D2DO263: An Anthropologist’s Advice for Improving IT Cultures

tldr: aka, security is a relationship, and can feel like a home intruder if not invited in

Day Two DevOps

Ned Bellavance and I on Day Two DevOps host brilliant and effusive engineers who share their lessons learned from large, impactful projects. Come soak up all the hard lessons they learned through building big stuff (and sometimes destroying big stuff), all for the low low cost of totally free.

Summary

It’s tempting to run IT organizations the same way we run infrastructure: as resource units to be applied to various jobs. But people aren’t infrastructure. They have opinions. They form teams. They operate on different incentives, which sometimes clash within an organization (i.e. sales vs. product managers, or infosec vs. everybody).

Today’s guest, Lianne Potter, is a cyber anthropologist. She applies her knowledge of software development, security, and human culture to help organizations better understand team dynamics, foster collaboration, and reduce intramural friction. We talk about navigating conflicts among different IT teams, why communication is essential for effective security, the differences between leadership and management, responsibility vs. blame, and more.

Episode Guest: Lianne Potter, Cyber Anthropologist and Head of Security Operations, Compromising Positions Podcast

Lianne Potter is head of SecOps for the largest greenfield technology transformation project in Europe. She is building a leading edge security team from scratch to meet the needs of a modern retail organization while empowering her team to think innovatively to create new standards in best practices. Lianne has delivered talks across the globe to share her vision for a new type of security function. Drawing upon her expertise as a cyber-anthropologist, her practical experience as a security-focused software developer and as a security practitioner, Lianne combines the human and the technical aspects of security to evangelize a cultural security transformation.

Episode Links:

Compromising Positions Podcast

Listen Now!

Head over to Packet Pushers to listen to the podcast. It’s available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast.FM, and pca.ST (basically anywhere that will take our podcasts).

Thanks all! Good luck out there.
kyler