February 09, 2013

Implementing EA with TOGAF framework and ArchiMate modeling language
EA has a diverse audience that has business and technical backgrounds, and each of the stakeholders needs to be addressed in a language that is understood by all. Therefore, essential qualifications for EA tools are: rigidity when it comes to the management and maintenance of knowledge and flexibility when it comes to the analysis (ad-hoc, what-if, etc.), presentation, and communication of the information to diverse audiences.


If the PC dies, Windows 8 will be its killer, says analyst
Buffone predicted that 2013 would see even more of the move toward mobile devices for those tasks. But until Windows 8 makes headway, he saw little chance that consumers would dump their PCs in dusty back rooms or closets. "Windows 8 on tablets could change that," Buffone said, "but from the sales so far, it's not going to be rapid."


A Declaration of the Interdependence of Cyberspace
Seventeen years ago, on February 8, 1996, John Perry Barlow sent out his manifesto "A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace," a statement of the core belief of many cyber-libertarians that governments should have no authority on the Internet. That belief may seem quaint to many of us today, when the separation between the real and the virtual is growing ever fuzzier. And yet the Declaration remains a fairly accurate representation of the views of many of the anti-government voices on the Internet.


Streaming is replacing the web as we know it
Soon, David Gelernter says, "the web will be history." Along with killing the operating system, browser and search, the meaning of “computer” is changing as well: "Whether large or small (e.g., a smartphone), a computer’s main function in the near future will be tuning in to — as a car radio tunes in a broadcast station — the constantly flowing global cyberflow. We won’t care much about the computer devices themselves since we’ll be more focused on the world of information … and our lives as attached to it."


The Mounting Case for Cloud Access Brokers
The least disruptive - and most efficient - means of addressing this disconnect is to insert into the data center architecture an access broker tier, a layer of dynamic access and identity management services designed to provide federation and unification of credentials across cloud and data center resources based on the organization's authoritative source of identity.


Tears and Fears: Dealing With a Crying Colleague
Having an employee cry in front of the whole team isn’t good for the group, and obviously, isn’t good for the employee. So, at the first sign of trouble, it’s a great idea to guide that person to a more private area. A spare office or conference room works great


Would push notifications for HTML5 apps kill native apps?
All that we need to get around this problem is enabling a browser based app to receive push notification. For example when a user adds a browser app onto a home screen, that app should be able to access the OS API, register itself for push notifications with its own push notification certificate and from that point on it acts as any other native app. The user could even be able to modify its behavior via OS settings.


I.B.M. Slims Down Its Big Data Offerings
The lower price is also a bid for the small- and medium-size business market, as these companies seek to adopt Big Data computing. “This brings the entry point down quite a bit and opens the way for more businesses to use Power technology as a preferred environment,” said Steven A. Mills, senior vice president for software and hardware systems at I.B.M.


Attention, Big Data Enthusiasts: Here’s What You Shouldn’t Ignore
The analysis firm IDC says the world’s information is doubling every two years. With this rate of data production, it means that some of the data is falling by the wayside when it is not put to immediate use. Many in the industry refer to this as “Dark Data”. When data goes dark, it means a missed opportunity and it leaves a big hole in any business strategy when it comes to obtaining valuable, actionable information on consumers.


Forrester: Systems of engagement will revolutionise tech by 2018
According to analyst Brian Hopkins, the hot technology trends of today – such as mobile, big data and cloud computing – are likely to be run-of-the-mill by 2015. “If you are only looking at these emerging technologies now, you are likely to get smacked in the face when you blink,” he wrote in a blog post.



Quote for the day:

‎"Culture eats strategy for breakfast" -- Peter Drucker

February 08, 2013

Achieving Success as a CTO
The only true way to measure the success of a CTO is to look at the success of the enterprise. A CTO is successful if he or she effectively supports and enables the business of the company. The way to do that is to understand how technology is going to impact the business. The CTO can measure effectiveness using the same metrics that are used to measure the business


Security data mining techniques to weed through data overload
Security professionals must constantly deal with great amounts of information, which is generated from such systems as firewalls and intrusion detection. Not only is time a factor, but budgets and resources cause concern with so much information being generated, because these can sometimes barely cover what's needed to sort through the data. This special video presentation ... explores issues IT security managers face when weeding through copious amounts of data to find and solve core compliance problems.


Review: The best network monitoring system on earth
EM7 has so many features and capabilities, it's hard to do it justice. Setup is easy, and the initial learning curve isn't too painful. It scales like crazy and distributes the load across lots of collectors and database appliances, physical or virtual. You can add any number of collectors -- one for every subnet, if you want -- as part of the license. Best of all, EM7 can be extended through templates and scripting to do just about anything you could possibly want from a management system, even if you don't have a full MIB for the device.


The data black hole that could suck the life out of the internet economy
The internet's reliance on an unending stream of free data could be unwise, according to analysts Ovum. ... This hardening of consumer attitudes towards sharing data, coupled with tightening regulation, could diminish personal data supply lines and have a considerable impact on targeted advertising, CRM, big data analytics, and other digital industries — opening up a data black hole underneath the internet economy.


Four variations on a CTO theme
Many organizations have decoupled the “I” for information from the “T” for technology and created two separate roles with distinct accountabilities and deliverables. But there are many different models – with variations depending on industry sector, maturity of company and of course the attitude and approach of the executive leadership team to technology as a strategic asset. We have been engaged in hiring both CIOs and chief technology officers (CTOs) for leading global organizations and believe the CTO profile has four major variations.


Facebook deleted EU facial recognition data, regulators say
"We recently reviewed the source code and execution process used in the deletion process and can confirm that we were satisfied with the processes used by Facebook to delete the templates in line with its commitment," said Ciara O'Sullivan, spokeswoman for the Office of the Irish Data Protection Commissioner (DPC), in an email. Facebook's international headquarters is in Ireland, making the company subject to Irish, and European Union, data protection laws (and also to Ireland's advantageous corporate tax rate).


Persistent Myths About Predictive Analytics And Big Data
Predictive analytics are calculations that are based on current and historical data that delivers predictions about upcoming events. It has been around for a while, although, as Doug points out, it has only recently become reliable and affordable for most companies, especially SMEs. Nonetheless, there are still a few myths that need to be corrected.


Will Security Features Of New DataStax Enterprise Boost NoSQL Adoption?
Apart from the features that are provided to the entire Cassandra NoSQL community, the product also provides certain advanced security features to the Enterprises. External authentication allows DSE to provide single sign on capability to all Cassandra, Hadoop, and Solr nodes in a DSE cluster. Transparent data encryption and data auditing enable enterprises to keep the data from falling into wrong hands. Visual management of clusters and database objects eases the work of administrators to a great extent.


Banks Using Big Data to Discover ‘New Silk Roads’
Information about checking accounts, mortgages and wealth management for the same individual were contained in independent information management systems, preventing banks from leveraging considerable analytic capabilities that could have helped account representatives provide customers with better service.


Interpreting Technology Hype
When new technologies make bold promises, how do you discern the hype from what’s commercially viable? And when will such claims pay off, if at all? ... Gartner Hype Cycle methodology gives you a view of how a technology or application will evolve over time, providing a sound source of insight to manage its deployment within the context of your specific business goals.


Why People Adopt Or Wait For New Technology
Instead of thinking about ‘early adopters’ and ‘normals’ as if they are two homogeneous groups, I think it’s better to look at the motivations that trigger someone to buy into a new technology or solution at various points in the release timeline. Here’s some of our research findings, as we try to understand when people take to new stuff:



Quote for the day:

"Man does not weave this web of life. He is merely a strand of it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself." -- Chief Seattle

February 07, 2013

The Continuous Delivery Maturity Model
The principles and methods of Continuous Delivery are rapidly gaining recognition as a successful strategy for true business agility. For many organizations the question is no longer “why?”, but rather “how?” How do you start with Continuous Delivery, and how do you transform your organization to ensure sustainable results. This Maturity Model aims to give structure and understanding to some of the key aspects you need to consider when adopting Continuous Delivery in your organization.


Governance, risk, compliance: Four things to ponder about GRC initiatives
The GRC road is long and arduous, but by pondering four key items (before even selecting an enterprise GRC offering) you can form a framework that will eventually lead to an environment where you can accurately determine what security controls to implement, how to gauge their effectiveness, and how to optimally support those controls (to many of you this may sound more fiction that fact).


Free cost-benefit analysis template examples for CIOs
SearchCIO.com searched the Web for free cost-benefit analysis templates that could tally planned project costs and calculate key performance metrics, such as ROI, net-present value internal rate of return and payback periods. Using these indicators, IT organizations can make more informed business decisions about where to invest their teams' energies, time and precious budget dollars.


The Soft Skill that Drives Your Analytics Team
Across all analytic positions, the top workplace characteristic found in the survey was “curiosity.” The best and brightest enterprise analytics teams will be able to spot those curious candidates or interested in-house employees for growing data teams, says Greta Roberts, IIA faculty and CEO of Talent Analytics.


Oracle Promises To 'Fix' Java
"The plan for Java security is really simple," Smith said. "It's to get Java fixed up -- number one -- and then, number two, to communicate our efforts widely. We really can't have one without the other. No amount of talking or smoothing over is going to make anybody happy or do anything for us. We have got to fix Java..." Oracle has been working to improve Java security, Smith said, though much of that work has not been publicized.


Python gets a big data boost from DARPA
DARPA (the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) has awarded $3 million to software provider Continuum Analytics to help fund the development of Python's data processing and visualization capabilities for big data jobs. The money will go toward developing new techniques for data analysis and for visually portraying large, multi-dimensional data sets.


Project management lessons learned from a vacation
The biggest learning on my part is that I need to worry less about thing going wrong in my absence. My team is made up of some very capable people and are able to provide good guidance on how projects should be executed. I will probably look to see how I can take advantage of that to get some of them to provide more leadership. From a personal point of view, the vacation has enabled me to recharge my batteries and come back with renewed energy. I will also look to ensure my team gets the same opportunity.


CIO: Innovation driven by IT simplification processes
By simplifying its technology environment, Northwestern Mutual creates value in three ways: generating financial capacity, managing risk better and increasing use cases for newer technologies. These innovations, Schaefer explains, are powered by the convergence of cloud, mobile, analytics and social technologies.


Singapore to benefit from 'app economy'
"The kitchen is ready with the recipe and ingredients, and the dining room has guests, but you still have to do the cooking. That is something very important [to note]," Krishnan said. He was speaking to ZDNet ahead of the inaugural PlugFest International Programming Competition, which was jointly created by GDG Singapore and another non-profit, IEEE Computer Society Singapore.


Microsoft's cybersecurity report rethinks global web landscape
Published by Paul Nicholas, senior director Security at Microsoft Trustworthy Computing, Aaron Kleiner and Kevin Sullivan at George Washington University’s Homeland Security Policy Institute, the report, titled "Measuring the Impact of Policy on Global Cybersecurity," focuses on how changing global demographics and the rising numbers of online users are an important factor in creating and enforcing protective policies.



Quote for the day:

"I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel." --Maya Angelou, American author and poet

February 06, 2013

Smart security spending requires assigning a value to information
The harsh reality is that CISOs are at a competitive disadvantage because, while cyber criminals have well-developed business plans, CISOs do not. Forrester has spoken to many CISOs who tell us they do "a pretty good job at budgeting," but struggle to define a clear business case for security spending. When pressed further, however, most ultimately admit they are not sure whether they are really good at what they do or are just lucky.


MySQL 5.6 tackles NoSQL competitors
MySQL now offers a way to more quickly access data, by way of the Memcached API (application programming interface). MySQL doesn't actually use Memcached but harnesses its API -- familiar to many system administrators -- as an interface to fetch data directly from the database, without going through the database engine. The approach can deliver data up to nine times more quickly, for data that does not need to be parsed by SQL.


jOOPL: object-oriented programming for JavaScript
The worst part is JavaScript is not an object-oriented programming language: it is prototype-oriented, which is a weak approach to leverage few features of a full-fledged object-oriented platform. ... "jOOPL" stands for "JavaScript Object-Oriented Programming Library". It is just that: a light-weight, easy-to-use and just object-oriented programming library allowing pure JavaScript to leverage more advanced features


Bad Kaspersky antivirus update prevents business and home users from accessing websites
A faulty antivirus update issued by Kaspersky Lab on Monday left many of its home and business customers unable to access any websites on their computers. Systems administrators using Kaspersky Endpoint Security (KES) on their corporate networks started reporting the problem on Kaspersky's support forum on Monday afternoon, Eastern Time. The reports kept piling up until late in the evening.


BI and Mobile Users
In this video Cindi Howson, founder of BIScorecard, and Jim Ericson, editorial director of Information-Management.com, discuss observations about increased interest in bringing BI to new classes of users and how mobile improves adoption of BI and dashboards at the executive level


Just Call Someone Already
Much worse than the inefficiency of using e-mail to set up phone calls are the missed opportunities and unnecessary misunderstandings that come when we use e-mail instead of phone calls. That happens far more often than is prudent. We use e-mail to avoid conflict. We use it to avoid feeling uncomfortable. To overcome shyness, inferiority complexes, doubts, apprehensions, and all manner of other psychological and emotional problems.


Managers Who Use KPIs For Evil, Not Good
Usually those KPIs are not within the complete control of the individuals they measure, and it leads to two negative consequences: people will either fudge the figures or scam the system. And this is exactly the opposite of what we want, which is to improve performance. It certainly is a tough one, because trying to make a big-KPI-stick-weilding manager do a 180 degree turn-around is no small task. We have to aim our bullets right at the heart of the problem.


After WCIT, US Lawmakers Look for Ways to Advance Internet Freedom
During WCIT, 89 countries voted to approve a treaty, which calls on member states to "collectively endeavor" to ensure the security of networks and to "take necessary measures" to prevent spam. That vague language could lead some nations to snoop on Internet communications or limit free speech, critics have said. The conference was a "rude awakening" for the U.S. and its allies pushing for an uncensored Internet, McDowell said.


5 Years Journey of TOGAF in China is Just a Beginning for EA
As an enterprise architecture framework introduced in China in 2007 by the team of Mr. Yao, trainees of end users found that the content is just too high-level and conceptual. Also the trainers only went through what has been written on the textbook without industry-specific cases or practice related information, which is not relevant and hard to apply.


ISpirt to co-exist with Nasscom
"Software companies are not breaking away from NASSCOM, but forming a think tank to co-exist with the industry body," clarifies Sharad Sharma, one among the founders of iSpirt. "In fact, NASSCOM is an industry body with members and we differentiate ourselves as a think-tank that include 'founders' and 'fellows' who support the group. ..." emphasizes Sharma.



Quote for the day:

"I don't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened of the old ones." -- John Cage

February 05, 2013

Analysis: Microsoft To Shift Its Focus to Tablets and the Cloud
Microsoft is responding to the mobile threat posed by Android and iOS devices by putting its Windows 8 and Windows RT operating systems on tablets, with the Microsoft Surface Windows 8 Pro device expected to arrive on Feb. 9. The company is also revving up a faster software release cadence, especially for its Office 365 cloud-enabled products.


Busting the Top 5 Myths of Cloud-Based Authentication
Analysts predict that more than 50% of enterprises will choose cloud-based services as the delivery option for new or refreshed user authentication implementations within the next few years. However, as with many ground-breaking innovations, this trend has also brought about some common myths. During this live webinar you will hear Jason Hart, VP Cloud Solutions, de-mystify the top 5 most common myths about migrating to cloud-based authentication


SSD onslaught: Hard drives poised for double-digit revenue drop
HDDs overall will maintain market dominance because of their cost advantage over SSDs, particularly when higher densities are involved and dollars per gigabyte are calculated, iSuppli said. HDD costs and pricing are significantly lower than SSDs. And, the average selling price for HDDs is expected to decline further 7% this year.


NextGen CIO mentor Q&A: Henry Shiner
Starting out as a McDonald's crew member at Yagoona, New South Wales, then moving on via an honours degree in chemical engineering and several senior business management gigs, Henry Shiner "came home" to McDonald's ANZ in 2007 as VP/CIO. In this video, Shiner--a mentor in ZDNet's NextGen CIO program--shares his passions for business, mentoring McDonalds' staff, cooking, and for exploiting technology to improve the McDonalds customer experience.


Aligning a cloud computing project with your enterprise mission
Companies adopting a cloud model make the mistake of opting for a vendor with the lowest price for their chosen type of cloud service. This is a big mistake; an enterprise needs to align its mission with the best cloud service provider, taking into account three aspects of the provider's offering: software, application availability and data requirements.


Consumerization of IT is Bigger Than Mobile
One of the challenges that IT faces today is the ability to control departments inside the organizations from going to Amazon-like providers, swiping their cards and getting instant access to a virtual machine that they can then use for whatever business initiative they have. When told not to do that, they ask for a similar service from IT, one that is as quick, effective and seamless, one which IT cannot deliver today.


Implementing a Generic Object Pool in .NET
Object pools are everywhere. Every database provider have its own ConnectionPool for managing and reusing connections, .NET framework is provided with a robust built-in ThreadPool for managing and reusing threads, sometimes a Memory Pool for buffers is used to save allocations, and the list goes on. Whenever a part of an application performance is bound to its resources, specifically creating and destroying them, Object pool can offer a significant performance boost.


Operational Intelligence – Is This the End Game for Big Data?
You could say that for the past 20 years we talked the data analytics talk but didn’t really walk the data analytics walk. It isn’t that companies didn’t do data analytics; they did. Many people were employed as data analysts or used data analyst tools as part of their job. In truth though, it wasn’t until Google that we had a company run by data analytics. And let’s not kid ourselves on this: intelligent business innovation drove much of what Google did, but data analytics drove a good deal of their activity and innovation.


Who is the Decision Coach on Your Business Team?
The best leaders I’ve worked with and for are not only good decision-makers, they are effective decision-coaches. They understand the importance of teaching their teams how to navigate the pitfalls and complexities of decision-making in pursuit of the best results for the organization. ... At the end of the day, we are all evaluated on the efficacy of our decisions and those of our teams. Good managers and leaders deliberately teach their teams to navigate this complex, trap-filled environment in pursuit of the right decisions and ever improving outcomes.


Outsourcing management "as a service"
The companies that succeeded had invested in building a business-led strategy, strong governance, investments in mature outsourcing competencies, and dedicated outsourcing management organisation (Program Management Office, PMO). Most importantly, they recognised outsourcing management as a key differentiator and core competence.



Quote for the day:

"To attain knowledge, add things every day. To attain wisdom, subtract things every day." -- Laozi, Chinese philosopher

February 04, 2013

Privacy groups call on U.S. government to stop lobbying against EU data law changes
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), and the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC)—including more than a dozen others—are seeking a meeting with the U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and the U.S. Acting Secretary of Commerce Rebecca Blank, to ensure that new European data law proposals are bolstered and not weakened.


Cloud Infographic: Big Data and The Future Of Healthcare
The healthcare industry has been making its move toward technology, putting iPads and tablets into the hands of healthcare professionals and now, the latest big move has been adopting the concept of cloud computing to organize, share data and protect patient information and healthcare data from being tampered with or lost. Some might be wondering why medical professionals have waited this long to “hop on the cloud.”


Test Your Mobile Website With DeviceAnywhere For Free
Recently Keynote has released a free tool for remote, real device interactive testing; giving users a real view of their mobile websites on select smart phones in real-time via a simple Web interface. DeviceAnywhere Free combines the ease of the cloud with the power of Keynote's global infrastructure of remote devices for mobile and Web testing and monitoring, so that Web developers, testers and content owners can begin testing immediately on real mobile devices.


Anonymous posts over 4000 U.S. bank executive credentials
A spreadsheet has been published on a .gov website allegedly containing login information and credentials, IP addresses, and contact information of American bank executives. If true, it could be that Anonymous has released banker information that could be connected to Federal Reserve computers, including contact information and cell phone numbers for U.S. bank Presidents, Vice Presidents, COO's Branch Managers, VP's and more.


5 security risks of moving data in BYOD era
Ammar Hindi, Asia-Pacific managing director of SourceFire, pointed out that new technologies such as the enterprise cloud, cloud-based apps, social media, and high-powered mobile devices offer more ways to access corporate data. In turn, moving data across different devices and networks is increasing security risks to the corporate network and opens sensitive corporate data to leaks and attacks.


In the future, your credit rating might be determined by what you post on social networks. Douglas Merill, Google’s former chief information officer and the founder of ZestFinance—a startup that leverages "big data" to provide credit scoring information—told the New York Times last year that “we feel like all data is credit data, we just don’t know how to use it yet.”


How The Bing Team Built Apps For Windows 8
Microsoft's Jigar Thakkar writes, "Several members of the Bing team formed an apps team approximately one year ago to deliver a set of apps powered by Bing for Windows 8. The focus of these apps is to keep users informed by delivering fast and fluid experiences, with content from multiple sources." He further added that all these apps were optimized for touch as well as tablet devices.


Podcast: Kabam founder on scaling globally and designing for different platforms
Online game company Kabam may have scaled globally too quickly, admits the company’s founder, Kevin Chou, in this podcast interview. But startups looking to take on the world could learn a lot from this chat with Chou who explains what companies need know (hint: don’t just lump everyone outside the U.S. together). Chou also talks about the role of design as his company changed from being Facebook-centric to more mobile.


12 Ways to Fuel Your Own Fire
Burned-out is easy. Neglect your energy and you’ll go out like an unstoked fire. Fire always cools without fuel. Ten years ago, Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz wrote, The Power of Full Engagement: Managing Energy, Not Time, is the Key to High Performance and Personal Renewal. It still sells like hotcakes. They wrote: “The number of hours in a day is fixed, but the quantity and quality of energy available to us is not.”


Microsoft Tells Big Data Programmers to Try F#
The language is geared to data-oriented programming as well as parallel programming and algorithmic development. F# 3.0, featuring support for large-scale schematized data and APIs, was released last year along with an update to Visual F# tools in Microsoft's Visual Studio 2012 IDE. ... InfoWorld Editor at Large Paul Krill recently spoke to Syme for perspectives on what Microsoft is trying to achieve with the language.



Quote for the day:

"It's not whether you get knocked down, it's whether you get up. " -- Vince Lombardi

February 03, 2013

Introduction to WebSockets
Chris Beams - a senior technical staff member at VMware and a core Spring Framework committer, Gunnar Hillert - a member of technical staff (MTS) at SpringSource and Rossen Stoyanchev - a Spring Framework developer make a thorough introduction to WebSockets and provide practical advice on using it in applications.


Creating a Simple Bloom Filter
You may have never heard of a bloom filter before but you've probably interacted with one at some point. For instance if you use Chrome, Chrome has a bloom filter of malicious URLs. When you visit a website it checks if that domain is in the filter. This prevents you from having to ping Google's servers every time you visit a website to check if it's malicious or not. Large databases such as Cassandra and Hadoop use bloom filters to see if it should do a large query or not.


Cloud computing law puts Canadian users at risk of snooping by American spies
In a report commissioned by the European Parliament, former Microsoft chief privacy adviser Caspar Bowden reveals, “it is lawful in the U.S. to conduct purely political surveillance on foreigners’ data accessible in U.S. clouds,” operated by U.S. firms such as Google, Microsoft, Apple, IBM and others. One sweeping provision of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) authorizes the targeting of, “foreign-based political organization(s)... or foreign territory that relates to... conduct of the foreign affairs of the United States.”


How Oracle Uses Big Data to Improve the Customer Experience
Customer experience management (CEM) programs are no stranger to the use of data. CEM professionals use data to gain insight about their customers to help improve the customer experience and optimize customer loyalty. Not surprisingly, CEM programs typically rely on customer feedback as their main data source (e.g., social media, customer emails, tech support notes, formal customer surveys). Customer feedback data, however, are only one type of business data that are used to improve business decisions.


Executive Insight: Breaking down the walls of the data centre
Martyn Warwick talks with John Dunne, the CTO of pioneering Irish start-up Intune, about how Software Defined Networks (SDN) will provide the means to simplify and control complex switches in the age of Big Data and will bring together the IT and telecoms worlds in ways never seen before.


5 ways to find your team's hidden talents
Even if you're leading an overqualfied crew, you're best served by trying to match people with work that requires as much of their brainpower as possible. Unchallenged workers are often unhappy workers, and unhappy workers leave when they get a better offer. Here are some ideas for finding and using your team's hidden talents.


The Big Data Challenge: 10 Tips for Telcos
The overall theory is that by extracting useful information from the information that is currently hidden and untapped in many systems and networks, CSPs can provide a better customer experience, develop more targeted and intelligent marketing programs and develop new business models that will ultimately enable them to maximize their top and bottom lines.


ASP.NET: Truly Understanding ViewState
Yet, here is a very good, in-depth article on ViewState that doesn't even mention it! Then there's this W3Schools article on ViewState that seems to indicate that posted form values are maintained via ViewState, but that's not true. (Don't believe me? Disable ViewState on that textbox in their example and run it again). And it's the #1 Google Search Result for "ASP.NET ViewState". Here is ASP.NET Documentation on MSDN that describes how Controls maintain state across postbacks. The documentation isn't wrong per say, but it makes a statement that isn't entirely correct


Breaking Down the Kinds of CIOs
According to the infographic below, there are five types of CIOs namely The Enforcer, The Mediator, The Evangelist, The Dinosaur and The Strategic Consultant. Take a look at the infographic which comes courtesy of Brogade to get a glimpse of the characteristics of each type as well the survival rating.


Four essentials of a good single sign-on strategy
Organizations implementing SSO, particularly to systems that hold sensitive data, should implement risk-appropriate authentication methods with the SSO system. Solutions aren't 'one size fits all' and solutions which provide SSO to all target systems may be deemed too expensive. Therefore, a best practice is to identify the tactical and strategic approaches that reduce enough of the problem space over time and within budget.


Sharing Code in WCF without Code Generation
The basic design pattern is so simple it is a wonder why the proxy generator even exists. (Well not entirely; proxy generation is still needed when consuming a non-WCF service.) As you can see, all you need to do is subclass ClientBase with the service interface you wish to implement and expose the Channel property. The constructors are recommended, but optional.


Quote for the day:

"Concentration comes out of a combination of confidence and hunger." -- Arnold Palmer

February 02, 2013

HP's Building an Avatar to Manage Your Mobile Connections
Their idea is to give individual users an identity that transcends the many smartphones, tablets and other devices they may carry, as well as all the Wi-Fi and cellular networks they use in different situations. HP's avatar would pick the best combination of hardware and network for each situation and automatically set up and take down connections, said HP Fellow Paul Congdon, who works in the company's Networking & Communications Lab.


The Datomic Information Model
Datomic considers a database to be an information system, where information is a set of facts, and facts are things that have happened. Since one can't change the past, this implies that the databaseaccumulates facts, rather than updates places, and that while the past may be forgotten, it is immutable. Thus if someone 'changes' their address, Datomic stores the fact that they have a new address without replacing the old fact (it has simply been retracted as of this point in time).


Predictive Modeling Now “Essential” to Insurers
Findings from a new Towers Watson survey indicate that P&C insurers are seeing those opportunities in their data; and according to the “P&C Insurance Predictive Modeling Survey” of small, midsize and large personal and commercial lines carriers, the capture and transformation of data into useful information has turned into a critical differentiator of performance within the marketplace.


Cyberwarfare evolves faster than rules of engagement
As the rhetoric heats up over cyberwar -- including warnings that attacks on the U.S. are imminent and alarms that the U.S. has escalated the risk via malware attacks on Iran's nuclear program -- the rules of engagement are missing in action. The current framework of international law and treaties doesn't adequately address cyberconflict, Jody Westby, CEO of Global Cyber Risk, said Monday at the Techonomy 12 conference.


IronKey Workspace review: Windows 8 PC on a stick
IronKey's new USB is certified to use Windows To Go -- an enterprise feature of Windows 8 -- to deliver a fully portable desktop. Windows To Go can be booted up from a USB-connected external drive on PCs that meet the Windows 7 or Windows 8 certification requirements, regardless of the operating system running on the PC. While Imation doesn't promote this feature, users can also boot up this USB on any Intel-based Apple computer.


Enterprise software wars: 5 points of advice for CIOs
In short, software is eating the world. My own theory is that we are in the middle of a dramatic and broad technological and economic shift in which software companies are poised to take over large swathes of the economy. More and more major businesses and industries are being run on software and delivered as online services--from movies to agriculture to national defense.


IBM Connect – Impactful Ideas, But Messaging Still in Motion
What IBM has not yet been able to do – even as it develops and promotes concepts like “Social Business” – is be consistent in its communication of those concepts. If 30 or so customers and partners at IBM’s own defining event cannot articulate or agree on the meaning of IBM’s core themes, that suggests that IBM has room for improvement in its communication and consistency.


Fail Fast Or Fail Smart?
The practice of being able to conduct quick, cheap and relatively painless tests, experiments or research exercises in order to gain invaluable insights, feedback, solutions to hypotheses and the like becomes vital in order to rethink, close the loop and ultimately “pivot” or change course based on integrating the new lessons into the model.


Visual Studio Gets Git
This past Wednesday Microsoft announced native support in Visual Studio for the Git distributed version control system (DVCS). Git has long been familiar in the open source world since it was created by Linus Torvalds to support the development of the Linux kernel. Since its release in 2005 it has grown in popularity and can be found supporting countless private and public projects. 


The CTO Role Broken Down
There is a big misconception about who should be a CTO. A CTO shouldn’t necessarily be the smartest code developer because, as a CTO, they must by definition be an integrator and a manager of people. CTO’s have to understand the entire organization. Specifically, they need to understand what all of the technical parts of the team are up to, what all the players in the organization are up to, and what the programs are that are underway.



Quote for the day:

"Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat." --F. Scott Fitzgerald, American writer

February 01, 2013

Realities of the Enterprise Data Scientist
An ideal data scientist – it’s always hard to find an “ideal” anything – would for me have four equal parts: 25 percent business knowledge, 25 percent analytics expertise, 25 percent technological capabilities and 25 percent visualization. You need someone who understands the business issues and the questions business is asking; that’s where it should start. Then, basically, the same person should be proficient enough to understand what techniques we should be using to address that business concern. ... There’s obviously a challenge to find someone who has an experience or background in all four.


A Smart Card Framework for .NET
This article demonstrates how to use the interoperability features of .NET and use them to write a simple framework to use a Smart Card in your applications. A Smart Card is a small embedded device that receives commands through a card reader using the PC/SC Win32 API. If you want to use this API, you will need a Smart Card reader to use a Smart Card such as a SIM card.


An Introduction to a Multi Structured Ecosystem
In this video, Teradata CMO and a chief data scientist discuss how to make sense of the new paradigm shift called big data. They discuss how a multi-structured ecosystem will allow data scientists and companies make sense of new these new sources of big data.


2013 CIO Playbook - 5 Ways IT Must Work Differently in 2013
In today’s world, more and more CIOs are starting to take on broader roles within the business. In fact, according to a recent Gartner survey, 77% of CIOs have significant responsibilities outside IT. This stands in stark contrast to the situation even a few years ago when most CIOs had no responsibilities outside IT. The CIO and IT have an opportunity to have a much broader impact on the business in 2013 and beyond, but taking full advantage will require working quite differently than in the past.


S'pore banks resisting NAF signup due to hassle, control
According to Chai Chin Loon, COO of Assurity Trusted Solutions, the subsidiary of the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA) set up to oversee operations of the NAF, only two banks--RHB Bank and ICICI Bank--have signed up for OneKey, the 2FA token of the NAF so far. This is because banks have security and regulatory "concerns" when it comes to signing up for the NAF, he explained, speaking to ZDNet in an interview Friday.


12 Common IT Hiring Mistakes and How to Avoid Them
Bringing a new hire into you IT department is a double-edged sword. ... That's why finding the right candidate is so important. As a hiring manager, you need to do everything you can to minimize the risk throughout the hiring process. Here are 12 common mistakes IT managers make, along with advice on how to take a more successful approach.


Sterile and messy lessons in corporate strategy
As A.G. Lafley and Roger Martin write in Playing To Win : “Far too few companies have a clear, choiceful and compelling winning strategy in place.” Worse, executives who do come up with a successful approach often become trapped. To quote from another business book, Strategic Transformation: “What was previously a source of strength becomes the opposite – the invisible bars of a prison from which it is very hard to escape.”


Android's (quiet) killer feature
Android's sharing capability, known to developers as a form of "intent," is about more than merely sharing in the social-oriented sense of the word. It's a way for you to quickly and easily pass data between applications -- anything from a Web page to a chunk of text or even an image.


US government debates action over Chinese cyberattacks
It is not just China which is of concern as a number of cyberattacks are also traced back to Africa and Russia. Newly-discovered Red October, for example, targets very specific organizations in order to steal data and gather intelligence. The high-profile targets and origins of the code have led Kaspersky Labs to "strongly believe" it originated in Russia, and may have been state-sponsored.


13 useful add-ins for Excel and Word 2013 -- most free
For some reason, Microsoft has taken to calling the mini-programs that you can install into their Office applications“apps.” Functionally, though, most of these are similar to web browser add-ons -- in the sense that they add to or enhance the feature set of the main program. Here are the most useful ones for the latest versions of Excel and Word. Unless specifically noted, the apps are free as of Feb. 1 (some are only free for a limited time) or have a free as well as paid version.



Quote for the day:

"The most important thing about goals is having one." -- Geoffry F. Abert

January 31, 2013

Turning to Big Data for Security
IBM isn't the only company looking to Big Data for security help. Security firm RSA also announced this week the availability of RSA Security Analytics. In PR tongue, the new offering is "a transformational security monitoring and investigative solution designed to help organizations defend their digital assets against today's most sophisticated internal and external threats."


Optimizing the cloud for the BYOD movement
To build a browser-based BYOD cloud strategy, all applications must be exposed using URLs. Most modern software tools and nearly all cloud services work this way, but legacy applications that are hosted on Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) platforms may include nonstandard interfaces. Some companies have also adopted Web services interfaces (using SOAP), which can be difficult to support on mobile devices, particularly if you can't target a single device type.


Could Security Woes Eventually Kill Client-Side Java? Analysts Weigh In...
"It's like all Java developers were just diagnosed with a devastating, incurable disease," Gualtieri said. "What are you going to do? Bite your tongue, keep your head down, and keep writing code." Al Hilwa, program director at industry analyst firm IDC, points out that any add-on to a browser is going to increase the surface area for security attacks. And Oracle complicates things by bundling the Java browser extension with the Java runtime environment (JRE).


JMS Message Delivery Reliability and Acknowledgement Patterns
During the coordination of message delivery, to ensure that the messages are delivered without problems acknowledgements for messages are very important. Thus there is a close connection between message acknowledgements and delivery reliability. In this article we will explore message acknowledgement and delivery reliability patterns with respect to Java Message Service (JMS). The scenarios are described using WSO2 Message Broker as the intermediate broker.


9 steps that help defend against DDOS
Attacks can be launched from multiple platforms, creating a distributed denial of service attack, or DDOS. Although they usually do not damage the target systems or compromise data, they can damage reputations, cost money and interfere with carrying out missions. Specifics will vary with each attack, but the U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team notes that, “In general, the best practice for mitigating DDOS attacks involves advanced preparation.” Here are some recommendations for advance preparation from US-CERT


Be a More Gracious Leader: 12 Ways
Today's business environment demands people to step up and be aggressive, strong leaders, in order to get ahead and drive their companies and careers forward. In that powerful march to success sometimes there is so much focus on being strong and assertive, people forget the human side. Here are 12 leadership qualities paired with their gracious counterparts. I'll leave it to you to find the combination that works in your world so others can perceive and respect you as a gracious individual.


A Practice Aid for Records Retention
Bits, bytes, megabytes, gigabytes, terabytes and petabytes all are common terms and, according to IT research firm IDC, data are doubling every 18 months. The decreasing cost of storage space (e.g., hard drives) has encouraged people to keep more data. However, the hidden cost of data storage comes with the entire infrastructure necessary to ensure the availability, security, confidentiality and privacy of the data stored.


10 Absolutely Free Project Management Softwares For SMBs
Software Project Management is the art and science of planning and leading software projects. There are countless tools/software's available in the market that makes project management simple and more efficient. Here is a list of 10 Project Management tools that are completely free for the benefit of SMB's who are on a shoe string budget. Some of the tools are Open Source and have a very accomplished feature set. So go ahead and pick the one that suits you the best.


Govt CIOs to be a reality soon in India
If the recommendations of the recently-formed expert committee, headed by Nandan Nilekani, chairman of UIDAI, are to be seen, CIOs may very soon assume the charge in different states and play an instrumental role in bringing efficiency into the government's e-governance plan. The Expert Committee was formed to look into the modalities of HR crunch faced by the NeGP plan.


What Is Executive Presence?
In today’s world, the results that were good enough last year aren’t good enough this year. This year’s results won’t be good enough next year. For leaders, then, it’s a continual state of getting different results. As Einstein would likely tell us, different results require different actions. That means that leaders need to be aware of when they need to pick up and let go of skills, behaviors and mindsets even if they’ve worked for them in the past.



Quote for the day:

"Ninety-nine percent of failures come from people who have the habit of making excuses." -- George W. Carver