October 04, 2014

Driving IT Business Alignment: One CIOs Journey
To fix things, Dale and his team partnered with the business. Doing it together rather than separately enabled the IT organization and the business to collaborate and to build a better and more permanent partnership. Dale says, “We have really enjoyed implementing the solution, because the business units are now working very closely with IT”. Dale claims as well the relationship with their business units has gotten to be a very solid, trusting relationship with them, and very collaborative. They have learned to trust IT’s input, and IT has learned a lot from the business units about how they operate and like to operate.”


EA in practice: The Case Container
A central part to any typical Enterprise Application is the Case or Dossier, and the process handling this. The information going in to a Case, the business logic applied to it, and the subsequent business decision(s). It all has to be filed with accuracy. Case handling get complex because information changes over time, business decisions are made, and the business logic and the information going into it are also complex. Just look at financial institutions and insurance systems, as well as government systems. These have a load of legislation and business rules - that change over time – and every business decision must comply to the rules and information that was valid at that point in time. Otherwise that decision does not have integrity.


Examine API integration trends in the enterprise
As customers are looking to API integration tools more and more for mobile enablement, [representational state transfer (REST)/Javascript Object Notation] has become an accepted standard for exposing enterprise applications as APIs. Tools should facilitate the creation of these REST APIs, and on the back end [they should] support service discovery, shaping, cataloging and publishing APIs, and [monitor] the health and performance of these APIs at runtime.


Your Roadmap to Successful Adoption of Agile
Lean software development presents the traditional Lean principles in terms that relate to software development. Often when Lean is discussed, there tends to be a strong focus on eliminating waste and rightly so. However the real focus of Lean is the identification of value to the customer: delivering what they want, when they want it, and with the minimum amount of effort. To be sure, what is considered “valuable” also becomes a driver for what is considered wasteful. As folks think about Agile principles, I suggest that they also consider the Lean software development principles to help them in their Agile journey.


Information Security Controls Relating to Personnel
While the risk of threats are increasing, study says that the threat is more from the inside than from the outside. This has mandated the need for framing polices, procedures and controls around the employees of the organization, so that such risks arising from within can be mitigated or managed well. Whilst personnel security controls cannot provide guarantees, they are sensible precautions that provide for the identity of individuals to be properly established.


An immature security program is an exciting challenge
There are similarities between where my new company is right now with regards to security and where my old company was when I started there. But I don’t expect this new job to be a repeat of the last four years. For one thing, I am starting with all the knowledge and experience that I gained over the past four years. In the course of that time, I have learned a lot about things like cloud computing, mobile devices, advanced malware, data handling and security awareness. And I expect to keep on learning, since new things that I can’t even anticipate are sure to crop up.


Inside the Secret Clash of CIOs and CMOs
There's a fundamental problem in the way CMOs and CIOs look at technology projects. CIOs don't like loose ends. That is, they want to see projects that have a clear beginning and end -- a clear-cut return on investment. CMOs, however, can't afford to wait for this kind of clarity before embarking on projects. ... CMOs call this open-ended approach as being "agile," which is very different from what CIOs hear. For CIOs, "agile" means a software development methodology, according to The CIO-CMO Omnichannel study


When Good Federation Goes Bad
Given a choice of identity providers to leverage when logging in to a service provider, I generally choose the IdP that has the least data about me. In loose order of preference, this translates to Twitter, Microsoft, Google, and finally, Facebook. The first three generally require only my email address and a few other attributes, such as profile information I share publicly. Facebook, however is a whole other matter. I've written before on how Facebook throws a plethora of user identity attributes at a service provider when you use it as identity provider for a federated login.


Identity and Access Management Through the Enterprise Service Bus is a Pipe Dream
The first is the bi-directional nature of the ESB’s interface with the rest of your systems. This simply means the ESB can send and receive data and commands to any system it is connected to. Identity and Access Management processes don’t work the same way, however, as the type of data is “very different.” The changes involved, such as “a change in job or surname, or a promotion or departure of employees,” often can’t be read by the applications in their default modes, requiring significant development work on the part of the application supplier to make the system function. A result is that only very basic messages can be sent, such as the creation of a new identity.


The Problem with “Always On” Deduplication
The bigger problem is the way in which database systems store data. Relational databases use tables to improve performance and manage operations. A relational database such as Oracle has no duplicate data blocks, because each block in a tablespace (the logical container in which tables and indexes are stored) contains a unique key at the start and a checksum containing part of that key at the end. As a result, most shops are going to see little space saving, while paying the price of increased latency as the hardware pointlessly attempts to find matching blocks.



Quote for the day:

"A leader takes people where they would never go on their own." -- Hans Finzel

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