January 25, 2015

The Internet of Robotic Things: Secure, harmless helpers or vulnerable, vicious foes?
“As IoT matures, we see the industry adding more robotic and AI functions to traditional industrial and consumer robots,” says Cooper. Beyond simply automation, these functions include predictive analysis, learning capabilities [such as machine learning], autonomous decision making, and complex programmable responses, explains Cooper. “The autonomous nature of these systems and their often critical function in the larger system make them of particular concern when it comes to security,” says Cooper.


How Xerox Jumpstarts Transformation through "Dreaming Sessions"
The process starts several weeks before the client shows up at the lab. We normally work with decision makers from multiple disciplines within the company. Well in advance, we need to understand their businesses, their workflows, what kinds of problems are they struggling with today. And then in the dreaming session itself, the client talks about their business, where they'd like to go, what they've envisioned. And then researchers will share some technologies we are working on in the labs. Maybe we share things we can do with data analytics or how to truly personalize a service. And then we show them possibilities for the future based on trends that we have expertise in.


Scrum explained
Although hard to execute, Scrum has some advantages that make its usage really worth. It embraces change: this is something which is one of the biggest problems in waterfall processes. Whenever anything needs to be changed, a long analysis had to be made, documents modified, for at last, modifying the product itself. Moreover, change is not welcomed in these processes - it is always something to be avoided. Scrum on the the other hand, embraces change, it welcomes it. Scrum recognizes that in software development change in natural, it means that the product is being used.


As Big Data and AI Take Hold, What Will It Take to Be an Effective Executive?
And most important, senior managers must learn to let go, something which is quite difficult because it runs counter to decades of organizational practices. Given our rapidly rising oceans of data, the command-and-control approach to management–where information flows up the organization and decisions are made at high levels–would sink the senior executive teams. As data science and AI permeate the organization, it’s important to delegate more autonomy to the business units that hopefully have the proper skills, the advanced tools and the necessary information to make better decisions on their own.


Five Critical Priorities HR Can’t Afford to Ignore in 2015
How employees get their work done has changed remarkably quickly; unsurprisingly HR needs to change, too Anyone who works in a global company doesn’t need to be told that their job has changed enormously in the past few years. Even if their job title – and sometimes their job description – remains unscathed, the number of people they work with, the amount of information they use to make decisions, their day-to-day tasks, and the technology they use have all changed quicker than at any time in their careers.


Sony's Two Big Mistakes: No Encryption, and No Backup
Vox's Timothy B. Lee points out in his step-by-step account of the Sony data breach that the company's networks were "down for days" following the November 24, 2014, attack.  Any business-continuity plan worth its salt prepares the company to resume network operations within hours or even minutes after a disaster, not days. A key component of your disaster-recovery plan is your recovery time objective. While operating dual data centers is an expensive option, it's also the safest. More practical for most businesses are cloud-based services such as the Morpheus database-as-a-service (DBaaS).


The 3 Little Architects – A Data Parody for today’s Financial Industry
The last architect is as technically competent as his peers however understood the value of building something once to use across the business. His approach was a little different than the first two. Understanding the risks and costs of hand coding or using one off tools to do the work, he decided to adopt an integrated platform designed to handle the complexities, sources, and volumes of data required by the business. The platform also incorporated shared metadata, reusable data transformation rules and mappings, a single source of required master and reference data, and provided agile development capabilities to reduce the cost of implementation and ongoing change management.


Why IT Should be Skeptical of 'Facebook at Work'
Facebook at Work will put the company in the crosshairs of established businesses including Microsoft, IBM, Jive, Zimbra and Slack. "Facebook has been a consumer social media innovator as well as a shrewd assembler of adjacent social media products," Keitt says. "So it stands to reason that as Facebook gets more comfortable in the enterprise space, it may seek to pull in more of these interesting consumer applications into an enterprise offering," similar to how Google rolled its family of apps into Google for Work.


.NET Becomes Open Source and Cross-Platform
This morning, the announcements made at Microsoft’s Connect() event in New York have been rippling through the web and the effects of these announcements are likely going to be felt for years to come. ... For decades, opponents of Microsoft have criticized the company for being too closed off and secretive and as of this morning, they may need to consider researching new arguments. The folks at Redmond absolutely stunned the world this morning with the announcement that the entire .NET ecosystem would be made open source and developed in the open.


Africa: The rise of BYOD & corporate data threats
“The scope of the problem only intensifies as business models continue to evolve with increased mobility, a growing mix of users, and geographically diverse business offices.” “The risk posed by the high percentage of employees with laptops, mobile phones, PDAs, multiple email accounts, and access to applications and databases makes addressing the insider threat a substantial challenge. Reducing the vulnerabilities posed by internal users needs to be a key priority in Kenyan organisations’ security strategies,” the report said. The report continues to suggest that the insider attacks which are deliberate are fuelled by disgruntlement, revenge, competitive advantage and blackmail. Most of the users already have access to the systems and so detection becomes difficult.



Quote for the day:

"When all think alike, then no one is thinking." -- Walter Lippman

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