October 14, 2015

Data & Analytics is Transforming the Audit

Leveraging the investments your organization has made in technology, we can drill down and explore your data in interactive ways, enabling us to enhance the focus of our efforts and deliver richer, more meaningful insights on the areas we audit. D&A also allows us to capture information that encompasses environmental factors such as unstructured economic and benchmarking data to paint a more complete and timely picture of an organization’s financial condition. D&A provides a more detailed view of historical performance, the causality of events and supports the ability of auditors to concentrate their time and judgment in areas with the greatest audit risk and complexity.


Google's Alphabet Move Was Brilliant

Some pundits claim that greater visibility will stifle Google's innovations, which they term "unprofitable experiments." In reality, all research projects are "losers" until they succeed in the marketplace. These critics don't seem to understand the determination of Larry Page and his cohort of brilliant leaders to transform the world through innovation. Nevertheless, I won't be surprised to see an activist investor like Dan Loeb or Nelson Peltz call for breaking up Alphabet in a few years into cash-generating Google and growth-generating Alphabet. Their inability to understand the integration of these two differentiated strategies for long-term shareholder value creation — the strategy we followed at Medtronic — never ceases to amaze me.


Cooling ICT environments: where to next?

‘Free air’ cooling technologies such as Indirect Evaporative Cooling are achieving PUE values of between 1.15 and 1.28 and the incentive to develop alternatives is inhibited by the reality of diminishing returns. Current good practice is considered to be a PUE of 1.2 using ‘free air cooling’ in temperate climates. Cooling technology is not of course only concerned with controlling temperature: it is also important to control humidity to prevent condensation in the case of high humidity, and electrostatic charge problems in the case of low humidity. An extremely important development that has not been fully appreciated by many ICT practitioners was the outcome of the extensive research by the Technical Committee 9.9 of the American Society of Heating, Refrigeration and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRE).


Cloud-Based Analytics Requires Hybrid Data Access and Integration

Given the distributed nature of data sources as well as the diversity of data types, information platforms and integration approaches are changing. While more than three in five companies (61%) still do integration primarily between on-premises systems, significant percentages are now doing integration from the cloud to on-premises (47%) and from on-premises to the cloud (39%). In the future, this trend will become more pronounced. According to our research, 85 percent of companies eventually will integrate cloud data with on-premises sources, and 84 percent will do the reverse. We expect that hybrid architectures, a mix of on-premises and cloud data infrastructures, will prevail in enterprise information architectures for years to come while slowly evolving to equality of bidirectional data transfer between the two types.


Google takes on Apple News, Facebook Instant Articles with AMP

AMP, Apple News and Facebook Instant Articles all deliver vastly improved experiences for users compared to traditional mobile sites, but AMP is unique because it claims to be an open-source initiative meant to benefit publishers, advertisers and users. Meanwhile, an underlying perception exists that Apple and Facebook's partner-centric approaches will result in the formation of winners and losers based on those platforms' business interests.  "If we have a standardized way about doing this, then all of a sudden all of these folks benefit. Twitter can win with Moments, while Google wins with AMP," says Facemire. "It's not mutually exclusive." AMP aims to improve content delivery across all mobile browsers and apps; the goal is not to serve as a defined container for articles within a specific ecosystem.


Does Cisco have to respond to Dell/EMC?

“Dell's control of VMware will have significant repercussions for other networking vendors,” says IDC analyst Brad Casemore. “Dell switches will become the preferred underlay for VMware's NSX network-virtualization overlay. Many vendors were counting on getting shares of that underlay business, and now those gains are in serious doubt.” ... Cisco also has its sights set on becoming the No. 1 IT vendor in the industry. Cisco could respond to this deal by acquiring a major storage player of its own, like partner NetApp; or one or more smaller start-ups addressing the hyperconvergence trend in IT. “As Cisco continues down their publically stated path to be the #1 IT company, we anticipate storage becoming a bigger piece of their strategy,” says Gartner analyst Andrew Lerner.


The Perch App Transforms old Gadgets into a Home-Security System

"As the years go on and hardware capabilities become similar, software is going to be the key differentiator," says Cohen. Recruiting people’s current gadgets isn’t so much to promote a homebrew spirit as to free Perch to focus on its software, which promises lag-free video feeds, realtime video chat, and image analysis that can tell what is happening in the home beyond simple motion detection. ... Perch is promising near-instantaneous video by incorporating a technology called Web Real-Time Communications, or WebRTC, an open standard for fast, peer-to-peer audio and video streams directly between clients, be they web browsers (without the need for plugins) or mobile apps. Encryption is also built into WebRTC.


The next steps for digital government - a question of accountability

“The whole culture and structure and governance of the civil service is not conducive to [working together]. All vertical organisations have that endemic problem - they’re not set up to do that. "I had a long career in Lloyds Bank, and the credit card division would never say: ‘We'll build that for personal lending as well.’ You’ve got to get those departments to collaborate, and that isn't an easy job. That's why you do need something in the centre. The answer is not technology, it's around getting people to collaborate and work together.” Beaven believes his work with departments on digital transactions shows how it can be done.


Veteran CIO values personal connections

We all have a ton of things going on, and this notion of spending time to connect with others seems to fall to the bottom of the list. But there's no substitution for spending time on this. [In the past] I blocked out time on my calendar called catch-up time, meaning catch up with others. I'd walk around or dial up people. Now I do less calendaring, because social networking allows us to have more frequent reminders to pick up that phone or drop them a line. And being in the top position makes me think about how I can facilitate others wanting to do the same thing. But in professional settings, relationships that matter are built on a foundation of trust, and trust is built on seeing each other in action. So finding ways to work together and finding ways to come together for problem-solving I have found are very effective ways to develop those bonds of trust.


Cloud vs Legacy IT. Solutions to Common Integration Challenges

The ODCA believes that integration of cloud deployments with enterprise landscapes should consider people, process, technology, and operating models. Doing so encourages faster cloud adoption, leverages existing enterprise investments in IT landscape and helps govern safe cloud adoption through effective risk and compliance management. Cloud integration must start with governance and control and then consider business process, applications, data, infrastructure, and organizational management controls. Integration should be addressed through the perspective of organizational roles involved in planning, delivering, and supporting IT services.



Quote for the day:

"Strength comes from overcoming adversity, not avoiding it." -- Gordon Tredgold

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