May 05, 2016

8 Challenges Affecting Software Project Management

The software industry is highly complex, requiring workers with both industry-specific skills as well as the requisite software development expertise. ... The software industry is also one of the fastest moving and evolving industries, creating an environment where companies can go under as fast as they started, due to domestic and international competition. Business owners, executives, middle management and all other employees working in this field are continually pressured to keep up, and project management professionals are under even more pressure to ensure the successful execution of projects. It’s not enough to only know about project management. Project managers must also keep pace with this fast-moving industry in order to anticipate possible risk, quality, integration, financial and other factors that may hinder the chances of a successful project.


The quest to find Satoshi Nakamoto continues

Another Satoshi has bitten the dust. On May 2nd Craig Wright, an Australian entrepreneur, published on his blog what he claimed was proof that he is Satoshi Nakamoto, the mysterious creator of bitcoin, a cryptocurrency. Within 90 minutes the post had been debunked on Reddit, an online forum. He then said that he would present “extraordinary proof” that he is indeed Mr Nakamoto by moving some bitcoin from accounts thought to be under control of the currency’s creator. But on May 5th he wrote on his blog that he did not have the strength to continue trying to prove his identity, prompting most to add his name to the long list of false leads in the hunt for Mr Nakamoto.


How to use advanced analytics to mitigate EHR data risks

"One of the analytics that we recommend is an analytic on all your expectations once you do go-live," Hoover says. "you want to look at what was happening three months before and in the same months a year before. You're dealing with materiality issues. It's the sum of the small parts that all of a sudden equal huge dollars." For instance, Hoover notes that when physicians make their rounds, there's a certain charge that should be associated with those rounds. Hundreds of physicians may be going through that process on a daily basis. If the physicians don't record those charges properly, or the system wasn't designed properly, that can add up to millions of dollars of revenue leakage in a few months.


India emerging as fastest-growing market for fintech software products

"While core banking, insurance, risk management, and point of sales solutions were first-generation products, the industry has undergone rapid evolution in terms of product offerings, with added focus on customer experience, driven by the advent of mobile and analytics technology," he said. In spite of these innovations, banks were facing challenges including complying with certain regulations such as the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA) and Anti-Money Laundering (AML), as well as the lack of automation and integration across systems -- hence these institutions have to resort to technology to deal with the complexities in compliances and procedures, the report said. Regulatory information required is obsolete and lack of automation and integration across systems causes another challenge for banks.


Fintech: The New World Order

Fintech is not new, but it has been given a facelift. Most would say that financial technology (or FinTech) has been around for a long time, and they’re correct. It isn’t new per se, but it is evolving faster now than ever, and changing how business is done. What makes Fintech so disruptive that it’s affecting all the institutional pillars in one strike. The pillars (Banking, Capital Markets, Private Equity, Insurance, Legal, Regulatory), all of which are long standing institutional pillars in our business society that had been static – and stagnant- for too long. Like many new sectors, in order to make sense of it and what it’s doing, you need to break it down into all the component parts to see how each affects what we’re doing or working on. Fintech is a financial revolution, or as many call it, an EVOLUTION.


Siri Creators To Unveil AI Personal Assistant Viv

When Viv, a new form of artificial intelligence, launches on May 9, the term "BattleBots" will take on an entirely new meaning. Viv comes from the people who created Siri, but Viv is far more powerful and better able to hold a conversation, they claim. Viv, along with Siri, Amazon's Alexa, Microsoft's Cortana, Google Now, and others, will be vying to fulfill your spoken commands. Viv is a start-up that's ready to come out of stealth mode, according to The Washington Post. Viv was developed by Dag Kittlaus and Adam Cheyer, who also developed Siri. Apple bought Siri in 2010, but Kittlaus and Cheyer were disappointed with how Siri was implemented on the iPhone and decided to strike out on their own.


Cloud consequences: JP Morgan calls time on IT-as-usual

Another obvious implication for enterprise IT groups is that demand for infrastructure-oriented skills is going to shrink, with a concomitant increase for application-oriented skills. It’s not going to be a great time to have a skill set focused on data center storage or compute. Employees will face the necessity of needing to retool their job focus toward applications. Employers will struggle with how to obtain enough talent. This will be exacerbated by the pressure on IT from peer business units and senior executives to deliver digital applications more quickly. And both sides will soon come to recognize that building cloud-native applications requires skills quite distinct from traditional three-tier applications.


How a tiny fishing village became the gadget factory of the world

Shenzhen is best-known for being home to giant manufacturers like Foxconn, but it also houses hundreds of smaller factories that create everything from individual gadget components to finished devices. While the city has been anonymously churning out electronics for decades, now it's changing again, becoming notable as both a hub for hardware startups and some of the largest Chinese tech companies that yearn to be bigger players on the world stage. As such, more than any other Chinese city, it embodies many of the issues that surface when discussing the country's increasing role in the technology industry, both as a gigantic market viewed hungrily by western tech companies, but also as an increasingly confident creator of its own hardware and software.


Locating Common Micro Service Performance Anti-Patterns

Most teams don’t implement their own frameworks, but rely on existing popular frameworks, such as MVC and REST. This is a good thing as we should not reinvent the wheel every time we build a new app. But a common syndrome occurs when a new project starts with a small prototype based on a sample downloaded from public code repositories like GitHub; the prototype evolves and morphs into a full application, and the team neglects to invest the requisite retrospection to evaluate whether the chosen frameworks were the best for the job and were properly tuned. My tip is spend time to understand the internals of your selected frameworks and how to best configure and optimize them for throughput and performance. If you don’t then be prepared to end up with the situation explained above; I see it every day!


To Go From IT to IoT Build on Your Skills

“There will certainly be some new job titles and new roles, but we will probably also see a lot of expansion of existing roles and responsibilities,” said Tim Herbert, senior VP for research and market intelligence at the Computing Technology Industry Association (CompTIA), an IT industry group. For example, if an oil company decides to deploy sensors on a pipeline, the network administrator may find herself learning how to connect new endpoints that have a bare-bones embedded OS, only battery power, and no human user. That’s likely to call for new skills. ... A good place to start is to get onto an internal project team or “center of excellence” where a core group of employees shape the organization’s use of IoT, Geschickter said. These teams will be looking for well-rounded technical people, so it may be time to study up a little.



Quote for the day:


"You can't have satisfied customers if you have dissatisfied employees." -- Shawn Murphy


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