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Help! I’m desperate!

Not really. To be more accurate I’m minorly inconvenienced.

As mentioned a few months ago, I’m looking for an alternative to Quicken (“Plausibility rules,” 3/12/2018), because it deprecated a feature I rely on, presumably to force me to buy an upgrade.

Not to be bullied into an unwanted expenditure I’ve been on the hunt for an alternative. Thus far, with just one exception, every other personal finance package I’ve found is cloud-based.

Which leads to the question, WHAT????

Look, I’m an open-minded sort, so maybe I’m missing something. Yes, I realize my personal financial data is already in the cloud, assuming we’re all willing to redefine “cloud” to mean “on the web.”

But it’s scattered among a bunch of providers and accounts. If I use any of the non-Quicken personal finance management alternatives I’ve found so far, I’ll be putting it all in one place, just waiting for the next data breach to happen.

There is an exception — a package called GnuCash. I’d use it and be happy, except that the instructions for automatically downloading transactions into it are both impenetrable and, as far as I can tell, don’t … what’s the word I’m looking for? … work.

All of which puts me dead-center in the ongoing debate as to whether data stored behind your corporation’s firewalls are more secure than data stored in a SaaS provider’s data farms.

Now I’m far from an authority on the subject, but I do know what the correct answer to the question isn’t: Yes. I also know it isn’t No.

I know this because I know that in addition to all the well-known information-security basics, the accurate answer depends in part on whether you push your own information security failings onto your SaaS providers.

Here’s what I mean: If I decide to use a cloud-based personal financial management solution, and if I don’t change my password on a regular basis, properly protect myself from Trojans, phishing attacks, and keystroke loggers, and keep my OS properly patched and up to date, it won’t be the solution provider’s fault if someone borrows my data.

This all scales up to the enterprise: If you use, say, Salesforce.com and do a lousy job of key rotation, or your administrators share a super-user login, or you don’t conduct regular white-hat phishing attacks, or you don’t properly protect PCs from invasive keystroke loggers and all the other prevalent intrusion techniques, it really won’t matter what level of security excellence Salesforce.com has achieved.

Also, “secure” means more than “protected from intrusion and misuse. With Quicken (or GnuCash) I can easily backup my data to a backpack drive, knowing how I’d restore it if I need to.

With a cloud-based service provider I’m willing to take it on faith that they backup their customers’ data in case of some form of catastrophic failure. Recovering to the state just before my most recent transaction download, on the other hand, is something I strongly suspect isn’t part of the service.

For the enterprise equivalent, Salesforce.com is always the SaaS touchstone. It recommends customers make use of their own backup and recovery tools, or else rely on third-party services.

But of course, your own backup and recovery tools are exactly as vulnerable as anything else inside your firewall, while third-party alternatives add yet another potential point of security failure you can’t directly control.

KJR first mentioned the cloud more than ten years ago (“Carr-ied away,” 2/4/2008), and yet the cloud continues to perplex CIOs.

From business cases that are always either more nuanced than “the cloud saves money” or else are wrong … to an impact on application development that’s much more significant than “recompile your applications in the cloud and you’re done” … to COTS and SaaS-based application portfolios whose integration challenges put the lie to cloud nativity as the uniform goal of all IT architects … to the ever-harder-to-untangle questions surrounding cloud-level vs internal-firewall-based information security …

If you’re looking for simplicity inside all of this complexity, good luck with that. You’re unlikely to find it for the simplest of reasons: An organization’s applications portfolio and its integration are direct reflections of the complexity of the organization itself.

Modern businesses have a lot of moving parts, all of which interact with each other in complex ways. Inevitably this means the applications that support these moving parts are numerous and require significant integration.

Which in turn means it’s unlikely the underlying technology can be simple and uniform.

And yet, when I need an application that can automatically download transactions into a personal financial database, there’s a depressing uniformity of vision:

“Put it in the cloud.”

Sigh.

Draw a Venn diagram. Label one of the circles “What I’m good at.” Label the next “What I enjoy doing.” The third reads, “What someone will pay me to do.

Where the three intersect? That’s your career, if you want one. It’s also the core  framework hiring managers have in the backs of their minds when trying to staff their organizations.

They’re accustomed to hiring employees. They bring in contractors – independent workers, also known as members of the gig economy – for situations that call for individuals with a well-defined “sack o’ skills” for a finite duration.

Contractors are, that is, members of the workforce who have decided they won’t scratch their circle #2 itches through their careers. Their numbers appear to be increasing, very likely as an offset to those who prefer the traditional employment/career approach to earning a living.

Managers generally think of their organization as a social construct. When staffing a role, hiring an employee is their default, and for good reason. They want someone who will do more than just a defined body of work. Beyond that they want people who will pitch in to help the society function smoothly, who will provide knowledge and continuity, who find this dynamic desirable, and whose attitudes and approaches are compatible with the business culture.

Bringing in a contractor is, for most open positions, Plan B.

Which is unfortunate for hiring managers right now. The trend appears to be that if they want enough people to get the organization’s work done they’re going to have to make more use of contractors … and not only contractors but also employees who have no interest in pursuing a career, just an honest day’s pay in exchange for their honest day’s work – who want jobs, not careers.

A different approach to staffing to what we’ve all become accustomed to is evolving, one that’s more transactional and less interpersonal. Culture will be less of a force because contractors will spend less time acculturating than employees; also, the ratio of time working independently than in the team situations where culture matters most is steadily increasing.

In some respects it will be more expensive. Contractor turnover will be higher than employee turnover because that’s built into how the relationship is defined. The ratio of onboarding time to productive time will increase.

Managers who don’t want to head down this road do have an alternative: They can compete for those members of the workforce who don’t want to become independent. The law of supply and demand suggests that this approach will cost more. It will also mean thinking through how to make the work environment as desirable as possible.

One more factor, as if one was needed: The security ramifications of a more transient workforce are significant.

Bob’s last word: “Digital” refers to changes in a company’s marketplace that call for changes in a company’s business strategy in response. Digital is all about products and customer relationships.

The current restructuring of traditional staffing practices is the result of digitization, the rise of the remote worker digital technologies have enabled, and COVID-19, which accelerated it all. It’s the next digital marketplace transformation to which businesses must adapt, only this time the marketplace in question is the one that trades in labor.

Adapting to this nascent transformation of the employment marketplace is less familiar territory, but it isn’t different in principle. Strategists have always had to think in terms of where their organizations fit into an overall business ecosystem. Staffing has always been part of this overall ecosystem. It’s just that few business leaders, not to mention those of us who engage in punditry and futurism … anticipated how quickly and dramatically this ecosystem would morph.

Bob’s sales pitch: Ten years ago, when I published Keep the Joint Running: A Manifesto for 21st Century IT, “Digital” was still an adjective, “everybody knew” the rest of the business was IT’s internal customer, and “best practice” was a phrase people tossed around when they had nothing better to say.

Oh, well. You can’t win ‘em all. But even though Digital has been noun-ified, this book’s 13 principles for leading an effective IT organization are as relevant as the day the book was published.