Daily Tech Digest - June 07, 2017

Kanban: Real Scaled Agility For Your Enterprise

Generally speaking, the aim of Agile scaling methods is to apply larger Agile wrappers around clusters of Agile teams in order to re-establish some kind of hierarchical structure needed to manage the interdependencies described above. Whether its a Release Train or a Nexus, or whatever else, the idea is that there is an “Agile Team of Teams” managing the interdependencies of multiple, smaller teams. As long as the total number of people doesn’t grow beyond the Dunbar number (~150), the Dunbar-sized group is dedicated and cross-functional, there is a team managing the interdependencies within the Dunbar, there are no dependencies outside of the Dunbar and there is some cadence (1-3 months) of integrated delivery—it’s still “Agile”. All of this scaling out as far as a Dunbar (and only that far) allows the enterprise to still “be Agile”—Scaled Agile.


IoT security regulation coming, warns Bruce Schneier

The real problem, however, said Schneier is that nothing incents a government to do something “stupid” like fear, which is why the information security industry has to get involved. “The choice is not between regulation and no regulation. The choice is between smart regulation and stupid regulation, and if we don’t want regulation to be imposed on us from the outside with little thought and little time, we need to start thinking about this and getting ahead of this because it is coming,” he said. “It will take just one disaster before your government, my government or both will do something, and they will do the thing they can grab the quickest, so we have to ensure that it is something that is also smart.” In the past, Schneier said security has largely been left up to the market, which although “not great” has worked “mostly OK” but these imperfect solutions have been OK because the effects of failure have been fairly limited.


3 steps to better IT career management

Historically, career advice began by counseling wannabe world-beaters that vertical market choice mattered greatly. Baby boomers need only recall Benjamin Braddock’s graduation party, where a friend of the family urged upon him this unsolicited career advice: “One word … plastics.” (Non-boomers may need to be told that we’re talking about Mike Nichols’ 1967 movie, The Graduate.) Plastics may not be the vertical of promise it once was, but there are still advantages in choosing a strong vertical market. The global economy, forecast to grow in the aggregate 3.5%, (World Economic Outlook) does not grow evenly. Some regions and some industries will grow faster than others. Situating oneself in a high-growth vertical market does not guarantee career success but increases the probability of positive opportunities.


7 Ways AI Will Revolutionize Business Travel

Once you pass through airport security, “you’re back on track timewise and decide to get a coffee and something to read,” Thompson continues. “While approaching the book store, you’re notified of special promotions based on your reading history. Then, at checkout you receive a coupon for gardening and classic car magazines, based on a recommendation system that knows these are your hobbies. “Now you’re starting to wonder why your co-worker hasn’t arrived at the gate. She receives a warning that she was in the wrong terminal and gets instructions on the quickest route to the correct gate. Location services have long been used to route planes. Now, they can also be leveraged to better move passengers along and help assure that flights are on time.”


Compliance Risks And The Fast-Growing Company

By implementing continuous accounting, which embeds the period-end tasks within accountants’ day-to-day activities, companies can mitigate their accounting and control risks. Costs are lower, since there is less need to employ additional accountants or other temporary help at closing time, while automated tools free up the accountants to provide value-added insights and services. That’s great news for fast-growing companies confronting the hodgepodge of accounting regulations and reporting standards worldwide. Rather than be the naysayer when operations come calling for capital to grow the business, the CFO is a strategic partner in the market expansion. With visibility into the flow of capital, the CFO can confidently say, “Yes, you can” do this or that as the engine of growth accelerates.


Not investing in cybersecurity has 'inverse ROI'

Clearly, there's an argument about the inverse ROI of not doing cybersecurity. It became very, very clear [that] the attack and the attack patterns were at older machines and institutions that had not patched something that was available for several months. So you can review your entire cybersecurity policy, and it may go to that level. But really this was about keeping your software licensed and current and patching things. For companies that do it right, they didn't have disruption; they didn't have to consider paying a ransom. For companies that don't do it right, they just learn what it costs to not do it right. The real lesson to be learned is that there is very much the potential for the big one. And the question is, how do organizations prepare and understand that with regard to ROI, and then how do we deal with it as a society?


Cybersecurity labor crunch to hit 3.5 million unfilled jobs by 2021

The National Association of Software and Services Companies (NASSCOM) recently estimated that India alone will need 1 million cybersecurity professionals by 2020 to meet the demands of its rapidly growing economy. Demand for security professionals in India will increase in all sectors due to the unprecedented rise in the number of cyber attacks, according to NASSCOM. Despite having the largest information technology talent pool in the world, India is highly unlikely to produce an adequate number of professionals to close the cybersecurity skills gap. "Every IT position is also a cybersecurity position now" according to the Cybersecurity Jobs Report, 2017. "Every IT worker, every technology worker, needs to be involved with protecting and defending apps, data, devices, infrastructure, and people."


Tracking Hacking: The World’s Biggest Data Breaches

Each bubble represents the number of records lost in any given breach, with the most sensitive data clustered toward the right side. Before 2009, the majority of data breaches were the fault of human errors like misplaced hard drives and stolen laptops, or the efforts of “inside men” looking to make a profit by selling data to the highest bidder. Since then, the volume of malicious hacking has exploded relative to other forms of data loss. Increasingly sophisticated hacking has altered the scale of data loss by orders of magnitude. For example, an “inside job” breach at data broker Court Ventures was once one of the world’s largest single losses of records at 200 million. However, it was eclipsed in size shortly thereafter by malicious hacks at Yahoo in 2013 and 2014 that compromised over 1.5 billion records, and now larger hacks are increasingly becoming the norm.


Key Abstractions for IoT-Oriented Software Engineering

Despite the considerable research on the Internet of Things (IoT), the technologies to make the IoT a systematic reality are far from being assessed. Early research focused mostly on communication and interoperability1. More recently, researchers have tried to facilitate the integration of resources and services toward provisioning software-defined distributed services. This is the case, for example, for the Web of Things (WoT) vision2, which aims to employ standard Web technologies to help develop coordinated IoT services. The WoT-possibly integrated with concepts from agent-based computing3,4-will likely represent a keystone technology in the IoT's future. Along such lines, several approaches (for example, in terms of supporting middleware5,6 and programming7) exist to aid IoT system and application development.


Machine learning systems are a 'land rush' of opportunity for CIOs

"There are so many opportunities that people haven't cashed in on yet," Brynjolfsson said. "And the bottleneck now is actually identifying the problems and opportunities that these technologies can be applied to most effectively." Experimentation -- such as Google turning a gaming algorithm loose on its data center to reduce power consumption -- is key. "The main error that a lot of companies are going to make is to extrapolate from the past and keep doing what they were doing with a little bit better accuracy or a little bit better precision," McAfee said. ... One thing is certain, the authors added: Machines aren't good at everything. Tasks that require creative thinking, interpersonal connections, large-scale problem solving or complex planning are still better performed by humans -- at least for now.



Quote for the day:


"When you find your path, you must not be afraid. You need to have sufficient courage to make mistakes." -- Paulo Coelho


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