News & Updates

Small Talk from the VP: Simplicity = Clarity (and other lessons learned from Apple)

By Dave Smallen

June 24, 2015

Last week I attended the annual meeting of the Consortium of Liberal Arts Colleges (CLAC), held at Lafayette College. There are seventy national liberal arts colleges in CLAC and the focus of our discussions was information technology in higher education. The opening keynote speaker was James Higa, who worked closely for many years with Steve Jobs at Apple and NeXT, and whose son attends Lafayette. He spoke about “Lessons Learned from Apple.” Here are three of my takeaways from his talk and how we might apply them to our information security initiative.

Simplicity of goals provides clarity to an organization. 

The iPod was one of the key technologies that ultimately revolutionized the way we listen to music.  The simple goals that the iPod development team had to achieve were: (1) store 1000 songs and (2) access any song in under 4 seconds.  Every idea for the design or construction of the device had to help achieve one or more of these goals. The test for Hamilton’s information security initiative is that every project we consider must reduce the institutional risk of compromising confidential or sensitive data.

Clarity leads to the ability to make decisions quickly.

Higa pointed out that lack of clarity can lead to exploring a variety of options that “may be” related to the goal.  Each of these explorations potentially becomes a large project by itself, drawing valuable staff and financial resources away from achieving a goal. Keeping our focus on things that we know will reduce institutional risk led to the decision to implement encryption for all Hamilton-provided computers, starting with those in administrative offices. This significantly reduces the risk of data being compromised when a laptop computer is lost or stolen. 

Avoid looking in the rear view mirror

Resting on your laurels when you succeed or dwelling too long on times you failed are counterproductive.  Learn from your mistakes – to avoid making the same mistake again – but don’t let mistakes stop you from taking risks that align with organizational goals.  Focus on the future and the challenges ahead.

We’ve made significant progress thus far in our efforts to implement strong passwords, cyber security insurance, encryption and security awareness, but we have many challenges to face.  Our collaborative work with other schools in the New York Six Consortium and our contract with GreyCastle Security will help us move forward.

Higa’s talk was inspiring. Apple’s creation of products and services such as the iPod, iPhone and iTunes were certainly illustrations of Steve Jobs’ mantra to think different. We have to find a way to do the same if we are to be successful protecting the information we collect from members of our community.