April 26, 2016

What’s eating your lunch? A tale of strategy and culture

“We can’t do what you’re suggesting,” the head of sales shouted at one of his colleagues. “Product development will never deliver on time and we will be stuck with a financial target that there is no way we can meet! They screwed us over last year and we’ve been racing to close the gap for the last 10 months. Our sales teams are spent and frustrated!” These leaders were part of a company that had grown from a young startup, full of energy and fresh ideas, to a billion-dollar firm with thousands of employees. Today, it bears little resemblance to the firm they had all joined years before, and the leaders were experiencing the frustration of navigating a bureaucracy that they had to own a hand in creating.


Agile is Dead

Who said Agile is dead? The founders of Agile and its practitioners said it, not me. Don't go thinking I made this up. ... In the meantime when you say "Agile Software Development" everyone will know you are referring to just another methodology, one that failed to produce the promised results, one that was widely implemented inadequately, one no better than Waterfall or Spiral overall, one with certain relative strengths and even more weaknesses. 'No more magic dust. Several of the founders of Agile Software Development and many other influential developers have pronounced it dead. Only consultants and managers with a vested interest in the brand-name "Agile" still want it alive.


How a CIO can help the CEO drive business growth

CIOs are highly skilled using technical expertise to "keep the IT engine" working 24/7 while simultaneously using creative skills to facilitate the innovative use of new technologies for growth and customer engagement. CIOs need to embrace this dual role with importance emphasized on strategic business matters. In situations where the CEO and senior executive feel that their CIO is not sufficiently business-centric a new trend of engaging a chief digital officer (CDO) is emerging to accelerate the flow of digital benefits into the "front office" or customer facing areas. This may not be necessary, if CIOs can redefine their role as business leaders responsible for leveraging technology advancements for business growth, They should take an ‘outside-in’ approach to their business than the traditional ‘inside-out’ of approach.


Exclusive Q&A: IBM Security’s Marc van Zadelhoff 100 Days In

Customers are placing controls in place of security, but they’re missing the big picture of a Big Data security platform and a team, a SOC (security operation center) that leverages Big Data analytics — our QRadar platform — and has the ability to hunt for the attacker as opposed to looking at historical data. We’re enabling them to transform their security operations with forward and predictive analytics around attacks, compliance and insiders. I think this year will be the year of the SOC transformation that’s going to be driven by the increase in ransomware, the increase in high-value data theft like health care data. It’s ransomware, it’s the theft of high-value data, it’s the emergence of IoT (Internet of Things) and cloud — all these things mean you have to have a highly-analytical SOC in place, and that’s what we’re helping customers to do.


FBI Says It Will Ignore Court Order If Told To Reveal Its Tor Browser Exploit

There are a bunch of different cases going on right now concerning the FBI secretly running a hidden Tor-based child porn site called Playpen for two weeks, and then hacking the users of the site with malware in order to identify them. The courts, so far, have been fine with the FBI's overall actions of running the site, but there are increasing questions about how it hacked the users. In FBI lingo, they used a "network investigative technique" or a NIT to hack into those computers, but the FBI really doesn't want to talk about the details.  In one case, it was revealed that the warrant used by the FBI never mentions either hacking or malware, suggesting that the FBI actively misled the judge. In another one of the cases, a judge has declared the use of the NIT to be illegal searches, mainly based on jurisdictional questions.


Angular 2 and TypeScript - A High Level Overview

AngularJS is by far the most popular JavaScript framework available today for creating web applications. And now Angular 2 and TypeScript are bringing true object oriented web development to the mainstream, in a syntax that is strikingly close to Java 8. According to Google engineering director Brad Green, 1.3 million developers use AngularJS and 300 thousand are already using the soon to be released Angular 2. ... You can also develop Angular 2 apps in JavaScript (both ECMAScript 5 and 6) and in Dart. In addition, the Angular team integrated yet another Microsoft product - the RxJS library of reactive JavaScript extensions, into the Angular 2 framework. Angular 2 is not an MVC framework, but rather a component-based framework. In Angular 2 an application is a tree of loosely coupled components.


New regulatory environment demands CCOs become ‘compliance technologists’

As companies attempt to take a global approach to compliance, 48% of symposium attendees reported that their organizations take a centralized approach to cross-border regulations, meanwhile some have run into issues scaling the compliance function due to the fragmented nature of local regulations. More than a third of respondents said their firms preferred a regional set-up over a more centralized approach. Beyond the teams themselves, an often overlooked area that CCOs need to consider is how their technology systems will evolve and adapt across the enterprise, particularly as rules are increased or changed in multiple countries and jurisdictions.


SWIFT warns customers of multiple cyber fraud cases

Monday's statement from SWIFT marked the first acknowledgement that the Bangladesh Bank attack was not an isolated incident but one of several recent criminal schemes that aimed to take advantage of the global messaging platform used by some 11,000 financial institutions. "SWIFT is aware of a number of recent cyber incidents in which malicious insiders or external attackers have managed to submit SWIFT messages from financial institutions' back-offices, PCs or workstations connected to their local interface to the SWIFT network," the group warned customers on Monday in a notice seen by Reuters. The warning, which SWIFT issued in a confidential alert sent over its network, did not name any victims or disclose the value of any losses from the previously undisclosed attacks. SWIFT confirmed to Reuters the authenticity of the notice.


How to prepare your business to benefit from AI

Both the customer-centricity and the ability to act on the customer, asks a lot of these organizations. What we're seeing is that a lot of organizations are introducing chief digital officers or VPs of Digital who are responsible for the overarching customer experience or the overarching ability to understand that on the data. ... For artificial intelligence to be truly useful and truly holistic, it needs to be connected across all these different functions, and organizations are going to have to think a lot differently about how they want to deploy technology like this to be able to take advantage of it. Ultimately, most organizations today aren't really structured to take advantage of being truly customer-centric and having the ability to act on that understanding with algorithms or insights or machine learning and so forth.


Juniper's New 100-Gbps Firewall Is 'Absolutely Ridiculous -- In A Good Way'

"A 100 Gbps virtual firewall sounds absolutely ridiculous -- in a good way," said Dominic Grillo, executive vice president of Atrion Communications, a Branchburg, N.J.-based solution provider and longtime Juniper partner. "That's really impressive. You're seeing more people looking towards protecting things east-west [server-to-server] internally, so the more you can enable in that virtual environment, the better. A 100-Gbps [firewall] would be a great new asset for us." The new cSRX is a software-defined networking (SDN) controlled firewall providing advanced layer 4 to layer 7 microservices that Juniper says is the industry's fastest virtual firewall. CSRX includes content security, Juniper's application security suite and unified threat management for providing security as a service in large multi-tenant cloud networks.



Quote for the day:


"Leaders are visionaries with a poorly developed sense of fear and no concept of the odds against them." -- Robert Jarvik


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