Critical Thinking: The Overlooked IT Management Skill
Critical thinking is essential to IT leadership because leaders sit at the
conjunction of four distinct worlds: data, technology, business processes, and
people. “An IT leader has to think logically about how to integrate these four
distinct capabilities into a reasonable response to organizational
challenges,” says Michael Williams, an associate professor of information
systems technology management at Pepperdine University. ... Solutions to
complex IT problems are not black and white, observes Sydney Buchel, a senior
consultant with cybersecurity and compliance frim BARR Advisory. “IT
environments vary, based on complexity, size, the data being processed, unique
risks, and integrations with other platforms,” she says. “This means that
making key decisions for your IT environment cannot be impulsive -- it
requires gathering, analyzing, and conceptualizing information to ensure
thoughtful decision-making.” ... Critical thinking requires time and
practice. “Collect all relevant information: evidence, facts, research, and
perspectives from trusted colleagues, as well as your own thoughts and
experiences,” Buchel advises.
Don’t do IT yourself: The trick to ensuring business alignment
There are many ways to implement an ITSC, but to start, you and your committee
members must work together continuously on a strategic plan until the planning
group can finalize an immediate one-year plan that is approved by all
departments. Then each department must take this one-year plan and decide what
resources are needed to accomplish their objectives — a process that should
include conversations with IT to help determine what is needed. These
requirements should then be examined by IT and senior department heads to
determine initial time and cost estimates, along with expected ROI, which should
be the responsibility of the requesting department. With these plans now
submitted to the ITSC, the committee, which remember is composed of all direct
reports of the CEO or the COO to ensure all departments are included, then
determines whether the systems requested do indeed represent what the company
needs and at the speed they are needed. By doing so, the committee can determine
whether staffing is sufficient or if additional resources are required to
accomplish planned goals.
The importance of software testing for Digital Transformation
IT costs represent significant overheads and budget cuts proliferate. With
smaller teams and fewer resources, teams have to do more with less when it comes
to software development in order to keep pace with Digital Transformation and
customer demand. Speed is a must – but if the customer experience is to be
protected, then quality must also be prioritized. Often test automation is a
late addition to the Digital Transformation process, but this causes many risks
and challenges along the way. As enterprise organizations develop applications
that rely on continuous software updates, automating testing is a crucial
element to increasing release speeds and improving application quality, helping
the organization run more efficiently to meet its bottom line. Test automation
gives organizations the ability to monitor and assess risk in real time or even
prevent issues before they occur. By adopting this real-time or and a
pre-emptive approach, major disruptions which can impact everything from
productivity to customer experience or revenue, can be staved off.
Bias Busters: The perils of executive typecasting
A common obstacle to good decision making is executives’ adherence to role
theory, a concept in sociology and psychology that suggests that most people
categorize themselves and others according to socially defined roles—as a
parent, a manager, or a teacher, for instance. They adopt norms associated with
designated roles, behave accordingly, and, in a form of groupthink, expect
others to do the same. ... Organizations must actively encourage dissent and
make it safe for individuals at all levels, regardless of role, to share
contrarian ideas. In this case, if the CFO could separate her idea to divest
from her status in the organization, she might get a fairer shake from everyone
involved. One way to do that would be to engage individuals and teams in a “what
you have to believe” assessment, highlighting the discrepancies between the
product line’s current performance and the resources needed to bring it back to
premier status. Such an assessment could put more facts into and structure
around strategy discussions.
Why Asia is moving to multi-cloud
So, what is it that attracts Asia Pacific (APAC) customers to his company’s
suite of products? Orchard highlighted two reasons that he consistently hears
from APAC firms that adopt his organization’s products: a broad ecosystem, and
the ability to bridge the cloud skills gap. “With the breadth of technologies in
use by our customers across both traditional data center vendors, public clouds,
and SaaS providers, they need a vendor whose focus is on the ecosystem. And with
over 2,600 providers for Terraform, we fit that bill better than any other
vendor in the industry,” he told DCD. In addition, Orchard says standardization
through the HashiCorp Configuration Language (HCL) language used to configure
its solutions using code can help address the ongoing skills shortage in cloud
professionals. Indeed, HCL as used by Terraform was lauded in GitHub’s latest
State of the Octoverse report as the fastest-growing language on GitHub. Though
the focus of infrastructure-as-code is on provisioning infrastructure, there are
secondary benefits to organizations.
Navigating The AI Minefield: HR Grapples With Bias & Privacy Concerns
To guard against bias and potential liability, employers must provide notice and
obtain consent from applicants and employees before using AI tools. This
includes explaining what type of tool is being used and providing enough
information for individuals to understand the criteria being evaluated.
Employers must also be mindful of the way their AI tools can affect people with
disabilities and be prepared to provide reasonable accommodations. By taking
these steps, employers can harness the power of AI while avoiding bias and
promoting diversity and inclusion in the workplace. Artificial intelligence (AI)
tools, though designed to help employers make better decisions, could be causing
more harm than good due to algorithmic bias. The problem arises when the AI tool
is developed and monitored incorrectly, leading to bias against certain
demographic groups, according to experts in the field. ... Additionally, AI
tools conducting background checks can pull data from a much broader area than
traditional selection tools, such as social media, and trigger data privacy
concerns as well.
DNS data shows one in 10 organizations have malware traffic on their networks
More than a quarter of that traffic went to servers belonging to initial access
brokers, attackers who sell access into corporate networks to other
cybercriminals, the report stated. “As we analyzed malicious DNS traffic of both
enterprise and home users, we were able to spot several outbreaks and campaigns
in the process, such as the spread of FluBot, an Android-based malware moving
from country to country around the world, as well as the prevalence of various
cybercriminal groups aimed at enterprises,” Akamai said. “Perhaps the best
example is the significant presence of C2 traffic related to initial access
brokers (IABs) that breach corporate networks and monetize access by peddling it
to others, such as ransomware as a service (RaaS) groups.” Akamai operates a
large DNS infrastructure for its global CDN and other cloud and security
services and is able to observe up to seven trillion DNS requests per day. Since
DNS queries attempt to resolve the IP address of a domain name, Akamai can map
requests that originate from corporate networks or home users to known malicious
domains
Heart Device Maker Says Hack Affected 1 Million Patients
The incident illustrates how deeply networked connectivity has penetrated the
medical device market, a development that has created new opportunities for
hackers to steal personal information in an industry historically unaccustomed
to fending off threat actors. Information potentially disclosed in the
cybersecurity incident includes individuals' names, addresses, birthdates and
Social Security numbers. "It may also be inferred that you used or were
considered for use of a Zoll product," the company says in a sample breach
notification letter. "More and more medical devices are becoming connected to
the network and internet and, in almost all cases, the manufacturer is gaining
access to device and patient information," said security researcher Jason
Sinchak, who leads cybersecurity firm Level Nine's medical device product
security practice. "What was previously an embedded medical device manufacturing
organization becomes a software-as-a-service and managed service organization,"
he said.
How machine learning is changing the way businesses think about customer behavior
“It’s crucial to ensure the emotional data captured accurately reflects the
inner feelings of the customers rather than just their expressed emotions
through specific keywords or loud expressions. Systems based on nonrelevant data
are likely to result in a waste of time and money and will probably have lower
success rates compared to systems that incorporate genuine emotion detection and
personality assessment,” he adds. This new frontier of so-called Emotional
Intelligence-as-a-Service has the potential to significantly impact customer
behavior by providing valuable insights into their preferences and motivations.
By personalizing the customer experience based on this real-time emotional
intelligence, organizations can improve customer satisfaction and assist
customers in achieving their goals more effectively. ... “In these new virtual
environments, just imagine the impact of a virtual agent in a new Web3 or
metaverse world that has its own unique personality and style and can truly
understand yours,” Liberman says.
The philosopher: A conversation with Grady Booch
The story of computing is the story of humanity. This is a story of ambition,
invention, creativity, vision, avarice, and serendipity, all powered by a
refusal to accept the limits of our bodies and our minds. As we co-evolve with
computing, the best of us and the worst of us is amplified, and along the way,
we are challenged as to what it means to be intelligent, to be creative, to be
conscious. We are on a journey to build computers in our own image, and that
means we have to not only understand the essence of who we are, but we must
also consider what makes us different. ... The field of artificial
intelligence has seen a number of vibrant springs and dismal winters over the
years, but this time it seems different: there are a multitude of
economically-interesting use cases that are fueling the field, and so in the
coming years we will see these advances weave themselves into our world.
Indeed, AI already has: every time we take a photograph, search for a product
to buy, interact with some computerized appliance, we are likely using AI in
one way or another.
Quote for the day:
"Leaders are the ones who keep faith
with the past, keep step with the present, and keep the promise to
posterity." -- Harold J. Seymour
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