« Phlavors of Phishing | Main | Is your password on the worst offender list? »

Tuesday, 15 December 2009

Hype-cycle management

Product life cycle management can be loosely defined as the activities a vendor engages in to develop, launch, market, mature (or evolve) a product. Many products enjoy long product life cycles. Other products reach a point at which they can no longer adapt or evolve, and vendors end the life of a product. Noteworthy adapter-evolvers include Adobe Acrobat, MS Office, Linksys and NetGear routers, Checkpoint and Secure Computing firewalls. Recent EOL examples include the Cisco PIX and Netscreen-5,-25,-50 lines of firewalls.

Users, especially enterprise administrators, contend with life cycle management of products they use in a very meaningful way. They carefully monitor a product's evolution, press vendors to add (or kill) features, improve performance or make products more secure. Users must stay informed so that they are not caught unprepared should a vendor choose to EOL a product. If you were an admin who ran a Cisco PIX only shop, you better have kept informed regarding the future of this firewall and considered what you would employ "post PIX".

Users have a longer life cycle to manage than vendors, one that includes hype cycle. A hype cycle may begin before a product announcement. Hype that sparks the cycle takes many forms: new standards and regulations (HIPPA, PCI) and demonstrations of prototypes at trade shows (Google Wave) are common. This is followed by trade pub and street talk. Soon, ThisRemarkableNewThing is widely heralded as the most disruptive technology since, well, the last most disruptive technology. 

Hype is contagious.  Enterprises should consider ways to contain or temper hype, since hype gone viral can cost an organization dearly.  Consider this tale of two C*Os and their experiences with the iPhone. 

The first C*O shows up at a senior management retreat with an iPhone, announcing that "this is so freaking cool". This begets a must-have attitude that trickles down from management, which begets an organization-wide buying frenzy, which begets a business imperative directed at IT to "integrate iPhones with our enterprise mail system and corporate web apps". To accommodate iPhone adoption, a planned 802.1x/network access controls project is dropped from the budget. There's always next year. This C*O failed to manage the hype cycle and allowed enthusiasm for a consumer grade product to snowball into a mobility issue that resulted in an unplanned network deployment, funded at the expense of an important security initiative. 

Now consider a second C*O whose response to exactly this situation serves as a five-star example of hype cycle management. When iPhone was announced, this COO sent an "all hands" email with the subject line "iPhone". He acknowledged the awesome coolness of iPhone and that he desperately wanted one. However, he tempered his enthusiasm when he realized that interoperability issues would prevent him from accessing intranet services that were essential and that an important network and security upgrade would have to be sacrificed to accommodate iPhone adoption. He asked all hands to temper their enthusiasm, be patient while IT investigated iPhone integration, and promised that the organization would do its best to accommodate new mobile technologies. This COO jumped in front of the bus as it was departing and yelled "stop!" but in doing so, he acknowledged the desirability of the new technology rather than dismissing it. He explained why iPhone adoption was problematic, reminding rather than rebuffing staff that the mission and business of the organization takes priority over having a cool handheld. Lastly, he empowered IT by announcing that iPhone adoption would be studied. 

Study these scenarios carefully. Substitute whatever it is in your organization that is causing buzz for the iPhone in the example and decide if your organization is best serve by C*O #1 or C*O #2. Hopefully, you have chosen wisely:-) I'm pretty certain you can tease out a set of "best practices" for hype cycle management. 

This is an update to a prior article from March 2008.

Posted at 11:38 AM in Web/Tech |

Comments

Feed You can follow this conversation by subscribing to the comment feed for this post.

Verify your Comment

Previewing your Comment

Posted by:  | 

This is only a preview. Your comment has not yet been posted.

Working...
Your comment could not be posted. Error type:
Your comment has been saved. Comments are moderated and will not appear until approved by the author. Post another comment

The letters and numbers you entered did not match the image. Please try again.

As a final step before posting your comment, enter the letters and numbers you see in the image below. This prevents automated programs from posting comments.

Having trouble reading this image? View an alternate.

Working...

Post a comment

Comments are moderated, and will not appear until the author has approved them.

Your Information

(Name is required. Email address will not be displayed with the comment.)

Find me on Mastodon and Facebook

Spotlight Posts

  • New study: Cybercrime Supply Chain 2023
    Today, my Interisle colleagues and I released a study, Cybercrime Supply Chain 2023: Measurements and Assessments of Cyber Attack Resources and Where Criminals Acquire Them. Criminals who perpetrate malware, spam, phishing and other serious cybercrimes enjoy an enormous economic advantage over defenders and responders. They can acquire resources from an online cybercrime supply chain where everything from phishing kits and malicious software, email lists and mobile numbers, domain names and Internet addresses, and places to host attacks are all readily and cheaply available. Our report examines these supply chains. We examined over 10M reports collected at the Cybercrime Information Center...
  • Interisle study reveals that phishing attacks have tripled since May 2020, situation worsening each year
    My colleagues at Interisle Consulting Group and I today announced the publication of an industry report, Phishing Landscape 2023, A Study of the Scope and Distribution of Phishing. We analyzed more than 11 million phishing reports collected from 1 May 2020 to 30 April 2023 to provide annual and triennial measurements of phishing. Our study identifies distinct, persistent exploitation and abuse of Internet resources, reveals that criminals can trivially acquire everything they need to phish. Among the major findings in the study, Interisle reports that: The number of phishing attacks has tripled since May 2020, and has increased 65% over...
  • FTC's proposed Trade Regulation Rule on Impersonation of Government and Businesses is important for #infosec
    M3AAWG comments on the FTC's proposed rule Trade Regulation Rule on Impersonation of Government and Businesses is available. I was one of the contributors to the comment. In the comment, M3AAWG "suggests additional regulatory solutions and best practices to complement the goals of this rule, such as clarifying the scope of the rule to include the use of domain names in impersonation schemes and the use of technologies that enable impersonation" and the important role that Whois plays in investigating impersonation and fraud. Several reports that my Interisle colleagues and I published are cited in the comment, along with the...
  • Cybercrime Information Center reports sharp increases in phishing attacks, unique domains reported in August-October 2022 time period
    A recent ebb in domain names reported for phishing created some euphoria in the domain industry. With phishing activity, as with tides, ebbs are invariably followed by flows. In their August- October 2022 Quarterly Phishing Activity, the Cybercrime Information Center observed a 40% increase in phishing attacks and a nearly 20% increase in unique domain names reported for phishing.
  • Cybercrime Information Center's YouTube Channel
    My colleagues and I at Interisle have created a YouTube channel to complement the quarterly reporting and studies of cybercrime we host at the Cybercrime Information Center. Our goal is to share, in a few minutes, the findings and insights from our research in a format that's easily accessible and shareable, informative, and entertaining. The inaugural videos provide 2-5 minute summaries of our annual Phishing and Malware Landscape studies. We'll continue to produce videos of our annual studies. If you like what you see, leave us a comment.

Search

My Photo

Categories