Daily Tech Digest by Kannan Subbiah

September 30, 2012

5 Signs for CIOs that Their Cloud Service Provider Can't Handle Tier 1 Apps
Picking up the right cloud, handling and relocation of the applications, all contributes to the hectic task. The best way to deal with this problem is by bringing in some cloud providers, who focuses on developer services.

Managing Enterprise Risk in the New Environment
For many years complying with government standards and industry regulations has been seen as a check box in the lengthy list of IT security tasks. However, most recent changes in the environment and increased cyber security threats have led to a rethinking of this approach. In this bright talk webcast, you will know more ...

Big Data Architecture at LinkedIn
In this interview at QCon London, LinkedIn’s Sid Anand discusses the problems they face when serving high-traffic, high-volume data. Sid explains how they’re moving some use cases from Oracle to gain headroom, and lifts the hood on their open source search and data replication projects, including Kafka, Voldemort, Espresso and Databus.

Building Secure Applications
Developers believe that that security is something that the IT Infrastructure team will take care of. On the other hand, the IT infrastructure team believes the other way. Then, whose responsibility it is to ensure building a secure application?

8 Little AWS Billing Oddities You Might Want to Know
As part of working on a purchasing and scenario planner for CloudVertical, I’m going over all the EC2 pricing variables – instances types, cost by region, cost by life cycle (on demand, reserved type and time, or spot), and I noticed a few small oddities I thought were interesting.

“Drilling” Through the Big Data
Drill is not trying to replace existing Big Data batch processing frameworks, such as Hadoop MapReduce or stream processing frameworks, such as S4 or Storm. It rather fills the existing void – real-time interactive processing of large data sets.

Meg Whitman’s Toughest Campaign: Retooling H.P.
At 56, Ms. Whitman, the eBay billionaire who spent a fortune unsuccessfully trying to become the governor of California, has found her Act III. She has been chief executive of Hewlett-Packard for a little more than a year, and many people are still waiting for her to get her message out about the place.

8 Principles of Better Unit Testing
Not many software professionals recognize that they need to follow different rules for writing unit tests, and so software developers continue to write bad unit tests, following best practices for writing production code that are not appropriate for writing unit tests.

Why Data Centers Need a Performance Review
Your data center is a critical part of your IT infrastructure; it is the engine that drives and facilitates the delivery of applications and services throughout your organization. Here are the top five things IT managers and CIOs should ask themselves when evaluating their data center's performance.

Why Apple Had To Release Its Terrible Maps App Now
Maps is the child of a nasty divorce between two of the world’s most powerful companies, and it has many industry observers trying to understand how Apple could enter the mobile maps market so late with a product that is so bad.

Quotes for the day:

"Time is our most valuable asset, yet we tend to waste it, kill it, and spend it rather than invest it." -- Jim Rohn

"Appreciation is like an insurance policy. It has to be renewed every now and then." -- Colonel Dave McIntyre

September 29, 2012

TDWI E-Book: Big Data Analytics
Download this TDWI E-Book to learn how to overcome obstacles, maximize business value, and get started with big data analytics. You’ll also read expert Q&A on misconceptions about big data analytics as well as a forecast of its future.

Is IT as a Service the Next Big Shake-up?
What AWS announced was its Reserved Instance Marketplace. In simplest terms, this marketplace is a secondary market for trading/selling/buying reserved instances of AWS’ Cloud-based IT services.

New Asus Transformer Pad combines LTE, quad-core processor
Asustek's latest Transformer Pad TF300TL has a quad-core processor and LTE capabilities to go along with a 10.1-inch screen, the company said on Friday.

Calif. law passed to halt employer snooping on social media
Calif. Gov. Jerry Brown took to social media today to announce that he signed two privacy laws protecting employees and students from bosses and universities wanting to snoop on Facebook, Twitter, and other social media accounts.

Shape Strategy With Simple Rules, Not Complex Frameworks
Simple rules represent the beating heart of strategy. When applied to a critical bottleneck, carefully crafted, and used in a mindful manner, they can guide the activities that matter. In a world of hard trade-offs, they are one of the few ways managers can increase alignment, adaptation, and coordination all at once.

Twitter Helps Build Social Data Ecosystem
Twitter's Certified Products Program is a step in the right direction toward improving data quality, analysis, and social business decision making. Let's hope Facebook and LinkedIn follow suit.

BYOD in Health Care: A Unique Range of Risk
Failure to properly implement a BYOD program can be a costly error because the HITECH Act also put teeth into HIPAA enforcement efforts in the form of increased penalties for violations and expanded enforcement authority at both the federal and state levels.

Selected data modeling best practices
Many of these practices apply generally, but the list excludes some concerns specific to other data modeling efforts like enterprise, data warehouse, datamart, or other non-operational models. Also, the focus of these notes is on logical modeling.

Google's Sergey Brin: You'll ride in robot cars within 5 years
"You can count on one hand the number of years it will take before ordinary people can experience this," he said at the signing of SB 1298, which establishes safety and performance standards for cars operated by computers on California roads and highways.

Quote for the day:

"How we think shows through in how we act. Attitudes are mirrors of the mind." -- David Joseph Schwartz

September 28, 2012

Mayer Tells Yahoo Employees Products Must Ship In 6 Months, Or Don't Bother (YHOO)
Mayer's rule: If a new product can't be shipped in six months, and if it doesn't have a realistic shot of reaching 100 million users or generate $100 million toward the company's top line, then Yahoo will no longer bother.

Quantcast releases bigger, stronger and faster Hadoop file system
It’s not for everyone, but if you’re storing petabytes of data Hadoop, Quantcast thinks it has the cure to your woes. Its newly open sourced Quantcast File System promises smaller clusters and better performance, and it has proven itself over exabytes of data inside Quantcast.

CIOs Shouldn’t Let Big Data Rule Their Decision-Making
We’ve been reading and hearing a lot about Big Data lately, and it’s a very real consideration for CIOs. But all this talk reminded me of some first-hand experiences with executives who used technology as a crutch in their decision making.

Clover Trail tablets pitched as workplace-friendly
Taking on Apple will be tough, but emphasizing how Windows tablets fit well in an office environment is the best hope for PC makers, said Nathan Brookwood, principal analyst at Insight 64.

Gartner Says India Will Be The Worlds Fastest Growing Enterprise Software Market through 2016
According to Gartner, Inc. India’s enterprise software market is forecast to maintain its strong performance, with an estimated compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 14.6 per cent from 2011 to 2016 – the highest growth rate in the world.

Strategic Plan...And Why Do You Need One?
Competitive advantage doesn't come from reactive cultures; it comes from awareness, deliberate action and careful sculpting of organizational and human capabilities to achieve what your competitors cannot. Most of all, it requires executive leaders who understand systems thinking and who are capable of crafting organizational systems to achieve the aim of the business.

Scala upgrade improves tooling, sheds runtime overhead
Version 2.10 will emphasize a futures abstraction. With futures, values are produced at some particular time in the future. Futures provide a lightweight abstraction to deal with asynchronous programming challenges over the Internet.

Trying to fill 6,000 jobs, Microsoft pitches $10,000 H-1B visa
Microsoft said Thursday that it has some 6,000 open positions in the U.S., and is creating new jobs faster than it can fill them. The company is now using its own workforce needs to make a case for a new type of H-1B visa as well as a permanent employment visa.

Majority of Indian companies looking at big data: survey
By a greater than two-to-one margin, organizations today view big data primarily as a business opportunity rather than an IT challenge and are moving quickly to do something about it, according to a recent survey of over 200 Indian IT and business professionals conducted by Informatica Corporation, an independent provider of data integration software.

Top 15 Strategies for Leadership Success
Check out Dan's 15 strategies for success in your leadership career.

Embrace Your Constraints to Create New Markets
How do you produce a $1 pair of glasses? How do you make a profit on it? Intentionally imposed constraints are mechanisms actively used to force inventiveness — "necessity is the mother of invention" turns out to be not just a great quote but a powerful tool.

Quote for the day:

"Though bitter, good medicine cures illness. Though it may hurt, loyal criticism will have beneficial effects." - Sima Qian

September 27, 2012

Enterprise architecture in the age of cloud services
In reading this article, an IT architect will learn how to use EA notations and IBM Rational System Architect to communicate effectively with business users and other stakeholders, including the service provider.

What do cloud and cloud management mean for enterprise architecture?
The main question in enterprise IT is often whether to move to a cloud architecture at all. There is a lot of value in the work that has been done over time to build and adapt an IT environment to suit the business, and a corresponding reluctance to change anything too quickly.

Google Apps axes export support for .doc and other old Microsoft Office formats
The cloud-based office suite will, from 1 October, only be able to export to newer Office Open XML formats such as .docx. This will affect anyone collaborating with users of pre-2003 Office versions, although Microsoft does have a compatibility pack to help out users of some earlier iterations

High Performance Computing (HPC) in the Cloud
High performance computing is no longer limited to those who own supercomputers. HPC's democratization has been driven particularly by cloud computing, which has given scientists access to supercomputing-like features at the cost of a few dollars per hour.

Embracing the Engineering Side of Software Engineering
Drawing from 20 years of research and industrial experience, the author argues that now is the time to make software engineering a true engineering discipline. (with video extra)

Expectation is reality
We hear about perception being reality in service management space. When you are dealing with projects, expectation become the be all and and end all. How your project is perceived is proportional to the level of expectation about the outcomes that you have built.

Analytics Lead Insurance CIO Wish List
Given a $3 million-to-$5 million bump in budget, almost one-third of insurer CIOs would put the money toward analytics, despite already investing heavily in that area, according to “If I Had $5 Million… Where Insurer CIOs Would Spend Money They Don’t Have and Why,” a survey from Novarica.

Europe ready to charge Microsoft over browser choice, eyes Google action
European antitrust commissioner Joaquín Almunia said in a speech today in Warsaw that both "world brands" were in the Commission's sights – Microsoft over its failure to properly offer users a choice of browser, Google over its fears it "had used its dominance in online search to foreclose advertisers and rivals".

How "Big-Data-as-a-Service" Can Help Smaller Companies Compete
The common perception of how big data is used centers around giant multi-national enterprises spending millions trying to fine tune their business strategies to eke out every last penny from their customers. But in reality, big data is worming its way into businesses large and small, often as a service instead of on-premises software.

Predictive Analytics: Classification Using Decision Trees
When assessing a candidate’s propensity to act in the desired manner, one can use the classification model to review the critical characteristics’ values to get a probability of achieving the desired result.

NetSuite talks 'Appstore' for everyone
Zach Nelson, CEO NetSuite was in London this week talking SuiteCommerce. Rebranded e-commerce or something new? E-commerce has been around for many years but in recent times, the market has become extremely complicated.

Quote for the day:

"Nothing can add more power to your life than concentrating all of your energies on a limited set of targets." - Nido Qubein

September 26, 2012

Huawei sees smartphones leading growth in consumer devices
Huawei expects to ramp up its Android-focused product range with Microsoft Windows 8 phones and tablet PCs, and possibly also so-called phablets - phone/tablets. It is also considering developing its own smartphone operating system to distance itself from Android

How Good Technology Is Opening New Doors with NFC-Enabled Samsung Smartphones
So the company jumped all over the opportunity to become one of the first large enterprises to pilot the use of Near Field Communications (NFC) enabled smartphones for physical access to buildings and offices.

When Did Yoda Start Writing CEO Speeches?
Many business leaders speak using sentences that put key information at the end, Andrew McAfee of the MIT Sloan School of Management writes. "Instead of saying 'Our costs are rising' they'll say 'Things are not great right now, from a cost perspective,'" he explains. This isn't wrong grammatically, but it is unpleasant to listen to, he writes.

Law enforcement to identify & store millions of voices via Russian biometric software
The FBI believes voice biometrics will be a “reliable and consistent means of identification for use in remote recognition.” Deploying voice recognition requires no “special equipment” other than a good quality microphone which most of us have thanks to our mobile phones.

Hitachi claims glass data storage will last millions of years
Company researchers displayed the storage unit, consisting of a sliver of glass 2cm square and 2mm thick, which can hold 40MB of data per square inch, about the same as a standard CD. The data is written in binary format by lasering dots on the glass in four layers, but the researchers say adding more layers to increase storage density isn't a problem.

Reducers - A Library and Model for Collection Processing
Rich Hickey discuses Reducers, a library for dealing with collections that are faster than Clojure’s standard lazy ones and providing support for parallelism

The Story Behind Cloudera and Big Data
A talk with Doug Cutting, the founder of Apache Hadoop and creator of numerous successful open source projects, including Lucene and Nutch about his role with Cloudera and learned more about Big Data,training options for IT professionals interested in Big Data, and how Cloudera compares to Red Hat.

The Age of Big Data and the Death of Theory
Is the World Wide Web and modern technology… replacing the human mind? Knowledge today is not a set of theories, but instead just Data, and the machine is a better place to store data than the human mind.

Autonomous vehicles legalized in California
California has just joined Nevada and Florida among the states that now allow autonomous vehicles to drive on the states’ roads

Stand Out in Your Interview
You've just landed a job interview for a position you really want. Congratulations. Now, you know you only get one chance to impress, but how exactly do you do that? Given all of the conflicting advice out there and the changing rules of getting a job, it's no wonder that job seekers are confused about how to best prepare for and perform in an interview.

Quote for the day:

"Anger is never without Reason, but seldom with a good One." - Benjamin Franklin

September 25, 2012

Five content filters suitable for both home and business
When you need to block content, it’s a relief to know there are plenty of tools out there that do the job. Here are five such tools that I believe can do the trick for anyone willing (or needing) to take the time to get these products set up and running properly.

IPv6 traffic rises in U.S., but remains sliver of overall Internet
ISPs are reporting a significant rise in IPv6 traffic during the last three months, even though the overall numbers remain tiny -- less than 1% of Internet traffic.

Oracle releases free ADF Essentials
"This [release] allows the ADF framework to be used outside of the Oracle stack," said Bill Pataky, vice president of product management in the Oracle Fusion team. The package, called Oracle ADF Essentials, promises to be "a really powerful way to create rich Web applications very quickly," Pataky said.

Oracle databases easy to hack, says researcher
"It's pretty simple," Martinez Fayo told the security blog Dark Reading. "The attacker just needs to know a valid username in the database, and the database name. That's it."

Oracle and Big Data
Here are Oracle's big data resources, which includes webcasts, white papers for the Architects and the Analysts.

A Startup Tries to Make a Better Artificial Brain
Vicarious hopes to combine neuroscience and computer science to create a visual perception system inspired by the neocortex, the wrinkly outer portion of the brain that deals with speaking, hearing, seeing, moving, and other functions.

Data Analytics and the Information Transfer Gap
“The biggest problem corporations face, whether it’s customer service, whether it’s sales, whether it’s an airline rep, is that they’re asked to make critical decisions for the corporation, but the information they’re provided is very, very hard to consume and use,” said Opera Solutions founder and CEO Arnab Gupta.

Service, function and capability (again)
Quick background: business-folk tend to use the terms ‘business service’, ‘business process’, ‘business function’ and ‘business capability’ as near-synonyms, which leads to all manner of confusion when we try to build common understanding across an organisation or enterprise.

Mobile Application Architecture with HTML5 and Javascript
HTML5 with JavaScript has opened the door for device-independent user interfaces. This means that user interfaces can be created using JavaScript component libraries that render interactive user interface widgets using HTML5 elements. HTML5 has many new features that support mobility and rich user interface development.

A Better (& Cheaper) Way to Motivate Employees
Most start-ups don’t have much in the way of cash to pay big salaries and bonuses. They might offer stock options to keep a carrot dangling in front of their key people as they spur them to work every waking hour.

Quotes for the day:

"A man of genius makes no mistakes; his errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery." - James Joyce

"If you can dream it you can do it." -- Walt Disney

September 24, 2012

IT departments warned: Evolve or die
“It’s almost an adapt or die moment for a lot of the IT profession, if you don’t start being able to articulate and contextualise technology’s value add to service delivery then why are you there?” he told the Efficient ICT 2012 conference in London.

Dresner Study Reveals Current Realities in Cloud-Based Business Intelligence
Over the past five years, business intelligence has seen less adoption in the public cloud than other applications. But our recent 2012 Wisdom of Crowds Cloud Business Intelligence Market Study® of 859 respondents found current strong investment in cloud-based BI and growing interest in tapping into the cloud’s benefits.

FEATURE-'Intel Inside' ignites mobile branding war
Intel is leading the charge by extending its hugely successful "Intel Inside" marketing campaign beyond personal computers. Launched in 1991, "Intel Inside" stickers turned commodity electronic components into premium products, and eventually became ubiquitous on laptops.

How the Cloud is Changing Backup Vendor Strategy
So as this happens, the astute executive is going to want to have a backup of all their data, no matter where it is, to one or more locations, even if the various providers are doing their own backup.

Converged infrastructure will require some compromise
All-in-one IT environments offer benefits in terms of simplified management, but companies must map their own requirements and decide whether this model makes more sense than best-of-breed systems.

Portrait of a Micro-manager
Most people I’ve asked say they’ve worked for a micro-manager. Their frustration shows when they talk about the person who drained joy from their career and under-utilized their skills.

10 tips for speeding up Outlook
Of course, some of these suggestions might seem to have a bit more “‘duh” factor than others. But you never know what level of skills you’re dealing with, so we’ll cover all the bases. In the end, you should have a much faster Outlook experience.

Management Skills: Three Ways to Build Empathy
Empathy as a management skill could be seen as a little bit ‘pink and fluffy’. After all, isn’t empathy what therapists, psychotherapists and counsellors use? Isn’t it a step too far so say it’s one of the key management skills?

Data privacy issues present new data governance challenges
"As information security professionals, we should want to assume these [privacy] responsibilities; that's good for our profession," Northrop said. "And by good for our profession, what I really mean is, you can make more money, and money's good."

Why a Star Hire Isn't Your Ticket to Success
Magic Person Syndrome (let’s call it MPS) leads a company to believe that the absence of the right executive is at the root of some core business problem. And if they can just hire a new executive, the problem magically will be solved. Have you heard (or said) anything like this?

Quote for the day:

"Continuous effort not strength or intelligence is the key to unlocking our potential." - Winston Churchill

September 23, 2012

The Top 10 Strategic CIO Issues For 2013
As you’ll see, each of these 10 is rooted in change, and calls for the CIO to be a leader instead of a follower; a disrupter instead of a go-alonger; and a business-driven executive instead of a tech-focused manager.

Lessons learned from real world BigData implementations
The real driver however is a different one. Business analysts discover Big Data technologies as the means to leverage tons of existing data and ask questions about customer behavior and all sorts relationships to drive business strategy.

Improve Yourself By Embracing Your Dissenters
One of the only ways for us to improve is to be aware of our shortcomings and then choose to embrace them. But where does this awareness come from? ... often the best way to become aware is to listen to the feedback of others. People are often not hesitant to criticize so if you listen attentively I assure you a whole dose of reality will come your way.

How the U.S. Chief Technology Officer Is Making Data Awesome
“It’s about turning government into a platform for open innovation. Data by itself is useless. I can’t feed my baby daughter data, as much as I’d love to because I love data. It’s only useful if you apply it to create an actual public benefit. You need appliers — you need entrepreneurs to know data’s there available in order for them to turn it into awesomeness.”

Working with Sockets in C#
It provides a simple way to exchange data over the network. It's used, as an example, to exchange messages between users. You can go further more to tranfer files and play "distributed" games and communicate multiple programs. Thanks to its powerful features, sockets are becoming a must to learn technology for developers.

The Rise of Coworking Office Spaces
Benjamin Dyett, one of Grind's three founders, describes their members as "free radicals," or people who "network endlessly and collaborate constantly. They choose when and how they do what they do, on their own terms. They don't want job security, they want career fluidity."

Benchmarking mobile maps
A mapping experience is a must-have feature for many of us. In fact, a recent survey by IDG found that 77% of respondents are using smartphones for GPS navigation. No wonder that many of our readers are closely following the recent development and changes of mapping apps and the user experience on the newest smartphones.

The potential pitfalls of data mining
We should be constantly asking these questions. Do they opt in? Or opt out? Which one is the reasonable default setting? Do we market this information to third parties? If we do, how and when do we inform our customers? Are we acting in a transparent way?

Big Ideas: Demystifying Hadoop
Another video in Patricia Florissi's (EMC Americas/EMEA CTO) "Big Ideas" series. This one explains Hadoop. It covers the history, the architectural principles, functions (like the name node, MapReduce).

Greenplum’s Gavin Sherry on Remaining Agile Within the Enterprise
One of the greatest challenges for an enterprise is iterating while delivering quality products as teams grow in size and projects become increasingly complex. Unchecked, a nimble startup can become burdened with well-intentioned procedures and management models that nevertheless slow the pace of innovation.

Quotes for the day:

"When you judge another, you do not define them, you define yourself." - Wayne Dyer

"Make failure your teacher, not your undertaker." - Zig Ziglar

September 22, 2012

How to build a Roadmap – Define Current State
This post will provide a little more exposition and insight into one method, which if done well, can provide an honest and objective look in the mirror to successfully understand where we truly are as an organization and face the uncomfortable truth in some cases where we need to improve.

40 Percent of Insurers Suffered Security Breaches in Past Year
25 percent of financial institutions suffered a breach in 2011—within insurance, that percentage is even higher—making security is a top priority for the financial services industry, according to Deloitte’s “2012 Global Financial Services Industry Security Study.”

Cloud Computing - Governance Challenges
In today’s world, with increasing cloud adoption and outsourcing activities, we could see business organizations are in almost in the same state as it is described of DoD, i.e. System-of-Systems

Oracle's engineered systems focus: A cloud distraction?
Wall Street was expecting Oracle to deliver first quarter hardware revenue of $899 billion and got $779 million. In other words, the rate of decline in Oracle's hardware business is accelerating.

Small Business Strategies: How to handle that adrenaline
No wonder so many entrepreneurs suffer adrenaline addiction. We thrive on risk-taking and love challenges. We juggle many tasks at once. Heck, when things are really bad, we're able to leap tall buildings in a single bound.

6 steps to embedding organizational culture
Changing a company's culture is a slow and difficult business, writes Mary Jo Asmus. It's important to start by thinking clearly about what sort of culture you want, and to communicate that vision clearly before starting to make big changes.

Meet the young boss with a digital & global mindset
"Born-digital, new-age leaders bring a global mindset and have an innate desire and ability to collaborate," says Lakshmi Narayanan, vice-chairman, Cognizant.

Why culture is more important than strategy
The most important thing about culture is that it's the only sustainable point of difference for any organisation. Anyone can copy your strategy, but nobody can copy your culture. So why would you leave it

PayPal chief scientist on cracking the code for big data analytics
In a wide-ranging SearchCIO.com Trailblazer interview, Oh talks about the state of big data analytics. He actually is trying to fathom the human subconscious by looking at who buys what, when and why.

Google Spans Entire Planet With GPS-Powered Database
According to Google, it’s the first database that can quickly store and retrieve information across a worldwide network of data centers while keeping that information “consistent” — meaning all users see the same collection of information at all times — and it’s been driving the company’s ad system and various other web services for years.

Quote for the day:

"The act of taking the first step is what separates the winners from the losers." - Brian Tracy

September 21, 2012

Hadoop, The Cloud, and Big Data
What mistakes does IT make beginning a Hadoop project, and what best practices can you follow to avoid those problems and be successful? For advice, ESJ asked Jack Norris at MapR Technologies; the company produces its namesake advanced distribution for Apache Hadoop, MapR

Samsung plans to drag iPhone 5 into patent suit against Apple
Samsung Electronics intends to drag the iPhone 5 into an ongoing patent lawsuit with Apple, according to documents filed with a U.S. court on Wednesday. Apple, for its part, expects to extend its suit to include the Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 and the latest version of Android, Jelly Bean.

10 social media methodologies that are changing how IT works
Major IT work challenges continue to revolve around project management, technical problem resolution and consultation, accuracy and timeliness of information, and the responsibility of running 24/7 operations. This is where social-style methodologies that incorporate peer-to-peer networking and information sharing are beginning to pay off. Here is a brief rundown on what’s “socially” working in IT.

Chip manufacturing race between Intel, ARM tightens
The race to manufacture the most power-efficient and fastest chips is gaining momentum, with contract chip manufacturer GlobalFoundries on Thursday announcing technology advances that analysts said could allow the company to catch up with Intel's chip-making capabilities by 2014.

Using The Roslyn Scripting API in C#

In this column learn how to utilize the C# Roslyn Scripting API to execute expressions , code blocks and classes from a string or file.

Is IT Ready for a Seat at the Table?

So against those demands, is the business side attempting to gain a better understanding of IT’s undertakings? Is IT doing a good job of managing the business side’s ever-expanding expectations?

It’s Not Your Leadership, It’s the Cause
“People naturally aspire to be part of something bigger than they are, to not just draw a paycheck but find meaning in their work.” Douglas Conant

How Will Today’s ‘Skills Shortage’ Impact Tomorrow’s CIO?
Interim European research shows 83% of industry professionals believe there is no IT skills shortage. However, many other reports contradict these findings. Kathryn Cave, Editor at IDG Connect discusses whether there really is a skills shortage and what impact this is likely to have on tomorrow's CIO.

What's New in Microsoft Test Manager 2012

In this article we’ll introduce some of the new features in Microsoft Test Manager 2012 (MTM) that are used and “dogfooded” by the Visual Studio ALM Rangers.

Top Business Intelligence dashboard design best practices (Part One)
“The business intelligence dashboard is often confused with the performance scorecard. The main difference between the two, traditionally, is that a business intelligence dashboard, like the dashboard of a car, indicates the status at a specific point in time. A scorecard, on the other hand, displays progress over time towards specific goals.

Quote for the day:

"Only those who risk going too far can possibly know how far one can go." - T.S. Elliot