Daily Tech Digest - December 14, 2020

SDM and the DevOps Delusion of Connected Organizations

Looking across the enterprise, DevOps cultures fray further. A perfect DevOps practice envisions teams in different departments, business units and geographies all in sync, delivering value via software on a reliable cadence. In reality, enterprise DevOps is difficult to pull off because most organizations haven’t implemented shared languages, comment processes and best practices across all of their teams with management buy-in. ... Adopting an SDM strategy on top of an existing DevOps culture can help an organization in a number of ways. Having disconnected tools, disconnected data and a lack of common language make it difficult for one side of the organization to know what the other wants. Even in mature DevOps implementations, software delivery ends up being a patchwork of different processes for different teams. It’s also difficult to determine if our teams are delivering the right end product if there’s no shared visibility and insight. SDM helps by establishing common data and common processes, giving visibility and insights across teams of different maturities, different tools and different technologies so you get all functions to collaborate. That way you can be sure you’re not just deploying more—you’re actually delivering continuous value.


Legal Framework Around Blockchain Technology Applications

Firstly, blockchain transactions have no borders and hence, jurisdiction is a vexed issue. Where and how a dispute can be raised remains an unanswered question. Blockchain technology depends upon public and private keys allotted to users and their interface with the hash function. Transactions conducted through blockchains have a sense of permanence. Though verification and authentication is the fulcrum of this technology, there is no means of enforcing a transaction in a court of law. Mistakes cannot be corrected and hence, the jurisprudence under the Indian Contract Act, 1847 relating to mistake of fact or law is wholly alien to these transactions. How is one to be held to a promise made in an entry in a ledger? When does the promisor and the promisee relation get established? These are all questions for which answers would have to be found. What happens if a private key is misused or tampered with? Are there any legal remedies? One doesn't know. There is no central authority which monitors BT, however, recent adaptations of BT are being used by governmental authorities for verifying and authenticating ownership of moveable/immovable assets. What are the responsibilities of such an authority?


The year ahead in DevOps and agile: still some missing pieces to plug in

A big obstacle preventing the success of DevOps is quality control, Jainendra points out. "Teams are now able to move more quickly. However, error rates are not decreasing. For now, this can be more easily managed since so many of the changes are smaller and easier to revert. But as DevOps scales throughout the enterprise, this will add a layer of complexity to the process. Many organizations are still seeing quality issues in both their program and infrastructure code; maintaining low error rates is key for creating a successful DevOps practice by helping streamline larger releases." There has been more progress with agile, Jainendra believes. "There's been an increased interest in scaling agile methods by implementing broader agile management such as Scaled Agile Framework," he says. "Additionally, teams have benefited greatly from agile methodology and are seeing productivity boosts as a result of its ability to create a culture of efficiency. Even as everyone began to work remotely, we are still experiencing the same team collaboration benefits as we were before Covid-19."  What lies ahead, he states, is a need for greater customization of agile efforts. "Organizations often fail to tailor their agile initiatives to their organizations. ..."


The Importance of Technology in the Strategic Design of Workplaces in the COVID-19 Era

One of the principal problems of the shift to working virtually is the feeling of personal disconnect. Working from home can lead to isolation. For companies, this means that successfully transmitting their mission and values can be a difficult task. The problem is exacerbated when you consider that corporate culture currently drives office design. Co-creation platforms allow us to carry out interactive activities with employees and receive feedback in real-time. We use gamification techniques to increase engagement and ensure employees take ownership of the office design project. These platforms and activities give us an understanding of the company culture; the unwritten rules that define the behavior of people in a group. This critical information helps companies build a more flexible culture that encourages continuous learning and lets interior design strategists design an office that transmits and reinforces its values. ... Designing, and above all, explaining online projects can be complex. We often find that it’s difficult for customers to understand detailed plans and schematics from behind a screen. With the integration of the BIM (Building Information Modeling) methodology and virtual reality technologies, designers can offer companies virtual tours of their future workspaces.


Are you ready for multicloud? A checklist

IT leaders know the complexities of setting up secure and robust cloud infrastructures. Naturally, these complexities multiply when you combine multiple clouds. You should strive to avoid dealing with them all at once. Operating across multiple clouds is complex because of the required governance, technical expertise, and integrations. As Sarbjeet Johal, an independent technology strategist, puts it, “Nobody gets up in the morning and says we are going to do multicloud today. They just fall into it, mainly due to organizational silos. Multicloud is as easy as 1-2-3... said no one ever!” Joanne Friedman, Ph.D. and CEO of Connektedminds, suggests that IT teams leverage their primary cloud provider wherever possible, rather than hunt for new or better capabilities in a second provider. ... Other IT leaders share pragmatic viewpoints on how multiclouds evolve and how to navigate initial complexities. Travis Campbell, a big data consultant, offers this insight into where the multicloud journey begins: Companies doing ‘multicloud’ but really treating it as a single cloud by each line of business are a special case here. For example, finance may have applications on cloud X, while engineering is deploying to cloud Y, and there’s no cross-pollination of work and data. It’s multicloud without hard problems.


Why JSON Isn't a Good Configuration Language

Compared to many other configuration languages, JSON is pretty noisy. There is a lot of punctuation that doesn't aid human readability, although it does make it easier to write implementations for machines. In particular, for configuration files, the keys in objects are almost always identifiers, so the quotation marks around the keys are redundant. Also, JSON requires curly braces around the entire document, which is part of what makes it an (almost) subset of JavaScript and helps delimit different objects when multiple objects are sent over a stream. But, for a configuration file, the outermost braces are just useless clutter. The commas between key-value pairs are also mostly unnecessary in config files. Generally, you will have a single key-value pair per line, so it would make sense to accept a newline as a delimiter. Speaking of commas, JSON doesn't accept trailing commas. If you need commas after each pair, it should at least accept trailing commas, since trailing commas make adding new entries to the end easier and lead to cleaner commit diffs. Another problem with JSON as a configuration format is it doesn't have any support for multi-line strings. 


A tech reboot of retail

Looking at the global figures, Michael O’Grady, principal forecast analyst at Forrester, says: “Retail categories like grocery and essential consumables are performing well, while other categories like fashion, beauty and cosmetics are seeing a marked decline in consumer spend.”Predictably, the coronavirus lockdowns have benefited e-commerce.  ... “It’s really important to understand what people are wearing,” says Capgemini’s Peplow. Image analysis on social media may be among the approaches fashion retailers will need to use to remain relevant to high street shoppers. Clearly, operating seamlessly across multiple channels will become a key line of defence for bricks-and-mortar retailers to compete with internet retailers. But while online shopping is convenient and may well offer an item at the cheapest price, in-store shopping is more than just transactional. There is strong evidence that high street retailing needs to become more experiential, such as the way Natuzzi is using mixed reality in its showroom. And while the idea of stores “3D printing” products may seem far-fetched, Decathlon’s use of the technology shows there are niches where it works extremely well.


Startups Should Do Things That Don't Scale, but Security Isn't One of Them

Startups are especially attractive targets to hackers due to a combination of limited resources and the proliferation of business models that revolve around collecting customer data. In fact, research shows over 67% of companies with under 1,000 workers have experienced a cyberattack, and 59% were successfully breached. Investing in scalable security is a startup's best hope at defending against an attack that statistics say it should expect. Lack of scalability in security detracts from efficiency and opens gaps in a startup's networks. It forces IT to preoccupy itself with the endless application of security to new resources and users rather than with optimizing or monitoring. In these cases, companies are often too busy working in the trenches to notice they've been hacked until it's far too late. It's not all bad news, however. Security is no longer a zero-sum game. It has been commoditized into various products in recent years, allowing young companies to balance its risks and rewards by scaling in pieces that won't become obsolete or demand too much attention from IT. Security processes like encryption, firewalls, and authorized access once required hardware and lots of work to operate at scale. 


Hacked: US Commerce and Treasury Departments

Reuters first reported the incidents, with The Washington Post suggesting that a Russian hacking group known as Cozy Bear, aka APT29, is the source. The Post reported last week that the same group was behind an attack against cybersecurity firm FireEye. In an update late Sunday, FireEye warned that starting around March and continuing through May, software updates for SolarWinds' Orion product had been subverted with backdoors, which it has dubbed "Sunburst." The malicious software updates were signed using valid digital signatures, and could steal files, profile systems and disable system services, it says. FireEye warns that "the actors behind this campaign gained access to numerous public and private organizations around the world." "We can confirm there has been a breach in one of our bureaus," the Commerce Department says in a statement. "We have asked CISA and the FBI to investigate, and we cannot comment further at this time." The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency, or CISA, on Sunday issued an emergency directive "in response to a known or reasonably suspected information security threat," noting that the affected Orion products are versions are 2019.4 through 2020.2.1 HF1.


Moving from Agile Teams towards an Agile Organization

It is not unusual to see different levels across the organization of a large program talking in different terms. This is normal and expected. The level of detail that senior management has to deal with cannot be the same as that of the engineers modifying the cloud infrastructure of the deployment pipeline. However, when talking about progress, if we have some talking about epics, others about features, implementation teams discussing stories, and others working on tasks, it shouldn’t be surprising that nobody really knows what the actual progress is. In the same way that it is important to agree on the moment in which progress is measured (e.g. when deploying in production, or when there is a certain change in some indicator), it is also important to agree on the unit of measurement to be used. Then we have a common unit of progress that is atomic. And by making this progress clearly visible, we raise the overall awareness. This results in a velocity increase that can be potentiated by other elements of the context. From a systemic point of view, everything matters. Not only are all elements important, but the relationships between them are especially meaningful. It is like those images we used to draw when we were kids, connecting the dots to see the figure hidden in between.



Quote for the day:

"You can discover what your enemy fears most by observing the means they use to frighten you." -- Eric Hoffer

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