Applying Physics to IT – A Conversation with Val King – On-Demand Video is LIVE!
Eugene Kalayev and Douglas Brown sit down with Val King, CEO of Whitehat Virtual Technologies, TOCICO board member, and a two-time CIO — now available on-demand.
The topic is one Val has been thinking and writing about for a long time. IT operations obey a kind of physics: a small set of repeatable laws around time, flow, constraints, queues, work-in-process, recurrence, drift, entropy, visibility, and authority. These laws quietly govern every environment, whether or not leadership names them.
Val’s argument isn’t that today’s IT metrics are wrong. They’re genuinely useful inside IT. They fail at the threshold — the moment they leave the department and travel upstream to leaders who need outcomes, not activity reports. Monitoring has never been better, yet the lived experience within most organizations remains the same contradiction — everything is green, yet the business still feels slow. The gap isn’t a tooling problem; it’s a measurement-orientation problem. Val’s framing: IT has gotten very good at apologizing faster — the next step in maturity is making the apology less necessary.
The conversation stays at the first-principles layer. No product demos, no scoring methodology, no implementation walkthroughs. Just the physics — where they show up in daily IT work, and what manufacturing, commercial aviation, and healthcare have figured out that IT hasn’t yet.
Watch the recording on-demand now.
About Val King Val King is CEO of Whitehat Virtual Technologies and serves on a handful of boards, including TOCICO (the Theory of Constraints International Certification Organization). He writes and speaks regularly on improving IT through first principles and has held the CIO seat twice — six years at a regional bank and seven at a healthcare system.
Follow Val on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/valking/
Visit Whitehat Virtual here: https://whitehatvirtual.com/
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