Tag: Risk Management

Being busy bodies doing busy work

… Anyone noticed that the ‘trend’ (development) where everyone claims to be oh so busy with, basically busywork, started with the demise of the secretarial profession ..?
Where secreataries (either a pool of or a single personal, or in a pool altogether for sharing i.e. load balancing) and like support staff were (sic) there to alleviate all the chores that now, all underlings/specialists, ‘managers’ and even up, are supposed to do now, in stead of the work they were hired for and be productive in the thing that labour specialisation had made them best, most productive, in, like a Ricardo trade deal within the organisation.

Yes, the secretaries were doing much of, superficially!, uninteresting work but were so labour-specialised in that, that they were more productive, effective, than any heap of managers ever could dream to be … Where the specialists as well as the managers once were specialised folk, with suitable spans of control, but now, no more…

That has been chucked out of the window. Despecialisation resulted indeed, and has included the tons of changeover time involved. Making everyone miserable with having to fill out dumb forms (dumbed-down to the max because now even managers needed to understand, not only the understand-experts that the secretaries were) in stead of the interesting work that one came over to the organisation for.

The hyperbolic extension to socmed addiction and FOMO, and a prefix Impostor Syndrome, of course leading to a neat total burn-out. Thta prefix thing, I’ll elucidate later in some seperate post, if you don’t git it.

The solution also being Obvious: Bring Back The Secretaries! And give them proper status and reward (in all ways; monetary, too, since they raise productivity and morale so handsomely — the latter not literally meant, btw).

Let’s all admit that productivity increase by firing lowest-level staff first, doesn’t work as far as we (???) have done that over the past four decades, and revert that trend. Plus:
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[Wide, high, mighty, needs no tower; Metz cathedral and yes, that’s part of another building on the right not a pic error … (?)]

Comedy crashers

No capers, frankly no comedy either, when some of the most respected in the field are concerned about pervasive probing of whole countries in one go. As here.

Probably, the same is pulled off on smaller countries as well; the infra doesn’t distinguish, but the protection budgets probably are much smaller, so a proof of concept might be interesting. Though this may trigger better protection in the larger country/countries, if done ‘right’ the attack(s) may be class break kind of things not so easily protected against in the first place.
And for now, the smaller countries probed, will have even smaller budgets and capabilities to even detect the probing all together / in the first place. Interesting …

But maybe budgets are better spent on all the other actual risks out there, like: ..?
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[Suddenly (of course !!) turned up at the Joinville château; Haut-Marne]

Culture for breakfast, since it's so light and airheaded

Yet again some oversight body / de facto regulator gave wind that they already had changed to auditing Culture and the Tone At The Top including Behaviour and Awareness, apart from mere ([ed.]) process and technology.
To get the latter off the table: Good. ‘Technology’ wasn’t understood the least bit anyway; really (sic).
And Process, ah finally they found that about all they had done in the past, was windbaggery of the worst kind. Yes, process has its place, but a so much more minor, subaltern one than the past Tragedy (sic, again) that ‘governance’/GRC/compliance/SOx was …! Yes again, it really was the little chicken pretending to be a full-grown eagle.

So now, they ‘have’ turned to Culture and related blah. About which they have no clue or would had to have fired a majority of own staff and hire complete+ replacement with psychologically skilled (i.e., fully a square angle to -educated) staff. Which they haven’t, or would have found out that the new skill set would have burned down the house that was.

Of which no (smoke) sign is in sight.

So, … words; the Tom Tom Club was right.

And:
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[Blockhead and Culture with a capital C here …; Casa de, Porto of course]

Another Thoreau

Yes another one in a series of The Annotated Alice Thoreau, with:

I am constantly assisted by the books in identifying a particular plant and learning some of its humbler uses, but I rarely read a sentence in a botany which reminds me of flowers or living plants. Very few write indeed as if they had seen the thing which they pretend to describe.

And so it is with, e.g., books and other theory of GRC. Not a living thing to be discovered in them. Just as if the dust of centuries had already descended on ‘process’, ‘structure’, etc. etc. — which it might have, when it is the errand interpretation of what management (sic; not ‘governance’ as that is a nonsense phrase as per this giant) has been around since the dawn of settled farmer civilisation. Note that all that seems, at superficial and likewise erroneous misinterpretation, rebellious might hearken back to the glorious days of the hunter-gatherers as expressed here. But at least, summa, they’re alive as the books/GRC aren’t hence fail.

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[Old guns still work, even as a model they’re still pretty, too; Rijks, Amsterdam]

ORM will not fly B-4 People are included

[Warning: Longread]

On the ails of the Basel-IV ORM proposals:

1. Unwarranted, certainly unscientific overreliance on ‘models’;

2. Modeling for prospective use in stead of hindsight understanding;

3. Too much top-down, not enough bottom-up;

4. No humans in the picture, hence the wrong and unactionable indicators.

Introduction

About all of the banking industry, and other financials in their wake, have had to deal with loads of regulatory requirements. Justified, some say, for ‘they’ cause(d) so much misery beyond mere most temporary loss of bonuses that the ‘un’ should be (have been long before) detached from bridled. So, Basel II and -III regulations swooped in requiring much more explicit and detailed handling of financial business than ever before. The move from laissez-faire to regulation, to regulation with sanction schemes, to sanctions (possibly interpreted as ‘token’…), was extended with provability and then complete proof-demonstration as minimum requirement.

This all, however, has created a large, and in general even I would say quite overpaid [disclaimer: am profiting too] industry of consultants, quants, ‘risk managers’, reviewers, assessors, auditors, and scores of Toms, Dicks[1] and Harries of the GRC kind. That are all very likeable nice lads and lassies, but maybe not all quite worth their salt, certainly not their bonuses, or even be sure to be worth much lending one’s ear to.
Keep reading!

Weird infosec science

Who would have thought — that total surveillance would reach into the house, no / hardly any backdoors need to be built in even.
As explained here, and here in closer-to-humanly-readable form.

If such are the Tempest inroads, who needs the newest-of-highest-tech solutions as they all will all succumb to either trivial complexity-induced-unavoidable sloppiness of implementation, or to circumvention in the above way…?

Of course all of it is an atrocity in ethics but … I won’t be utterly negative about humanity’s future so I’ll stop now. With:
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[Art imitating life; Stedelijk Amsterdam]

Plusquote: Qua Quantification

Qua quantification, maximal isn’t the optimal that minimal is.

If quantification were good, or worth pursuing even anything more than a bit or minimally, Yoda would talk about hidden Markow chains not The Force.
Not all that can be counted, counts, and not all that counts, can be counted. Where ‘not all’ is to be read different than latter-day simpletonian, but as antediluvian ‘none’. Capice ..?

Many more arguments might go here. Suffice to say that ‘evidence-based’ science is a scam. Only those that are too stupid (let’s put it like it is) to ‘get’ the value of philosophy (and ethics etc.etc. as part of it), may not understand it. But as the vast masses don’t have a clue how their car works — chemical reactions within the pistons, anyone? how ’bout the programming of the cabling that controls it all? — but still use it, NO you not understanding does NOT mean it’s nonsense, in your case to the contrary.

To return to the positive of the Plusquote…: All may have a say in matters of society and the ‘control’ (quod non) of its infrastructure including all ‘critical’ sectors like energy, security and finance…

Oh that may be too much of a stretch but still…:
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[OK, … quantify this … NO not even the qualifier Amsterdam is correct, it’s Dordrecht and even that doesn’t capture the picture…]

Risk Chagrins

It’s just a matter of Karma…

As long as ‘risk’ ‘managers’ deal with negativity (admit it; focusing on the negative is even written into quite a number of definitions involved ..!), they’ll become the sourpusses they want to see all around (remember, the “passing back risk management to the ‘first’ line” ..?), and according to which they’ll behave ever more, finding evidence everywhere they’re on the ‘right’ track.
Quod non, but conspiracy theorists as they are, they will not listen …

Oh, and this:
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[Your ‘risk’ ‘heat map’, accurate picture]

Plusquote: Materiality

Discussions about materiality are not material.

This, after realizing that all too often, the discussions about materiality were/are either by Eager Beavers (not having grown above box checking zealots), or by outsiders qua experience and expertise, e.g., lawyers (q.q.) and ‘governance’ bubbletypes.
Whereas, when ‘materiality’ (or its twin-at-a-right-angle, ‘significance’) its pass-or-fail boundary is discussed, not the precise measure (and hence, rigorous definition) counts, but the very fact that there is a discussion in the first place. That is material, that points at an issue. Wise minds (q.q. probably not directly involved ..!) understand this point and will not want to join the discussion, leaving the latter to the nonderstandables.

Think about it — when the discussion arises for whatever reason, that mere fact already is a signal, which can simply be reported as such, together with all its glorious detail. Must. For it is material significant oh whatever…

Leaving you for the weekend with:
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[“It’s only a model” it aint ..! in Rotterdam — oh wait that’s a scaled re-build…]

Maverisk / Étoiles du Nord