George Spafford Quotes

The following quotes are extracted from articles and presentations:

"IT exists for two reasons - to enable the creation and protection and value."

"It seems paradoxical that the people and organizations most in need of help often realize it the least. What I term as 'the Underperformer Paradox'"

"With computers, if they can infinitely repeat logic, then why aren't the outcomes 100% predictable?"

"For just about any technology, be it an operating system, application or network, when a sufficient level of adoption is reached, that technology then becomes a threat vector. "

"With the Internet, for each additional node added that doesn't have adequate security and behave in a responsible manner, we observe diminishing returns, or even negative returns and we lose a portion of total value."

"We can safely assume that for any network, only 20% of the nodes will create 80% of the value. Conversely, we can also assume that the majority, or 80%, of the nodes will contribute very little value – perhaps 20%, if the 80/20 rule holds true."

"As project complexity increases and individual knowledge or experience decreases, then the difficulty of communication will increase."

"As the amount of time you are willing to wait for data increases, the effort and costs to collect the data will decrease."

"Data acquisition is subject to diminishing returns. You can spend more and more money and effort to acquire the data, but as the time to acquisition decreases, the cost of acquisition increases."

"The Law of False Alerts: As the rate of erroneous alerts increases, operator reliance, or belief, in subsequent warnings decreases. "

"If we stop and ponder it, biotech and nanotech provide the substrates upon which information is used to craft outcomes. Whether the information technology used has to do with the assemblers, mixing tanks, genetic encoding manipulation, and so on, the fact remains that it is the processing and application of logic (process) and true information that makes it all possible. Whether the systems used are plastic, silicon, graphite, or DNA is a function of the media used to house or embody, the information. The materials involved can change, but the concepts of programming and overall software and system engineering remain relatively intact. "

"Any formula aimed at ascertaining theoretical network potential value (NPV) can only go so far in the real world due to factors that impair incremental value or even create negative value for each additional node added. "

"As organizations attempt to accomplish ever more challenging objectives, the need for effective risk management will increase as well. "

"With today's lean organizations, complex systems and dynamic environmental factors, the risk management methodologies and systems must evolve quickly. They must move past the current enterprise view and extend into the ecosystem of entities that the company participates in. In the same way that manufacturing and business realized that optimization required refining supply chain operations, entities must extend their risk management practices into the value chain and create managed risk chains wherein a given risk chain is the combination of entities that are coupled together to achieve common objectives. "

"Simply put, process controls are mechanisms designed to manage the variation associated with the attainment of the processes objective. This is an important perspective because an organization should have a goal and each process should be designed to support the goal by either mitigating risks or directly adding value. "

"One of the first steps needed on a process improvement journey is to actually codify processes into documentation and then ensure that standards are followed. By manual auditing and the implementation of automated detective controls, we strive to ensure that what is documented is actually being followed."