Hybrid: How "Big" Ruins "Tech" - Kent branch

Ron Ballard

"Big", here, is not about system size - there are some very good big systems. Rather, it means financially big, and that includes systems and business practices from Google, Microsoft, Meta, Apple, Amazon, and big consultancies such as EY and Fujitsu.

What these companies do has been described as "Surveillance Capitalism", "Data Colonialism" and, more colourfully, as "Enshittification". The focus has been on the appropriation of our private data, to exploit us for massive financial gain. This a big problem, but it is not the only one.

I want to focus on the everyday exploitation of businesses, government departments and charities, with inefficient, error-prone and extortionately expensive application software and tools.

I'll start, very briefly, with a couple of things that set me on the path I've taken. Then I'll look, again briefly, at some of the great innovations of the last 50 years, and some of the things that have been not so good, and the reasons that have encouraged developments that are bad for all except a handful of centi-billionaires.

The Fujitsu scandal has been a very public example of profit-before-people. The bulk of this talk will focus on personal experience of some much less visible applications that have recently hurt organisations that I respect and admire.

I'll finish with some positive aspirations to help software engineers and managers choose and develop systems that really help their users.

Ron Ballard

Ron studied Computer Science (with some other subjects) at Manchester University, graduating in 1973. He worked on the development of a bibliographic database for the British Library and then spent 15 years working for database vendors, building database products, supporting them, building transactional applications and data warehouses using them, and teaching others to use them.

From 1996 to 2017 he was an independent database consultant working with big databases in large organisations.

Ron has now retired but keeps himself occupied by writing and speaking about databases, and by volunteering with some major charities to assist them with agile development of data warehouses and migration to new systems.

In 2017 Ron published his first book – Relational Databases For Agile Developers.

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