May 02, 2015

The Swiss Army Knife for Technical Leads
Working as Technical Lead is very exciting; every day you have new challenges, new problems to solve and a great deal of satisfaction. However, sometimes you need some tips in order to improve and empower your teams. There are several techniques to ensure the quality of the products we are working on, but the most important, and powerful at the same time, is, without any doubt, the feedback loops. As you know, working on a new software is more empiric than scientific, which is why we need metrics and small, but incremental, improvements if we want to meet the needs of our users or clients. Feedback loops are a very basic, but powerful methodology designed to help us and our teams to succeed in their daily tasks. With feedback loops, you are sure you'll get the feedback and metrics that will allow you to improve your projects.


Big Data and Advanced Technology Fuel Gamification in the Workplace
Employees find motivation in doing their job when there are checkpoints of measurement in place. Gaming techniques have been incorporated into applications to activate this factor. For example, global cloud-computing company Salesforce.com created the game Badgeville for its CRM product’s employee training and development. In the app, users participate in missions designed around crucial sales processes and behaviors, earning points and badges along the way. The gaming principles integrated in this platform are both a form of engagement for Salesforce employees to adjust habits and an analytics tool that gauges insights of usage by employee.


Federated Security Domains with SAS® and SAML
This paper will introduce the reader to federated identity and give a technical overview of what is perhaps the most important standard in this space, the Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) 2.0 standard. Designed as layers of standards on top of each other, at the outer-most layer are SAML profiles that implement the use cases we are interested in, single sign-on, federated identity, and others. We will discuss the layers that make up the SAML 2.0 standard and look at how SAML distinguishes between the roles of the identity provider and service provider. ... SAML 2.0 is a very flexible standard that supports multiple communication mechanisms known as bindings, and ways of including information about users in the assertions. This unfortunately means that some troubleshooting will probably be required to get things working.


The 10 weirdest job titles in tech
While the IT industry has always been innovative, forward-thinking and, to make a sweeping generalization, populated by folks who are just a little bit odd, the last few years have seen that quirkiness reflected in IT job descriptions. From "Digital Prophet" to "Evangelists," the sky's the limit when it comes to describing roles at IT firms. And while there's some argument about the benefits and drawbacks of off-the-wall titles, there's no question that the trend is here to stay. Here, CIO.com has put together the ten weirdest IT job titles.


‘We Use Machine Learning Algorithms to Save Millions of Dollars’
Understanding the linear or nonlinear relationships between different KPIs to get the best possible insights is the second most important job. Understanding the customers, suppliers based on data and then classification or clustering them is another important job. Here analysts use R and python languages for doing predictive analytics and optimization. ... We try and solve business problems more accurately with help of machine learning. Having solved it and built the confidence of stakeholders, our team has started new projects on prediction, classification, clustering and optimization. All these initiatives have helped our company save millions of dollars with the help of accurate prediction of demands and understanding of complex relationship between different KPIs.


Trends in Information Governance: eDiscovery and Big Data
Organizations have the best chance for success by concentrating on the highest risk and biggest pain points that can benefit from IG. IT’s domain has a big claim, particularly with unstructured data. Unstructured data rates are hitting 75-80% of corporate data, and data growth is increasing 35-50% year-over-year. In the midst of this massive data growth, IT is directly responsible for data lifecycle management, user access, data security, and compliance. They are also frequently involved with eDiscovery collections and big data analysis. These represent big challenges – and IG tools concentrating on unstructured data directly benefit all of these processes. Introducing IG into the data management domain is best done with a combination of technology toolsets and organization priorities that drive policy settings.


Embracing Disruption When Transitioning to the New Style of IT
Startups make innovation look easy. Seemingly out of nowhere, young and vibrant companies emerge to tackle long-standing business challenges. Established organizations, on the other hand, are often bound to rigorous compliance processes, shareholder obligations, and multi-year corporate planning cycles — disruption is seemingly impossible. As the recent survey from HP points out, 75 percent of established firms1 currently lack the qualities of ‘digital disruptors’ within their industries. These organizations recognize a need for innovation but lack the capabilities to develop or execute a formal strategy. But all is far from lost. As companies begin to make sense of their data assets, complex security challenges, and options for scalable infrastructure, there is a window of opportunity for IT executives to build innovative cultures within their organizations.


Bitcoin Entrepreneurs Scramble to Appeal to the Masses
The technology underlying the currency is still in its early days, they argue, and the potential to build compelling products and services on top of it is still being realized. A growing number of startups are scrambling to develop apps they believe will inspire mainstream use of money that isn’t backed by any government. “A billion dollars has been invested in this industry in the past 24 months,” said Barry Silbert, the founder of the financial technology firm SecondMarket and an investor in 48 Bitcoin-focused startups, to an audience at the Inside Bitcoins conference. “We’re just getting started.”


Cisco Services chief talks about the network provider’s big data plans
Really it is about streaming data on the router and let’s assume we are right and there will be 20 billion devices about to be connected or let’s go lower to 10 billion or even five billion it’s still huge amount. They will all have propriety protocols and be able to capture data in that device. That data never goes out or into one silo or not available to others. What is going to happen is they will all talk and if we think we have the biggest data flush today it’s just a start on what digitalization is? In a classic example, look at the way jet engine are produced. A jet engine takes in 1TB per hour of data. So if you have four on a plane and that plane is flying for 12 hours how do you compute that? You need real-time streaming of the analytics and what we do is communication technology to store it.


Companies must teach workers to swim in new oceans of data
Data is the element they all share in common, and it's affecting more than just the executive ranks. In the business world's headlong rush to collect as much data about as many things as possible as quickly as it can, a question has been left for later: How do you turn those massive volumes into practical value? Turns out, "later" is now, and there's a crushing shortage of specialized data scientists. Few companies, meanwhile, even have a plan for bolstering their data talent. At virtually every level of the organization, staffers are being asked to cope with and find meaning in more data than ever before.



Quote for the day:

“True leaders bring out your personal best. They ignite your human potential”.” -- John Paul Warren

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