August 08, 2016

HR 2.0 is the poster child for the next wave of SaaS innovation

SaaS would take over segments that previously were not SaaSified. As hotbeds of net new SaaS activity consolidate into market winners, widespread innovation within a segment gives way to incremental innovation. The focus of entrepreneurs and investors mostly moves on. Yet, the current wave of HR SaaS innovators entering the market over the past few years is proving that there can be more to the story even after a segment has been SaaSified. As we assess the market, product, competitive and talent dynamics, we see a perfect storm of enabling characteristics pushing beyond incremental innovation into the widespread disruption of the firmly established HR SaaS category.


Enterprise security architecture: Technology overview

When it comes to creating an IT security roadmap, there are several technology areas to consider. In a recent SearchCIO webcast, Johna Till Johnson discussed the nuances of enterprise information security architecture and infrastructure. CIOs and IT security professionals have a lot to think about when it comes to crafting a solid plan. First, there is understanding next-generation security technology: What does it do, and why does the company need it? Then, there is the vendor piece: Who makes it? Finally, where is the technology headed? In this photo story, click through to get Johnson's recommendations for secure Web gateways; next-generation firewalls; data leakage protection; advanced security analytics; user behavior analytics; and threat, compliance and risk network tools. Follow through the end to get additional advice and important conclusions.


What's New in the Open Source Atom and Visual Studio Code Editors

The most notable recent update to Visual Studio Code actually came with last month's 1.3 update, which for the first time featured the implementation of tabs in the editor, requested by more than 9,000 developers on the UserVoice feature-request site. The support of tabs followed another oft-requested feature, an integrated terminal, introduced in the May 1.2 update ... "Atom is a text editor that's modern, approachable, yet hackable to the core -- a tool you can customize to do anything but also use productively without ever touching a config file," the code editor's Web site declares. ... "Unfortunately, our bindings to libgit2 were causing Atom's helper processes to become unstable, leading to hard crashes," Sobo continued. "We apologize to any package authors who may have switched to these new APIs, but we've been forced to back out the async APIs.


How enterprise architects can help ensure success with digital transformations

The enterprise-architecture (EA) department can play a central role in reducing the complexity associated with digital transformations. Most companies have a dedicated EA group embedded within the larger IT organization. This group typically oversees the entire systems architecture, including business processes and IT infrastructure. It helps to establish rules for and processes around technology usage to ensure consistency across business units and functions. As such, this group can help the CEO and others on the senior leadership team redesign their companies’ business and IT architectures so that they can avoid some of the pitfalls cited earlier and compete more effectively in a digital era.


A Different Perspective

Why do so many of us in IT continue to do the mundane? Why do we avoid meetings? Why do we do the same things we were doing five years ago? Because we’re afraid to let go. We believe by being the team that reboots routers and applies patches, we’re proving our value. We feel needed. We’re able to point to tangible metrics like uptime. That way, at our annual review, we can say, “Look! We were up 99.7% of the time! That’s 0.1% higher than last year!” How. Mind. Numbingly. Boring! We’ll never create the next great innovation by doing the mundane. We’ll never show our organizations the real value IT can bring if we bury ourselves in day-to-day operations and hang our hats on a 0.1% improvement. We have to let go!


Distributed Ledger - Strengths That Warrants Its Adoption

The technology is being commercialised by several industry groups and are coming out with the use cases that this technology will be suitable for across different industry vertical. With the surge in funding for the FinTech innovations, the block chain technology may find its retail and institutional adoption in about 3 to 5 years, while some expect that this will take even longer. Some have invested in in-house development, while others have partenered with others in their pursuit to adopt the blockchain as part of their main stream business technology.  Listed here are some of the key strengths that drives the adoption of the technology worldover.


Will Industry Stacks Be the New Blueprint for Banking?

Fintechs, which have grown rapidly in number and in level of investor funding, similarly aim to take control of the customer relationship. They enter specific, attractive banking segments with focused products and services, aiming to disrupt banks through platforms, such as peer-to-peer lending and investment services. Some fintechs address customers’ new or unmet needs through innovative business models, such as the online money transfer service TransferWise. Others upstage the existing services of traditional banks with improved offerings, such as Mint, Intuit’s online personal-money-management service. Fintechs that insert themselves into customer relationships or limit direct access to clients pose a particular challenge to banks, jeopardizing margins if not volumes.


Preparing for the Era of Intelligent Machines

Combining the three layers of content capabilities – 1) Document Management and Workflow; 2) Enterprise Content Management; and 3) Mobile and Cloud – to create new and rich customer experiences that allow you to get ahead of the Digital Transformation curve is the current strategic imperative for the C-suite. And this is no mean feat. But looking a bit ahead, I find myself thinking about another huge coming change. Going back to my point 1 above -- Technologies exist in beta long before large companies put them into practice – maybe if we look around a bit in the broader technology space, maybe we can get a glimpse into the next wave. And in thinking about this, I’m pretty convinced that in the next wave, we’re going to need to add a fourth party to our triad – Machines.


Next-generation data scientist: Harnessing an integrated development environment

Data science teams deriving benefit from an integrated development environment (IDE) to boost their collaborative output makes perfect sense. IDEs provide a comprehensive, extensible, open framework for accessing tools, data and other resources needed to build, test and deploy executable assets into production environments. As data science moves into the inner circle of next-generation developer competencies, data scientists can expect the emergence of an industry-standard IDE that is equivalent to the industry-standard Eclipse framework that IT management professionals have been using for years. IBM Data Science Experience (DSX) is the open IDE for team data science. DSX, which carries forward the functionality of IBM’s Data Scientist Workbench, offers several productivity features.


Moore’s Law: Checking Out or Changing Direction?

The most likely technical direction is to increase CPU density by going into three dimensions. Think of this as a kind of stacking of silicon, but it’s much more complex than simply piling one wafer on top of another, and you have to be able to cool the chip. Nevertheless, this is not a new idea. The memory industry has already turned in this direction to raise NAND Flash capacity, and the CPU guys will learn from their experience. Although it would be technically possible to go below 10 nm miniaturization, it’s likely to prove less expensive and offer a more certain future to go into 3D. In theory this approach will behave like the wafers of the past, allowing the CPU guys to pursue the same engineering direction far into the future. And that means they’ll be able to continue their regular “doubling” of power.



Quote for the day:


"Speak your mind, even if your voice shakes." -- Maggie Kuhn


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