November 17, 2014

13 Things to Do When a Hacker Steals Company Data
If the worst happens--e.g., a hacker steals your customer records or breaks into a server--it's easy to go into a tailspin and try solve every problem all at once. Apart from the headaches this can cause, it's also not the best approach to a data breach. Orlando Scott-Cowley, the director of technology marketing at Mimecast, a company that makes a secure cloud-based e-mail service, told me about an action plan he advises.


HP Analytics blazes new trails in examining business trends from myriad data
There are 20 million SMBs in US, and we are able to build a model to predict which of these prospects are similar to the clusters we had. That’s where we were able to find customers that looked like our most profitable customers, which we ended up callingVanguards. That resulted into a tremendous amount of a dollar increment for HP. It's a good example of what you talked when you find unexpected things. We just wanted to analyze data. It led us to a journey and ended up finding a customer group we weren't even aware of. Then, we could build marketing strategy to actually go target those and get some value out of it.


James Lewis on Microservices
Johannes Thönes talks to James Lewis, principal consultant at ThoughtWorks, about microservices. They discuss microservices’ recent popularity, architectural styles, deployment, size, technical decisions, and consumer-driven contracts. They also compare microservices to service-oriented architecture and wrap up the episode by talking about key figures in the microservice community and standing on the shoulders of giants.


ArchiMate 2.1® Poster Pack - Print Version
The ArchiMate meta-model and notation is fast becoming the de facto standard for depicting Enterprise Architecture. The ArchiMate® 2.1 Poster pack provides a quick-glance reference to both ArchiMate Concepts and ArchiMate Viewpoints.


A Primer on Measuring Employee Engagement
There are many factors that contribute to employee engagement — ranging from corporate culture to management style to competing priorities outside of work — and the pertinent factors are different for each employee. This complexity is what makes it so challenging to measure and understand engagement in an actionable way. While still in its infancy, people analytics is beginning to give organizations the data and tools to understand what drives engagement, perhaps even better than employees understand themselves.


Fitbit Data Now Being Used In The Courtroom
The lawyers aren’t using Fitbit’s data directly, but pumping it through analytics platform Vivametrica, which uses public research to compare a person’s activity data with that of the general population. Muller says the case is “unique,” and does appear to be the first known case where data from a wearable is used in court. (If other earlier cases come to light I will update this post.) “Till now we’ve always had to rely on clinical interpretation,” Muller says from his office in Calgary. “Now we’re looking at longer periods of time though the course of a day, and we have hard data.” His plaintiff will share her Fitbit data with Vivametrica for several months as part of an assessment period.


Are Asean CFOs starting to embrace the Cloud? Oracle asks
Despite the apparent advantages of Cloud computing, not all organisations are convinced that this is the best way forward as many CFOs still have their reservations about the quality of software vendors, and the possible creation of processing silos. Especially, the migration of ERP applications onto the Cloud is facilitating one of the biggest shifts in financial systems. The challenge of integrating systems and technologies remains a key barrier to adoption at many organisations; as well as the question of whether there are sufficient internal skills to make the shift.


Laser-Radio Links Upgrade the Internet
Technology that uses parallel radio and laser links to move data through the air at high speeds, in wireless hops of up to 10 kilometers at a time, is in trials with three of the largest U.S. Internet carriers. It is also being rolled out by one telecommunications provider in Mexico, and is helping build out the Internet infrastructure of Nigeria, a country that was connected to a new high-capacity submarine cable from Europe last year. AOptix, the company behind the technology, pitches it as a cheaper and more practical alternative to laying new fiber optic cables. Efforts to dig trenches to install fiber in urban areas face significant bureaucratic and physical challenges.


Data science: 'Machines do analytics. Humans do analysis'
Humans have to find the patterns, ask the right questions and make the connections in the data. "Machines do analytics," explained Sullivan. "Humans do analysis." Computers are good at detail and examining the past, but real data science requires imagination and cognitive ability. "I can take 10 tools, U.S. Census data and agriculture data and determine that people who were strangled by their bed sheets tracks cheese consumption," Sullivan said. "A human knows that makes no sense. You can't commoditize reasoning by a human." Another way to put it is that machines are used as "data janitors" to clean data and crunch numbers, but it's a small part of the overall process.


As open source goes mainstream, institutions collaborate differently
"There's a clear progression that nearly every government agency goes through, fromconsuming open source, to publishing open source (as a one-way broadcast), to collaboratingon open source," said Balter. "A similar progression is also seen from open source, to open data, and open government policy. Policymakers see the geek's tooling, realize the value of collaboration, and want to bring it into their own workflow. If your doctor takes a multivitamin every day, wouldn't you? To me, the idea of working more openly, regardless of format or form, within an organization, or with the public is the idea that we're seeing catch on. It's starting with open source, but that's just the start."



Quote for the day:

"Sometimes when you innovate,you make mistakes. It is best to admit them quickly,and get on with improving your other innovations." -- Steve Jobs

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