we we came in at GBP200K total. It was the smoothest running project ever and we just didn't use that much time or money. They were so impressed that they felt they needed to pay us the other GBP100K and gave us more work that was not really our area but we took it.
In 2017 I made a new invention and our mapping rate went to 6K-8K fields per month. And 2 years ago I made another invention and our mapping rate is now 12K-15K per month. I have had days where I have mapped more than 1K fields. Very long days that I can't do now I am 62. But never the less. What used to take me 220 hours I have done in a 15 hour day.
This latest set of inventions is what makes "Mega Models" for large operational systems even doable. With "Mega Models" the top data warehousing guys will be able to use my software to build the worlds largest data models and ETL at 90% less than doing it any other way. And they maintenance will be 90% less than doing it any other way. We have a data model that has now passed 100,000 fields and we expect it to get to 250K fields this year. We will see how that goes.
So, for example? Because I am broke today? I would happily do a telco for EUR100K. I know I can get it done in 4 months so why not? We used to sell just the data models for EUR100K.
You have all these guys talking about "data vault" and how knowledgable and expert they are. But if you ask them: "So, say you have a telco running Single View. How much are you going to charge them for a Data Vault?"
And the answer is. "Well that depends on a lot of things. But the starting price would be EUR/USD500K but if we ran over it would cost more."
My answer is: "I will do that for you from home for EUR100K". If you want me on site you have to pay T&A.
Who sounds like he knows best what he is doing?
I spent so much time in telcos and I did Single View at Carphone Warehouse. I have done many other Telco Billing Systems as well. I could deliver a telco data warehouse for EUR100K in my sleep.
But I am "woke cancelled" and I can't even GIVE AWAY my data models and software because men in my industry are afraid women wll attack them if they use my FREE software. Hopefully a few men will grow a spine and finally start using my free software and hire me "behind the scenes" where the don't know about me. LOL!
Part 01..
Hi Nick,
A separate comment on the topic of fixed price data warehousing deals.
Back in 1995 I was doing my second star schema data warehouse for the IBM Global Banking System under development in our Sydney lab. I realised that there were design patterns for fact tables and dimension tables. So I bought a cobol compiler and I wrote templates that could be used for future projects.
Then in April 1996 I was hired by Hitachi to launch the data warehousing practice in Asia Pacific. I brought on board one of the guys I had trained on my IBM project. He was the second best cobol programmer I ever met. Much better than me.
He said that he felt he could write a code generator. Meaning, what we would feed the code generator was the templates modified and a dictionary and the code generator would generate the cobol code necessary. I gave him a week to determine if he could do it and to come back to me with an estimate of the actual effort. By Friday 5pm he came back with the finished generator!! LOL!
So what we could do with this generator was to create a dictionary which was just a set of text files. They described the staging area tables and the target data warehouse views. And it generated the finished cobol code for all the tables needed in a star schema.
I knew how much this was worth and I knew this meant that we could offer fixed price projects. The price was $A300K services in Australia and USD300K services in Asia because we had to include travel and accomodation in Asia for the team.
So I sold my first fixed price data warehouse to Manulife Hong Kong in 1997 for USD300K and we came in just a little under budget. I think about USD20K. We sold a 4 CPU Sequent System and a terabyte of disk. That was my first Terabyte data warehouse. But what we had proven was that with my ETL software we could pretty much guarantee the $A300K / USD300 price point.
I sold a number of projects at that price point for Hitachi. When I moved to PwC I was not allowed to use my software because PwC wanted billable hours, not "effiencies". And after PwC I took over the Asia Pacifice Professional Services for Ardent (Makers of DataStage). This was just after they bought Bill Inmons PRISM Solutions. Australia was one of the most successful countries in the world for Bill.
The owner of the reseller was a guy named Mark who was VERY good and he had a sales rep named Kevin who was also VERY good. Mark and Kevin ran the largest consulting team in Australia. I sold Bills software and put their people into the largest deal of the year in 1997 and so we were all pals. I basically said that since they were selling Bills software I would help them out to help Bill. So getting into the largest deal of the year in 1997 was something they appreciated me doing for them.
So when Prism was bought out by Ardent both Mark and Kevin had to leave under the terms of the deal. They cashed out and made a LOT of money each and moved on and started another company. They both recommended me to Ardent to take over their business which I did. And Ardent Australia was the most successful Ardent country by comparison to GDP in the world. The day we were bought by Informix we had 50 installed DataStage accounts vs 2 Informatica. And those two Informatica sites were customers of Hitachi and PwC who refused to buy DataStage because that would involve me. So essentially we were 50 to 0 against Informatica the day we were acquired.
Of course, while at Ardent I could not promote my own ETL Software. I gave the Ardent lab all my code and asked them if they could build a generator that would generate datastage jobs like we generated cobol code. The answer came back that it was not technically possible. So we left it at that.
In 2001 I relocated to Dublin Ireland and the idea was to travel to locations around the world to implement Sybase IWS models. The Sybase partner was Informatica but resellers often sold DataStage because it was better.
Anyway. In late 2001 I was a guest author for Ralph in his column in DBMS magazine. My article was very well received world wide so Ralph asked me if I could write another article. That was in early February. We talked about what would be a good topic. I said I was so frustrated with Informatica because I had to actually change the data models to be able to load them with Informatica. It was not "data model agnostic". And just in chatting I said a really interesting article would be:
"The top 10 features all ETL tools should have".....
Part 02.
These situations where millions of dollars are at stake are very complex, very political, and other vendors and companies had no problems making false allegations as I found out later on the St. George deal. That was the first time an IBM customer had actually made a false allegation about me trying to harm my career but it was certainly not the last.
On a broader social scale the issue is this Nick. In the 70s "honesty, honour and integrity" were character traits in men that were respected. If a man falsely called another man a liar "them were fighting words". I saw grown men say "Let's step outside and settle this like men" and they did. To disparage another man, in any way, falsely, were "fighting words".
There was a code of conduct between men. That code of conduct was that "honesty, honour, and integrity" were valued in men. It was best explained to me by my WW2 veteran grandfather in 1978 when I was 14. He fought the Japanese for the duration. He put the steel in my spine. It was he, more than anyone else, who wrapped up and presented to me what it was to "be a man". I had other examples in my life, but to have a WW2 veteran as my grand father tell me what it was to "be a man" left a great impression on me. I measure myself against my grand father and no one else. He is the yardstick by which I have lived my life. He is the greatest man I ever knew personally.
Alas, we had given women the vote. We had given women a voice in public. Indeed, 1975 was the UN International Year of Women and they made Helen Reddys "I am Woman" song the theme song of the year. A song packed with lies like "women are invincible".
Men get their way by being honest men of honour and integrity. Real Men never lie to get their way. That is the standard. A man caught lying and who was unrepentant was called a liar and he was socially ostracised and no longer respected. As a man you got one chance at telling a lie and if you were caught you had to "fix what you broke" and be truly repentant. That's how men work. Sure, there have been men successful at lying in the past, but they very often get their “come uppance”.
Women and girls do not work like that. Women and girls get what they want by lies and deception. It was a woman who taught me that “no woman is capable of honesty”. She was actually surprised I thought it was even possible for a woman to be honest.
She said to me herself: “Us women get what we want from men by lying to them.”
I was first falsely accused by girls when I was 6 in 1970. Along with every boy in my class. The girls made up false allegations about us boys to get us caned.
Girls and women have lied to me and lied about me all my life. It's "normal" that girls and women lie. It's "normal" that women and girls steal property. This has been observed throughout history.
It's the reason why in a Sharia Law court a woman’s word is worth half a mans word and an allegation by a woman against a man is not considered credible if the man denies it.
But in the west? We chose to allow women to claim "equality". In the history of the feminist movement there has never been a woman write an essay to enumerate what she means by "equality". Not one. Not ever. I guess the "oppressive patriarchy" did not let woman have access to a pen and some paper. Women have never enumerated what they mean by "equality" for the exact reason they wanted to be able to move the goal posts over time.
Given that all women achieve their goals by lies and deception, once we gave them the vote, once we gave them a voice in public, once we gave them jobs, once we allowed them to invade men’s spaces?
They lied. Gee? What a surprise?!
Today, a woman nominated for the US Supreme Court can't even tell you what a woman is. Women doctors can't even tell you whether a man can get pregnant or not.
Once you accept women’s lies and do not punish women who lie? Indeed, if you richly reward women who lie? Guess what? The men will cotton on to that and emulate that behaviour. Indeed, men are now so interested in gaining the rich rewards of being a woman that they will even "become women" for all that free money and attention.
So, very slowly, bit by bit, since some time around the mid 70s, if not sooner, we have seen the erosion of the idea of "An honest man of honour and integrity" being respected in western society.
We have seen the rise of the "smooth talking snake oil salesman" who is a known liar and criminals. Hell, Hillary Clinton ran for president!! There is no person on the face of this planet who is better known as a liar and a criminal than Hillary Clinton!!! But she got the nod because she was a woman. Her lies and crimes were overlooked because she was a woman.
Who followed? Joe Biden!! A man so well known to be a liar and a criminal they were making JOKES about him on late night TV in the 80s!! LOL!
So in western societies now the "smooth talking snake oil salesman who is a liar and a criminal" can become president of the United States of America. The liar and criminal can become the richest man in the world. People, men and women alike, have prescribed how much money a man has as being correlated, indeed, signifying, moral virtue.
We live in world where liars like Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, Jeff Bezos and many others are “revered” and "respected".
Hell….We live in a world that made Taylor Swift a billionaire!! LOL!
And men like me? The honest men of honour and integrity? The men of impeccable character? Well? We are thrown in jail as political prisoners. Our houses are stolen. We are driven into poverty. We are driven into debt. And even our own peers, who know our character, who men like me made rich? They will turn their backs on us in fear that if they help us the women in their lives will destroy their lives as well.
Indeed Nick, even my own FATHER supported my criminal abuse. How about that?
Once you give women the vote, a voice in public, political power, they will destroy that society. This is so well known that there is even a Greek Play called "Assembly Women" where the women put on fake beards and go into the assembly and vote in communism.
Companies live inside social environments.
And once the external social environment supports and rewards women’s lies? It was only a matter of time before men adopted the same tactics. When men are not punished for lying and stealing? Surprise, surprise, they will lie and steal.
That's where we are Nick. And there is no way back to the 1960s. We are going to go “forward”. And by "forward" I mean take a long hard look at the Roman Empire and what happened to them after they allowed women more social freedom. That is where the west is headed and there is no way to stop it. All this talk of “AI” is just nonsense because AI is not going to stop what is coming next. “AI” will pander to womens lies just as much as men did.
On the down hill run?
Personally? I am just focussed on earning money to pay off the loans I took out from the man who helped me save my life in April 2008. I owe him USD200K. Then I need some money for retirement.
But my fellow men? Even the men who know me well and who I helped along the way? My fellow white western men won't help me because they fear women will attack them for helping me.
So now my allies are muslim men who do not take the lies women tell seriously.
Muslim men are not afraid of womens lies because when women lie about a muslim man all his peers know not to take her seriously.
I won’t do any more comments on the political side on your substack because I presume you do not want them there. But what is happening in the business sector, including in our “data segment” is downstream from the social environment. And the social environment is collapsing with no way to turn it around at this late stage.
I tried and failed. And it has costs me USD5M+ to be “woke cancelled” since 2010. I made USD330K in 2006 at the age of 42. Today I am in debt for the very reason I am a man of impeccable character.
How about that? LOL!
Part 01.
Hi Nick,
Oh, I could give you all sorts of "war stories" about companies being unethical. I hit that early on when I moved to IBM Marketing in March 1991. Teradata was the worst of the lot. On the deal we were trying to sell to my customer, the Mutual Life Company in Australia, they also talked to Teradata.
Teradata was selling them a machine "as new". At IBM we had a practice that we photographed the serial numbers of all competitive equipment in our customers data centers because so many other companies sold hardware "as new" that had been already used. It was a common practice. Indeed IBM bought and paid for floor space in large customers so that when the mainframe was resold it was resold as "only ever having been on IBM owned floorspace and serviced by IBM Systems Engineers". We got higher resale values for our customers when we did that. Of course, we told the prospects for the second hand machine that was the situation. We didn't hide it.
Anyway, Teradata was selling this machine "as new" and it had been used by one of our customers in a pilot and returned We had the photographs of the machine in the customer site and the serial number photograph. We gave that to the Mutual Life Company and they had the Teradata rep in. They asked him to confirm the machine was "as new" and he said yes. They gave him the photographs and asked him if he knew he was lying. He said yes. They asked him why he lied to them and he said: "Because you might have not found out about the lie and bought the machine." Obviously the rep thought that was ok because he did it.
The Mutual Life Company was owned by a company called Lend Lease that was run by a man called Stuart Hornery at the time. It was a construction company and ran the ethics of builders, as I alluded to about my Uncle. There was a standard at Lend Lease. If you were caught lying you were very publicly fired and you would not get a reference from Lend Lease. Everyone would know you were a liar. So no one who worked at a Lend Lease company lied. Those who did and were caught were publicly fired. That ended their careers.
I could tell you all sorts of stories about how Teradata reps lied to customers to make sales. In 1992 Teradata sold a machine to Telecom New Zealand that was never going to work. They sold the first machine for USD5M and the upgrade for another USD5M. The machine never went into production.
In 1993 Teradata sold a machine in a head to head with me at the St. George Bank, the 5th largest bank in Australia. They lied through their teeth the whole way. Indeed, I took the evaluation team to the MLC and the manager at MLC got permission from his legal department to tell the story above.
I was then FALSELY accused of telling the story by one of the St. George people in the room. I was never told who the person was. The IBM rep and branch manager knew and they took the position of not telling me. I had to sit through an internal tribunal hearing, again, falsely asccused of repeating that story to St. George. The man who told the story was called as a witness and he was scathing to my manager and the finance branch manager that he should have to come to our office and defend my good name.
He absolutely let fly at them for not taking my word about what happened and said that if he was me he would have resigned having his word questioned like this. He was a good friend of mine and he didn't hold back at that meeting. He was FURIOUS on my behalf. But I had a wife and four kids, including a newborn and a 2 year old to support so I needed my job. 1993 was a deep recession and so I chose to defend my good name rather than resign and my friend understood I needed the money to support my growing family.
As an IBMer I was not allowed to tell customers about teradata or other competitors and what they were doing. It was in our employment contracts to never disparage a competitor and that included saying things that were true that were negative.
I had many times where my customers demanded to know my opinion about a competitor and I told them my employment contract forbid me from any negative comment about any competitor. I almost got fired once for what could easily be perceived as a "negative comment" about IBM!! It wasn't meant that way. I was empathising with my customer on the tender preparation for a deal that was worth $A8M that I was trying to win for IBM to smooth over "issues" we were having.
IBM had very strict rules about "tender preparation" so that we could not be accused of having "influence" in the tender. I was in the very difficult position that I was the IBM Systems Engineer who was advising the team who were preparing the Tender on many other matters. I had won the trust and respect of the team by my hard work and they were asking me to contribute to the tender preparation because they knew my level of skills in what the tender was about.
I actually faced an internal tribunal hearing with my job on the line for that comment that was overheard by my customers secretary and reported to my rep and branch manager. I had to get the my customer to stick up for me at that tribunal too. He said my comment was not at all negative about IBM, and that I was very clearly trying to be empathetic to a very difficult situation. He actually told the tribunal that our meeting behind closed doors was quite "heated" and that I had very professionally handled the conflicts of interests and made him understand why I could not do what he was asking me to do.
This was a VERY senior tech manager and a VERY smart man. His team had complained to him that I was "not being as helpful as they wanted" and he had called me into his office to explain my side of the story. They wanted my help on the tender preparation and I was saying no because it was $A8M and we wanted to bid on it. We felt we had a very good chance of winning it. I made my customer understand that there was a conflict of interest here and that IBMs position was that where there is the possible perception of a conflict of interest we must err on the conservative side.
So at the tribunal hearing the customer explained all this and said that as far as he could tell I was doing what I felt was in the best interests of both parties and NOT creating a situation where a possible conflict of interest could be alleged if the contract went to IBM.
He actually said: "Peter is between a rock and a hard place and he is doing the best he can, which is very good just by the way."
So my management decided that my comment was perfectly reasonable under the very complex circumstances in which it was made where there was an $8M tender on the line that MANY companies would want to bid on. Emotions run high when vendors lose an $A8M contract and if we won and any of the losing vendors ever found out I had contributed to the tender they could easily accused IBM of "conflict of interest" and raise a fuss in the marketplace, or even take it to court…..
Hi James, and other readers.
The issue with "data projects" not being approved is not the above, though the above is all true.
The issue with "data projects" not being approved is that IT people in general and "data people" in general have zero credibility on the business side of the house.
Nor should they have any credibility.
We have managed our profession like a joke and so now "data professionals" are a joke on the business side of the house.
Not that long ago I was in a meeting with a CEO of a smallish company. She could see I was 60 years old and had long term experience. She was about my age. She asked me how it was possible for IT people to be so ignorant and so arrogant at the same time. She pointed out that most of her IT consultants would not know a debit from a credit.
I told her that 40 years of IT people telling themselves how smart they were while actually being very ignorant has led to a level of arrogance that was, frankly, embarrassing.
I told her that in the 90s I had tried very hard to promote honesty and hard work in my profession.
I told her that I tried very hard to have men take the position that we should name and shame the snake oil salesmen. I told her I failed and by 2002 I had given up. I just went about my business as best I could while snake oil salesmen got the majority of the attention in our profession.
And now? Every board member of every large company, every senior manager of every large company, knows full well that people in the "data area" are not to be trusted.
They know men like me exist in our segment, honest men, but they also know men like me are as rare as hens teeth and not even our own industry segment respects honest men of honour and integrity.
So they are not about to trust anyone in the "IT" area in general or the "data area" specifically, which is my area.
When the men in "data" want to be taken seriously by board members? They will take my advice that I have freely offered since the 80s.
Step one is "Be honest".
If a man in our segment is not even willing to be honest? Then I don't want to talk to him. I only want to talk to the very few honest men in our segment. Maybe they will take my advice, maybe they will not.
But any man presenting a business case for a "data project" should know that he is considered to be a "snake oil salesman" today by the men he is presenting to. And justly so.
Look at the failure rates of "data projects". Still over 50%. And we don't name the culprits. We let them go and commit other failures on other projects. We have no professional standards. We have less professional standards than plumbers.
Ok?