#94 - Easier, Better, Faster, & Cheaper Software

Hello, and welcome to another episode of CISO Tradecraft, the podcast that provides you with the information, knowledge, and wisdom to be a more effective cybersecurity leader.  My name is G. Mark Hardy, and today we're going to try to balance the impossible equation of better, faster, and cheaper.  As always, please follow us on LinkedIn, and subscribe if you have not already done so.

Shigeo Shingo, who lived from 1909-1990, helped to improve efficiency at Toyota by teaching thousands of engineers the Toyota Production System, and even influenced the creation of Kaizen.  He wrote, "There are four purposes for improvement: easier, better, faster, cheaper. These four goals appear in order of priority."

Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft, stated that, “Every company is a software company.  You have to start thinking and operating like a digital company.  It’s no longer just about procuring one solution and deploying one solution… It’s really you yourself thinking of your own future as a digital company, building out what we refer to as systems of intelligence.”

The first time I heard this I didn’t really fully understand it.  But after reflection it makes a ton of sense.  For example, let’s say your company couldn’t send email.  How much would that hurt the business?  What if your company couldn’t use Salesforce to look up customer information?  How might that impact future sales?  What if your core financial systems had database integrity issues?  Any of these examples would greatly impact most businesses.  So, getting high-quality software applications that enable the business is a huge win.

If every company is a software or digital company, then the CISO has a rare opportunity.  That is, we can create one of the largest competitive advantages for our businesses.

What if we could create an organization that builds software cheaper, faster, and better than all of our competitors?

Sounds good right?  That is the focus of today’s show, and we are going to teach you how to excel in creating a world class organization through a focused program in Secure Software Development.  Now if you like the sound of better, faster, cheaper, as most executives do, you might be thinking, where can I buy that?  Let's start at the back and work our way forward.

• We can make our software development costs cheaper by increasing productivity from developers.
• We can make our software development practices faster by increasing convenience and reducing waste.
• We can make our software better by increasing security.

Let’s first look at increasing productivity.  To increase productivity, we need to under    stand the Resistance Pyramid.  If you know how to change people and the culture within an organization, then you can significantly increase your productivity.  However, people and culture are difficult to change, and different people require different management approaches.

• At the bottom of the pyramid are people who are unknowing.  These individuals Don’t know what to do.  You can think of the interns in your company.  They just got to your company, but don't understand what practices and processes to follow.  If you want to change the interns, then you need to communicate what is best practice and what is expected from their performance.  Utilize an inquiry approach to decrease fear of not knowing, for example, "do you know to whom I should speak about such-and-such?" or "do you know how we do such-and-such here?"  An answer of "no" allows you to inform them of the missing knowledge in a conversational rather than a directional manner.
• The middle part of the pyramid is people who believe they are unable to adapt to change.  These are individuals that don’t know how to do the task at hand.  Here,