Quote for the day:
"Don't let yesterday take up too much of today." -- Will Rogers
AI and Analytics in 2025 — 6 Trends Driving the Future
As AI becomes deeply embedded in enterprise operations and agentic capabilities
are unlocked, concerns around data privacy, security and governance will take
center stage. With emerging technologies evolving at speed, a mindset of
continuous adaptation will be required to ensure requisite data privacy, combat
cyber risks and successfully achieve digital resilience. As organizations expand
their global footprint, understanding the implications of evolving AI
regulations across regions will be crucial. While unifying data is essential for
maximizing value, ensuring compliance with diverse regulatory frameworks is
mandatory. A nuanced approach to regional regulations will be key for
organizations navigating this dynamic landscape. ... As the technology
landscape evolves, continuous learning becomes essential. Professionals must
stay updated on the latest technologies while letting go of outdated practices.
Tech talent responsible for building AI systems must be upskilled in evolving AI
technologies. At the same time, employees across the organization need training
to collaborate effectively with AI, ensuring seamless integration and success.
Whether through internal upskilling or embarking on skills-focused partnerships,
investment in talent management will prove crucial to winning the tech-talent
gold rush and thriving in 2025 and beyond.
Generative AI is not replacing jobs or hurting wages at all, say economists
The researchers looked at the extent to which company investment in AI has
contributed to worker adoption of AI tools, and also how chatbot adoption
affected workplace processes. While firm-led investment in AI boosted the
adoption of AI tools — saving time for 64 to 90 percent of users across the
studied occupations — chatbots had a mixed impact on work quality and
satisfaction. The economists found for example that "AI chatbots have created
new job tasks for 8.4 percent of workers, including some who do not use the
tools themselves." In other words, AI is creating new work that cancels out some
potential time savings from using AI in the first place. "One very stark example
that it's close to home for me is there are a lot of teachers who now say they
spend time trying to detect whether their students are using ChatGPT to cheat on
their homework," explained Humlum. He also observed that a lot of workers now
say they're spending time reviewing the quality of AI output or writing prompts.
Humlum argues that can be spun negatively, as a subtraction from potential
productivity gains, or more positively, in the sense that automation tools
historically have tended to generate more demand for workers in other tasks.
"These new job tasks create new demand for workers, which may boost their wages,
if these are more high value added tasks," he said.
Advancing Digital Systems for Inclusive Public Services
Uganda adopted the modular open-source identity platform, MOSIP, two years ago.
A small team of 12, with limited technical expertise, began adapting the MOSIP
platform to align with Uganda's Registration of Persons Act, gradually building
internal capacity. By the time the system integrator was brought in, Uganda
incorporated digital public good, DPG, into its legal framework, providing the
integrator with a foundation to build upon. This early customization helped
shape the legal and technical framework needed to scale the platform. But
improvements are needed, particularly in the documentation of the DPG.
"Standardization, information security and inclusion were central to our work
with MOSIP," Kisembo said. "Consent became a critical focus and is now embedded
across the platform, raising awareness about privacy and data protection." ...
Nigeria, with a population of approximately 250 million, is taking steps to
coordinate its previously fragmented digital systems through a national DPI
framework. The country deployed multiple digital solutions over the last 10 to
15 years, which were often developed in silos by different ministries and
private sector agencies. In 2023 and 2024, Nigeria developed a strategic
framework to unify these systems and guide its DPI adoption.
Eyes, ears, and now arms: IoT is alive
In just a few years, devices at home and work started including cameras to see
and microphones to hear. Now, with new lines of vacuums and emerging humanoid
robots, devices have appendages to manipulate the world around them. They’re not
only able to collect information about their environment but can touch, “feel”,
and move it. ... But, knowing the history of smart devices getting hacked,
there’s cause for concern. From compromised baby monitors to open video doorbell
feeds, bad actors have exploited default passwords and unencrypted
communications for years. And now, beyond seeing and hearing, we’re on the verge
of letting devices roam around our homes and offices with literal arms. What’s
stopping a hacked robot vacuum from tampering with security systems? Or your
humanoid helper from opening the front door? ... If developers want robots to
become a reality, they need to create confidence in these systems immediately.
This means following best practice cybersecurity by enabling peer-to-peer
connectivity, outlawing generic credentials, and supporting software throughout
the device lifecycle. Likewise, users can more safely participate in the robot
revolution by segmenting their home networks, implementing multi-factor
authentication, and regularly reviewing device permissions.
How to Launch a Freelance Software Development Career
Finding freelance work can be challenging in many fields, but it tends to be
especially difficult for software developers. One reason is that many software
development projects do not lend themselves well to a freelancing model because
they require a lot of ongoing communication and maintenance. This means that, to
freelance successfully as a developer, you'll need to seek out gigs that are
sufficiently well-defined and finite in scope that you can complete within a
predictable period of time. ... Specifically, you need to envision yourself also
as a project manager, a finance director, and an accountant. When you can do
these things, it becomes easier not just to freelance profitably, but also to
convince prospective clients that you know what you're doing and that they can
trust you to complete projects with quality and on time. ... While creating a
portfolio may seem obvious enough, one pitfall that new freelancers sometimes
run into is being unable to share work due to nondisclosure agreements they sign
with clients. When negotiating contracts, avoid this risk by ensuring that
you'll retain the right to share any key aspects of a project for the purpose of
promoting your own services. Even if clients won't agree to letting you share
source code, they'll often at least allow you to show off the end product and
discuss at a high level how you approached and completed a project.
Digital twins critical for digital transformation to fly in aerospace
Among the key conclusions were that there was a critical need to examine the
standards that currently support the development of digital twins, identify gaps
in the governance landscape, and establish expectations for the future. ... The
net result will be that stakeholder needs and objectives become more achievable,
resulting in affordable solutions that shorten test, demonstration,
certification and verification, thereby decreasing lifecycle cost while
increasing product performance and availability. Yet the DTC cautioned that
cyber security considerations within a digital twin and across its external
interfaces must be customisable to suit the environment and risk tolerance of
digital twin owners. ... First, the DTC said that evidence suggests a necessity
to examine the standards that currently support digital twins, identify gaps in
the governance landscape, and set expectations for future standard development.
In addition, the research team identified that standardisation challenges exist
when developing, integrating and maintaining digital twins during design,
production and sustainment. There was also a critical need to identify and
manage requirements that support interoperability between digital twins
throughout the lifecycle. This recommendation also applied to the more complex
SoS Digital Twins development initiatives. Digital twin model calibration needs
to be an automated process and should be applicable to dynamically varying model
parameters.
Quality begins with planning: Building software with the right mindset
Too often, quality is seen as the responsibility of QA engineers. Developers
write the code, QA tests it, and ops teams deploy it. But in high-performing
teams, that model no longer works. Quality isn’t one team’s job; it’s everyone’s
job. Architects defining system components, developers writing code, product
managers defining features, and release managers planning deployments all
contribute to delivering a reliable product. When quality is owned by the entire
team, testing becomes a collaborative effort. Developers write testable code and
contribute to test plans. Product managers clarify edge cases during
requirements gathering. Ops engineers prepare for rollback scenarios. This
collective approach ensures that no aspect of quality is left to chance. ... One
of the biggest causes of software failure isn’t building the wrong way, it’s
building the wrong thing. You can write perfectly clean, well-tested code that
works exactly as intended and still fail your users if the feature doesn’t solve
the right problem. That’s why testing must start with validating the
requirements themselves. Do they align with business goals? Are they technically
feasible? Have we considered the downstream impact on other systems or
components? Have we defined what success looks like?
What Makes You a Unicorn in Your Industry? Start by Mastering These 4 Pillars
First, you have to have the capacity, the skill, to excel in that area.
Additionally, you have to learn how to leverage that standout aspect to make it
work for you in the marketplace - incorporating it into your branding,
spotlighting it in your messaging, maybe even including it in your name. Concise
as the notion is, there's actually a lot of breadth and flexibility in it, for
when it comes to selecting what you want to do better than anyone else is doing
it, your choices are boundless. ... Consumers have gotten quite savvy at
sniffing out false sincerity, so when they come across the real thing, they're
much more prone to give you their business. Basically, when your client base
believes you prioritize your vision, your team and creating an incredible
product or service over financial gain, they want to work with you. ... Building
and maintaining a remarkable "company culture" can just be a buzzword to you, or
you can bring it to life. I can't think of any single factor that makes my
company more valuable to my clients than the value I place on my people and the
experience I endeavor to provide them by working for me. When my staff feels
openly recognized, wholly supported and vitally important to achieving our
shared outcomes, we're truly unstoppable. So keep in mind that your unicorn
focus can be internal, not necessarily client-facing.
Conquering the costs and complexity of cloud, Kubernetes, and AI
While IT leaders clearly see the value in platform teams—nine in 10
organizations have a defined platform engineering team—there’s a clear
disconnect between recognizing their importance and enabling their success. This
gap signals major stumbling blocks ahead that risk derailing platform team
initiatives if not addressed early and strategically. For example, platform
teams find themselves burdened by constant manual monitoring, limited visibility
into expenses, and a lack of standardization across environments. These
challenges are only amplified by the introduction of new and complex AI
projects. ... Platform teams that manually juggle cost monitoring across cloud,
Kubernetes, and AI initiatives find themselves stretched thin and trapped in a
tactical loop of managing complex multi-cluster Kubernetes environments. This
prevents them from driving strategic initiatives that could actually transform
their organizations’ capabilities. These challenges reflect the overall
complexity of modern cloud, Kubernetes, and AI environments. While platform
teams are chartered with providing infrastructure and tools necessary to empower
efficient development, many resort to short-term patchwork solutions without a
cohesive strategy.
Reporting lines: Could separating from IT help CISOs?
CFOs may be primarily concerned with the financial performance of the business,
but they also play a key role in managing organizational risk. This is where
CISOs can learn the tradecraft in translating technical measures into business
risk management. ... “A CFO comes through the finance ranks without a lot
of exposure to IT and I can see how they’re incentivized to hit targets and
forecasts, rather than thinking: if I spend another two million on cyber risk
mitigation, I may save 20 million in three years’ time because an incident was
prevented,” says Schat. Budgeting and forecasting cycles can be a mystery to
CISOs, who may engage with the CFO infrequently, and interactions are mostly
transactional around budget sign-off on cybersecurity initiatives, according to
Gartner. ... It’s not uncommon for CISOs to find security seen as a barrier,
where the benefits aren’t always obvious, and are actually at odds with the
metrics that drive the CIO. “Security might slow down a project, introduce a
layer of complexity that we need from a security perspective, but it doesn’t
obviously help the customer,” says Bennett. Reporting to CFOs can relieve
potential conflicts of interest. It can allow CISOs to broaden their involvement
across all areas of the organization, beyond input in technology, because
security and managing risk is a whole-of-business mission.
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