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Reasonably Accurate 馃馃 Transcript
Mark here. How are you doing today? It's Friday. And for those of you on the blog, you can see it's an absolutely beautiful fall day. You can also see the steam coming out of my mouth because it is Canada. It is a little chilly, but it's stunning out.
And I thought it would be cool to show you guys literally. This is why we call it fall all day. The tree behind is just going to be dropping its leaves. Great beautiful thing. And on the Canadian note, I wanted to talk today about trust, trusting companies trumps an organization, trust in business.
And the reason why I want to talk about that is because I watched a really compelling video from Steve Dodo who is a productivity evangelist Canadian legend. And he was talking about trust on his channel and I'll link that video down below and I'll tweet it out.
And he was talking about, you know, what are the factors for you to trust the company to do business with them, to trust them with your data. And he covered pretty much everything which was really big topic, Steve. So I'm not going to reply all to that.
What I am going to do is focus in on a couple of key things. I thought it was interesting in a several minute long video. Not once was the question of risk posed and that's what we deal with all the time in technology, all the time and security, all the time in business.
You can't just blindly trust. Trust isn't a binary. It's an entire spectrum. So where I might trust you with some minor transactional data, I don't necessarily trust you with my passport number or my social insurance number or information like that. There's a spectrum here of trust.
And the interesting thing is at the end of it, you can actually engender trust through the same way no matter what it's transparency and consistency. So the more transparent a company organization is in their aims and the more consistent they are in taking steps towards those aims, the easier it is to trust them.
But one of the key questions we deal with in it a lot and it comes across securities plate a lot is vendor lock in and whether you're purely in it or you're, you know, just a normal business, adopting tools and buying software lock in is a concern because if you're building your business on a particular type of cash register, I have to move that to another type.
If that system no longer works for you, that's a significant burden and expense. If you keep going back into the back end of it. If you're building your servers and your applications and things like that on a particular set up, whether that's a cloud provider, which is where you probably should be or in a colo agreement in a data center that's locking you into certain technologies.
And there are some companies who absolutely avoid lock in no matter what. And that's ridiculous because they're not getting the advantage of partnering with companies of using tools building in. They're trying to be as generic as possible to move around. Um And we saw this come up at the serves conference in San Francisco this summer where um there was a couple um in a private closed door session, a couple of people actually mentioned that they done the calculus on it and they done the math on it and it was actually faster for them to rewrite everything and then to try to move it.
So they weren't worried about locking at all. And I think that's one extreme, then the other is to go so generic that if you're not actually taking advantage of the platforms that you're participating in, so trust is the spectrum and what you need to do is evaluate the risk.
What is the risk of this? So if I'm a retail business and I go with the square cash register, which is a really cool ipad based cash register, you can flip around ties back into the square system. So if you've ever used square with your credit card, your emails, your receipts are emailed automatically a lot of benefits for the consumer.
But you're picking to do business with that company. And let's say you were, you know, set up for retail and that works for you. But at a certain point, they switched their focus and now no longer set up that cash register streamline for retail operations, maybe they start to adjust so that now it's something different and it no longer aligns with your business names.
What is the cost of moving off that platform? What's the risk of that actually happening? So there you go back and you look at that history of that company. See, OK, where is square gone with this product? Is this product an experiment for them? Is it an actual line of business?
You have to evaluate that risk and the way you can do that is if the company has been transparent in their previous activities, if they are transparent in their name and if they're consistent, consistently going toward that, and I think that's really how you need to evaluate in general and with every specific example.
So if I'm going to build my technology back end on cloud provider, a how consistent have they been are they aimed and along the direction that I want to go with my company, with my organization, with my project? And have they consistently been going there? Now, of course, the younger a company is the less of a track record they have.
So hopefully they're taking additional steps to engender that trust, but it's really a time thing. You have to wait to see if they're going to be consistent because in this, especially in this day and age, anyone can say anything they want, you can promise the moon and the stars and unicorns and rainbows and all that stuff.
Um The question is, can you deliver and of course, if you're promising all that you probably can't deliver and people will see through it a mile away, fingers crossed. However, it's those people who are on the edge of plausibility that it sounds too good to be true or hints at being too good to be true where people might get sort of sucked in and make the wrong decision.
So time definitely is a factor. But really for me, trust, it keeps coming back down to transparency and consistency. Have you set an aim? Are you consistently marching towards that? And are you transparent even when things go bad? Are you able to say, hey, this is what went wrong.
Here's the factors for that. Here's what we're doing to resolve that moving forward. There's no easy answer here when it comes to trust. Just remember, it's not a binary decision, it's not all or nothing. There's a spectrum in play. I highly encourage you to check out um Steve Da's video that I'll link to below and subscribe to his channel.
Um Fantastic stuff that he's, he's diving into on his new uh new one as well as classically in do tech. Um But always good to see different perspectives and Steve's got a wealth of experience that he brings to the table to share with all of us.
Um I hope you are set up for a fantastic day. I'll talk to you online at Mark NC A in the comments down below for those of you in the vlog and podcast by email me at Mark N dot C A. Um Enjoy the beautiful weekend.
We'll talk to you uh online and on the show on Monday.
