465- From Department of No to Department of Risk w/Jeff Posluns

Jeff Posluns runs the tech part of Traffic Tech, a third- and fourth-party logistics company with about 40 offices around the world and about 1,200 people. In his view, a project without a business owner should not start, because the business owner defines the outcomes. He applies the same thinking to funding: most organizations fund projects, the team disbands after go-live, and technical debt stays invisible until something fails, so he advises persistent funding of business capabilities, with lifecycle and run costs approved at the same time as the build.

Technology risk is business risk, and the business should own it. When ownership is unclear, risks get accepted by default because nobody made a decision, so he puts technology risk on the enterprise risk register with named business owners. A new initiative starts with the named business executive, the number and the date, and he decides up front how progress will be measured and at what point in the spending to ask whether the project should be stopped and shelved. He also argues that a CIO still needs real technical depth, or ends up approving decisions they can't evaluate.

When a request is unreasonable, he answers as the Department of Risk: a risk assessment from the GRC team, and the list of what the business has to accept. Spend a day changing the color of a baby puke green button, and you might lose two loads of melted Hershey Kisses and have to make an insurance claim. His priorities come from a meeting every two weeks, with five high-priority projects that have delivery dates and five medium ones with target dates, and his one-line advice for technologists is to learn to hate the right things.