Daily Tech Digest by Kannan Subbiah

August 06, 2013

W3C defines local Web storage API
You won't be able to use the Web storage API for large documents or data sets. The W3C document recommends that each Web site or service limit the Web Storage data to 5MBs. The actual amount of local Web Storage on your device varies from Web browser to Web browser and even from version to version. That's still enough to make HTML5 applications much more useful.

Alternative project management styles are faster than multitasking
The best alternative, if you can manage it, is to commit to just one project for the duration of the iteration. This is called project portfolio management. Some group of decision makers in the organization decides which project is number 1, which project is number 2, which project is number 3, and so on down the line. They assign the projects to the teams and let the teams know the rank order of the projects.

U.S. cloud industry stands to lose $35 billion amid PRISM fallout
"The United States has both the most to gain and the most to lose," writes report author Daniel Castro, citing job growth and revenue dependent on the U.S. exporting cloud computing services. The "low end" scenario estimates assumes the U.S. loses about 10 percent of its foreign market to European or Asian competitors, or $21.5 billion over the next three years.

US IT worker files hiring lawsuit against Infosys
The lawsuit, citing comments from former Infosys employees, alleges that more than 90 percent of the company's 15,000 U.S. employees are foreign workers, with most of them from South Asia. The company is using H-1B visas to hire foreign workers "to performA jobs for which there are qualified American workers available," the lawsuit said.

Enterprise Private PaaS Adoption and Differentiation
While Public PaaS only requires a simple, on-demand subscription process and uploading code into the Cloud, Private PaaS requires transforming enterprise IT deployment models, monitoring and management systems, operation processes, funding models, and platform configuration options. Changing internal IT processes, infrastructure, and people skills is not easy, and often, complicated IT initiatives do not obtain the initially promoted lofty goals.

NuoDB 1.2 is Packed with Previews and Fixes
Note that our new "Preview" offerings are just that - a look at what's coming, a.ka. beta features. These will give you the chance to start using them now, knowing they are far enough along in development to try, but not quite 100% of where we expect to take them. Some will require a Beta program sign-up for participation, and some you can go straight to download and use now.

One in every five tablets will be an enterprise device by 2017
Enterprise tablets will make up around 12 percent of the 186 million tablets that Forrester expects to be in use in 2013. However, business adoption for internal and customer-facing purposes will drive tablets to become 18 percent all tablets in use by 2017, according to the company's latest global business and consumer tablet forecast update.

Linda Rising presents more practical advice about the Agile mindset
Rising described the growth mindset as an "Agile mindset" because in Agile environments, we are encouraged to learn from our mistakes. The idea of failing fast and improving, as promoted with Agile teams, is aligned with the growth mindset. Those who practice this Agile way of thinking do indeed continue to grow and learn more readily than those with the fixed mindset. If we think we can grow, we do. If we think we can't, we don't.

Microsoft Going All In with Hadoop and Hortonworks
"It is a bit different for us," Clark admitted, to work on such an open source project in view of its strong brands in the data platform space, such as SQL Server and Excel. But he said the move made sense for Microsoft and Hortonworks was the best partner. "We're putting our shoulder now firmly behind their distribution on Windows," he said.

Wrangling WebRTC: Challenges and Opportunities for Real-time Communication
Gustavo Garcia, Architect at TokBox explores actual use cases for real time communication in verticals ranging from telepresence to healthcare, where WebRTC fits and where it falls short, and what developers can do.

Quote for the day:

"The secret to success is to start from scratch and keep on scratching" -- Dennis Green

August 05, 2013

Disappointing News about SQL Server 2014
What's not fair, however, is to assume that a 16-core server running SQL Server Standard Edition only needs (or can only use) up to 4GB of Memory per core. In fact, that idea is patently ludicrous—given server hardware configurations today. It's also a bit galling to the spirit of SQL Server licensing that has existed in the past where customers paid to license the amount of computing power they were harnessing with SQL Server

PayPal co-founder on 'putting data to work' in healthcare with Glow app
"It turns out to be, as many things are in health, an information problem," Levchin reflected. Thus, Levchin declared Glow, which launched earlier this year, as "the first attempt" in making fertility (and later other medical treatments) more affordable thanks to information being made more readily available and actionable. "The fundamental truism of data-driven companies is you either talk about it or take the principal risk," Levchin remarked.

12 predictive analytics screw-ups
"Data mining is the art of making comparisons," says Dean Abbott, president of Abbott Analytics, which was retained for the project. Because the company had rules in place that always applied the exact same actions, Abbott had no idea which sequence would work better for collecting debts. "You need historical examples," he says. And if you don't have those examples, you need to create them through a series of intentionally planned experiments so that you can gather that data.

The trouble with VDI
there's the eternal network bandwidth problem. When your users are in the office, with Gigabit Ethernet and sufficient 802.11n Wi-Fi, delivering a solid desktop experience is easy. But, when your workers are often on the road with three to five Mbps DSL connections or over-subscribed Wi-Fi access points, it's another story. More often than not, there's insufficient bandwidth to deliver a quality experience.

Password Verification Security Loophole
Leighton Nelson asked an interesting Oracle security question via Twitter yesterday regarding Oracle’s built-in password verification functions and whether or not it can be bypassed by changing the way you create a user. Steve Karam says "Yes" and demonstrates the same through this blog post. As he explains any one with create / alter user privilege can bypass the password verification.

DataStax helps enterprises offload Oracle
“20 of the Fortune 100 have moved from Oracle to Datastax. We are a better fit for modern applications.” According to Ellis, relational database technologies such as Oracle are inadequate for powering modern online line-of-business applications. ... One of the companies using DataStax is eBay, which is running 250 TByte Cassandra and DataStax Enterprise cluster. Other businesses using DataStax include the movie streaming service, Netflix and Thomson Reuters.

Traffic Manager Overview
Although Traffic Manager conceptually routes traffic to a given service, the actual process is slightly different because it uses DNS. No actual service traffic routes through Traffic Manager. The user’s computer calls the cloud service directly when Traffic Manager resolves the DNS entry for the company domain to the IP address of the cloud service.

Three things Oracle has done to become a big cloud player
The moves are not just significant for Oracle; the partnerships that the company has garnered are significant to the partnering with Microsoft and Salesforce, too. And they’ll also reverberate across the industry to competing companies such as Amazon Web Services and SAP, predicts Holger Mueller, vice president at Constellation Research who recently published a report about these developments.

Tech Industry Leaders Appeal for Laxer Intellectual Property Laws
"They use the cost of litigation as a club to extort settlements out of companies that actually do things," Van Lindberg, vice president of intellectual property at the open source cloud provider Rackspace, told members of the Judiciary Committee's subcommittee on IP and the Internet. "If there is something that you could do to encourage innovation in America, it is to stop the patent troll problem and to really help us with this litigation abuse."

Researchers reveal methods behind car hack at Defcon
"If the only thing that keeps our cars safe is that no one bothers to do this kind of research, then they're not really secure," Miller said. "I think it's better to lay it all out, find the problems and start talking about them." However, fixing the issues won't be easy because most of them are there by design, according to Miller. Car manufacturers won't be able to just issue a patch, the researcher said. "They'll have to change the way these systems are made."

Quote for the day:

"Success or failure in business is caused more by the mental attitude even than by mental capacities" -- Walter Scott

August 04, 2013

How to build a Roadmap – Sequence
Developing a balanced well-crafted road-map is based on the “best available” ordered set of actions subject to the set of priorities (and constraints) already agreed upon. When you think about this across multiple dimensions it does get a little overwhelming so I think the best thing to do is break the larger components into something we can attack in pieces and merge together later.

Visionary companies are driving next generation enterprise architecture in China – are you ready?
Contributing to more than 60% of total GDP in China, small and medium enterprises (SMEs) have always sought to simplify their IT operation as much as possible, and at the same time scale it up when business expands as quickly as possible. IaaS solutions appear to be a perfect match for SMEs; however IT professionals have concerns about the security and data privacy over the operations by other companies.

Virtual Panel: Using Java in Low Latency Environments
The difference in performance between Java and C++ is so close that it's not a black and white decision based solely on speed. Improvements in GC techniques, JIT optimizations, and managed runtimes have made traditional Java weaknesses with respect to performance into some very compelling strengths that are not easy to ignore.

3 Different Approaches to Enterprise Manufacturing Software
While there is usually a need to simplify and consolidate processes where possible, it’s also important to integrate key processes and ensure that the systems that support manufacturing operations are actually helping to improve the business and not just feeding other systems and people in the organization with information that may not be necessary. This takes a tactical approach, and depending on your existing investments, the approach may vary.

IT Management: How do your leadership skills measure up?
Today’s marketplace is in a state of constant change. Successful companies are those that can also respond and quickly adapt to the changes around them. That requires leaders who are able to lead with the head, by focusing on the big-picture goal and business objectives; the heart, by knowing how to engage, coach and motivate people; and with the hands, by providing the tactical tools and skills necessary like a project manager.

A Metric Leading to Agility
With any metric,we need to be clear about what the curve should look like. Is the metric defects? We want them to go down. Is it lines of code? Then, presumably, we want them to go up. Number of tests? Up. RTF should increase essentially linearly from day one through to the end of the project. To accomplish that, the team will have to learn to become agile. From day one, until the project is finished, we want to see smooth, consistent growth in the number of Running, Tested Features.

Securely Managed API Technologies Key to Fostering Market Innovation
API business agility is both a management and security issue. API managers must consider how much API governance can be automated to reduce potential for coding errors. On the flip side, security issues related to governance policies, date protection, compliance adherence all need mitigation to achieve optimal business agility.

An evaluation of four patterns of interaction for integrating disparate ESBs effectively and easily
Keen at al assert that: “Integrating two or more ESBs is subject to some of the same integration patterns as connecting two or more applications; integration déjà vu” (2005, p. 87). They reasonably suggest that one important implication of this assertion is that “it seems logical that integrating ESBs should follow best practices similar to these for enterprise application integration (EAI)”

A Product Management Skills Map For Product Owners
Product manager is a formal job title, particularly at commercial tech companies, for individuals who drive product technology and make market-facing decisions intended to generate revenue. They set product strategy as well as implement it. They are heavily matrixed, often covering aspects of product marketing, sales support, external thought leadership and corporate strategy.

Quote for the day:

"You will get all you want in life if you help enough other people get what they want." -- Zig Ziglar

August 03, 2013

Why, when to use messaging middleware
There can be overlap with workflow systems and traditional batch-scheduling systems. These systems' core focus is orchestration and keeping track of where things are in a long running process. The workflow system may not perform any processing itself, but instead will act as the master delegator to the people, integration platforms or general purpose computing platforms that handle the units of work required.

Functional GUI Testing Automation Patterns
Any application at a certain moment of time with specific input data can exist in only one specific state. According to such a definition we can picture the software program as a finite state machine (finite automaton). Considering this fact and the availability of state and transition models (Figure 1 as an example) we can define certain sets of transitions (workflows) between pages that would cover most of the program’s functionality.

SaaS contracts too often lack security specifics
"Contractually, very little security language appears in the body of SaaS contracts," Gartner analysts Jay Heiser and Alexa Bona wrote in the report. "Typically the security section contains little more than platitudes, stating that the provider will use 'commercially reasonable efforts to establish and maintain security safeguards.' These are often declared to be 'in line with industry standards,' which are mostly never defined."

Colocation - Key Considerations for Selection of Service Provider
The benefits of going for colocation service include effective use of capital and having higher quality facilities through power redundancy, cooling, and scalability/growth. Choosing a colocation provider is a strategic business decision that evolves from thoughtful consideration certain key parameters. More over, the partnership with the colocation service provider need a multi-year commitment from both.

Hackers to NSA chief: Read the Constitution
It was a far cry from when Alexander kicked off DefCon 20 with a keynote speech last year. There's a lot of crossover between Black Hat and DefCon attendees, the general spoke on Wednesday in his official uniform. This would be a more serious presentation. Over the ensuing 45 minutes or so, Alexander described in broad terms how Section 702 of the FISA Amendment Act and Section 215 of the Patriot Act affect governmental intelligence gathering in the U.S.

An Extensive Glossary of Big Data Terminology
Big data comes with a lot of new terminology that is sometimes hard to understand. Therefore we have created an ABC of big data that should give some insights. Some of the definitions refer to a corresponding blog post. Of course this big data glossary is not 100% complete, so please let us know if there are missing terminology that you would like to see included.

GM’s plan to turn the car into a smartphone on wheels
GM’s not just talking about letting audio streaming and simple location-based services apps into the dashboard, it’s planning to expose engine and vehicle data and even its OnStar telematics features to its developer community. That means app builders can get access to the inner workings and technologies on an unprecedented scale, much like a smartphone or developer can delve into the core features of an Android or iOS device.

The state of business process execution language (BPEL) in 2013
In the last five years, BPEL hasn't undergone any major changes, but it has received more mature support from vendors. The support hasn't come without a price, but if developers use BPEL for automating technological processes and eschew excessive customization, they can overcome some common problems with the technology, experts say.

Data Center Innovator Ken Brill Dies At 68
Brill is also credited with technical innovations, including the introduction of dual power supplies for servers, which ensures a server keeps running if one power supply fails. He was awarded a patent for the invention in 2000 but never sought to profit from it, according to Kudritzki. "He was motivated by the desire for constant improvement," he said. "That's what drove him." -- RIP

Disrupting What We Think We Know About Disruptive Innovation
The human brain, or more specifically the neo-cortex, is designed to recognize patterns and draw conclusions from them. Experts are able to identify such patterns related to a specific problem relevant to their area of knowledge. But because non-experts lack that base of knowledge, they are forced to rely more on their brain’s ability for abstraction, rather than specificity.

Quote for the day:

“If we did all the things we were capable of, we would literally astound ourselves.” -- Thomas A. Edison

August 02, 2013

Applying a Life Cycle Framework to Implementing a Governance Model
Establishing structured communications will maintain linkages throughout the levels of governance and assure that the organizational strategy, mission, vision, and desired outcomes are maintained and aligned. This alignment can provide assurance to the organization, knowing that the outcomes of the performing initiatives are meeting its goals, as the predefined process provides the proper oversight to the responsible individuals. When governance is working correctly, the organization will be performing at an optimal point.

Quality of Risk Data Top Concern Among Risk Managers
Fewer than a quarter of respondents rated their technology and systems as “extremely or very effective” with data management/maintenance, data process architecture/workflow logic, or data governance, according to “Global Risk Management Survey, Eighth Edition: Setting a Higher Bar,” a new risk management report from Deloitte.

How to align your IT Strategy skillfully
“It is no longer about which products to buy; it is about a strategic approach followed to leverage the technological advancement. For example, it is about “how to treat big data in a different fashion which can help my organisation,” and therefore have negotiations around that with the vendor,” says Parikh. ... “The prioritisation is done based on a scale of vitals, essentials and desirables, and future CIOs need to spot the high business impact items for better alignment of the IT strategy to drive business growth,” points out Kumar.

Selling cloud-based communications starts with a hybrid sale
Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) providers must adjust their selling strategies to match their customers' basic business needs by finding ways to work with the infrastructure customers already have installed. Enterprises with premises-based UC systems are not going to swap them out overnight, said Ken Landoline, principal analyst of unified communications and contact center research for Washington, D.C.-based Current Analysis Inc.

Utilities Behind the Big Data Curve
That shortage is one reason the industry is falling short when it comes to putting the data it collects to better use. Compounding the problem is that most utilities still take a siloed approach to their data, according to Guerry Waters, vice president for industry strategy at Oracle Utilities. “The utility industry needs to take an enterprise view of the data,” he says.

USB will soon catch up to Thunderbolt with 10Gbps speeds
Both the SuperSpeed 3.1 and the USB Power Delivery specification initiatives are in the implementation enabling phase where the functional components for each are being developed and component suppliers are working with platform and peripheral manufacturers, the spokesman said. "While some products sporting these latest technologies are potentially going to reach the market next year, 2015 is when both will likely gain a more measurable impact," he added.

The virtues of database as a service
The key initial driver is the move to more single-purpose databases. Its use in the public cloud is largely driven by small tactical enterprise IT projects that end up using database-as-a-service providers out of sheer need for the technology, as well as limited budgets. Once, Oracle was the default choice for databases, but that's no longer the case.

Luc Levesque of Trip Advisor, on Frequent Evaluations
“Wouldn’t it be great if you had a blueprint to give someone on Day 1 that encapsulates what works with me and what are some of the quirks about me that you’re just going to have to accept?” So I wrote it up, and started sharing it with my team. It’s worked really well. ... Another is no finger-pointing if something goes wrong, so fall on your sword. We’re all in this together. We move very fast and we’re going to make mistakes.

Risk and complexity: Businesses need to get a grip
From risks around cybersecurity to supply chain concerns to fast-changing trends around cloud computing, the pace of change and pressures on businesses to adjust well have never been higher. To gain a fuller grip on such risk and complexity, The Open Group is shepherding a series of standards and initiatives to provide better tools for understanding and managing true operational dependability. BriefingsDirect sat down with the President and CEO of The Open Group, Allen Brown, at the July conference to gather an update on the efforts.

Quote for the day:

"Great work is done by people who are not afraid to be great." -- Fernando Flores

August 01, 2013

Understanding IT's role in cloud security and compliance
In this chapter excerpt from Cloud Computing: Assessing the Risks, authors Jared Carstensen, Bernard Golden and J.P. Morgenthal discuss what cloud consumers need to consider in terms of security, compliance and risk, how these considerations affect cloud infrastructure and applications, as well as where the compliance responsibility -- or trust boundary -- lies.

Ask these 9 questions to avoid hero worship and closed minds
Failure is essential to the human experience; we would not be able to define success without it, nor would be we be able to learn and grow if there was nothing we were shallow, ignorant or inexperienced about. And, in theory, corporate America gets this. We talk about innovation by failing fast, of developing employees by letting them make mistakes and overcome them. But do we live this or simply say it?

Secure migration to the cloud: A not impossible mission
A challenge with many of these approaches is that they are not always scalable for enterprise use: different administrators are managing passwords, SSH key pairs, and so on. You may have one solution for securing your data at rest in the cloud, one for backups and another for data migration. Got a headache yet?

Cloud contracts poor on security, says Gartner
“As more buyers demand it, and as the standards mature, it will become increasingly common practice to perform assessments in a variety of ways, including reviewing responses to a questionnaire, reviewing third-party audit statements, conducting on-site audits and/or monitoring the cloud services provider,” said Bona. ... “We recommend they also include recovery time and recovery point objectives and data integrity measures in the service level agreements, with meaningful penalties if these are missed,” she said.

Tech Trajectories: Four More Moore’s Laws
We’re all familiar with Moore’s Law, which takes an inexorable view of technological progress, with the number of components on an integrated circuit doubling like clockwork every 18 months or so. But do other technologies follow a similar pattern of exponential improvement? ... Moore’s Law–like doubling serves as a fair predictor of progress, but not without hiccups.

What to look for in Linux memory usage
Unlike Windows, where memory swap can slow programs down, Linux memory swap is advantageous, thanks to the way in which Linux analyzes processes' allocated memory page use. The Linux kernel runs a Least Recently Used algorithm to determine which memory pages need to be in RAM and which do not. In some cases, letting the Linux kernel swap faster can improve memory performance.

How the cloud is going to reinvent ERP — and how long it will take
Not that the cloud is going to banish the core of on-premise ERP. "For the next five years or more we will see the deployment of what we call hybrid-ERP, a mix of on-premise and the cloud", Rayner said. "What we do know is that there will be come occasions when on-premises ERP is the way to go and some where the cloud is better suited."

Making the Shift from Sustainable to Transient Advantage
In traditional strategy, companies define their most important competitors as other companies within the same industry. And that worked very well in an era where most sectors of the economy were dominated by a few big players; if you're an oil company, for example, you compete with other oil companies. If you're a car company, you compete with other car companies. But that is a dangerous way to think about competition. Boundaries between industries are no longer so clear-cut.

Software-defined everything: Revolution or evolution?
It is easy to get caught up in the hype cycle and believe the buzz about the benefits of new technologies. Software-defined solutions certainly hold a lot of promise -- an automated, dynamic infrastructure, business-aligned SLAs, simpler operations and lower costs. But, technology shifts like this don’t come without risks or unintended consequences that we -- as an industry and individual companies -- will need to manage.

A Way to Drive 'Dual Transformation'
One way to make the case for change is to highlight early warning signs that disruption is taking root. Disruption typically starts innocently, with a lower-cost or simpler solution taking root among undemanding customer groups, or among people whose lack of expert skills or sufficient wealth kept them out of the market. The pattern of disruption means that these humble beginnings can lead to cataclysmic change, so even the smallest development should be watched carefully.

Quote for the day

"Be less curious about people and more curious about ideas." -- Marie Curie

July 31, 2013

Healthcare and technology: How J&J Pharma CIO keeps them in sync
In this first part of a two-part CIO Innovators Profile video shot at the MIT Sloan CIO Symposium event in Cambridge, Mass., Papathomas shares with Tech Target's Christina Torode how technology is creating new products and services for J&J Pharma and how IT must earn the right to be a trusted partner to the business.

Project Management: Do Less by Committing to More
Adaptation to project reprioritization does not affect projects that are already underway. Because business and management stakeholders are involved in the prioritization process, there are no surprises about the program schedule. Everyone also understands that the program backlog is always evolving based on the changing needs of the business.

How Intel Plans to Destroy the Legacy Data Center
Intel, to its credit, eventually came around and has been working furiously to create a high-efficiency platform based on Atom. Companies such as Facebook are flocking to it; they say it provides the best capacity, lowest operating costs and highest efficiency for Internet service loads. (Internet services are still the fastest-growing opportunity for this class of device.)

PRISM turned up the volume on cloud security conversations
The conversation about cloud security got more interesting following revelations on the National Security Agency’s PRISM program, even if many people figured that such government snooping was possible if not already happening. After talking with executives at a few cloud providers, it sounds like the PRISM news hasn’t necessarily lowered inquiries about public cloud services. What it is has done is prompt more questions about security.

DDoS attacks getting bigger but shorter in duration
Not only do they attack multiple sites, but they don't prolong an attack if they don't see immediate results. "They'll move from target to target after 10 or 20 minutes until they find one they can cause an immediate impact on," Smith noted. Attacks are becoming bigger because hackers have more resources to mount attacks than ever before, said Marc Gaffan, founder of Incapsula.

Spoofed! Fake GPS signals lead yacht astray
"We mimicked the entire GPS constellation," said Todd Humphreys, a researcher at the university's department of aerospace engineering and engineering mechanics. "We had a counterpart for each signal coming down from every satellite in the sky. When they mixed together with legitimate signals in the receiver, ours were slightly stronger," he said in an interview.

Reengineering a CRM strategy for the age of the customer
CRM leaders need to take a systematic approach to understanding the business drivers that affect the organization; this sets the context for the CRM strategy. Forrester defines business drivers as the "evolving customer, competitor, and technology trends that collectively act as an environmental force driving your company to evaluate and hone its CRM strategy and practices."

4 Ways To Build Your 'Executive Presence'
People judge a company by its leader. “Women [and men] who have ‘it’ have discovered the right formula of conveying their business expertise using a combination of competence — business knowledge — and warmth — their ability to connect with others,” said Rosina Racioppi, President and CEO of WOMEN Unlimited, which trains talented women to develop needed skills and mindset shifts to become leaders.

Microsoft relinquishes SkyDrive brand
According to the settlement, Microsoft will not pursue its planned appeal of this decision and Sky will allow Microsoft to continue using the SkyDrive name for a reasonable period of time to allow for an orderly transition to a new brand. The agreement also contains financial and other terms, the details of which are confidential.

Quote for the day:

"My troubles and obstacles, have strengthened me... a kick in the teeth may be the best thing in the world for you." -- Walt Disney

July 30, 2013

Are Conditions Right for a Chief Data Officer?
If we substitute "information" for "money", we have roughly similar picture. Everyone gathers it. Everyone uses it. But who is looking out for the big picture? Making sure that the information assets are working as hard as possible, that value is safeguarded, that it's being used appropriately? ... we're in the early days of business leaders starting to take their information assets very seriously: maximizing value, avoiding risks and safeguarding information assets.

Encrypting Backup Data for HIPAA and PCI Compliance
Stored data is a top target by hackers, especially the type of data that can be used for fraud and medical identity theft – within the healthcare industry in particular, encrypting stored data to meet HIPAA compliance is one way to avoid the HIPAA Breach Notification Rule and keep data secure.

Is the CMO now the Chief API Officer?
While the CIO budget is shrinking, the CMO budget is bulging. Often, I see instances where a CIO will go to the CMO for help and have them write the check. The CMO has become the king of IT without you knowing it. It helps them to track everything their potential customers are doing. Often they are now responsible for analysis and identifying emerging trends – which of course they can leverage for more effective campaigns.

IT Governance: Way to Succeed
“Given the growing complexity of the CIO role, the future CIO may find that appointing a CTO or a deputy is necessary. The deputy focuses on “keeping the lights on” - this will enable the CIO to capture opportunities that are advantageous to the organisation by strengthening the stage and supporting the management in advancing new ways of thinking and operating.”

Enabling Microservice Architectures with Scala
Kevin Scaldeferri, reports on using Scala for an SBT plug-in, for unit and functional testing, type-safe shared configuration using Zookeeper, and live inventory with WebSocket and Akka Actors. ... He has spoken at OSCON, YAPC, several user groups, and given internal tech talks on a variety of topics such as "How to Serve a Billion Requests a Day with Perl", "Beautiful Concurrency with Erlang", SBT, and more.

What cloud bursting and disaster recovery mean for hybrid cloud
Clearly, cloud bursting represents a more agile approach for a disaster strategy. If growth in an application's workload can trigger cloud bursting, a reduction in available resources to the application -- server or even data center failure -- could also trigger it. This DR strategy could deal with not only a complete data center failure but also limited equipment, software or even network failures.

Cybercrime 'bigger threat than nuclear war', UK lawmakers say
Committee Chair and MP Keith Vaz said: "We are not winning the war on online criminal activity. We are being too complacent about these E-wars because the victims are hidden in cyberspace. The threat of a cyber attack to the U.K. is so serious it is marked as a higher threat than a nuclear attack."

The Center of Analytics Success Takes on Communication Skills
An analyst at a global advisory firm says that communication skills are an “area for improvement” for CIOs—especially for individuals who want to “help lead the transformation of their companies." And another study found that 41% of survey respondents suggested communication skills were even more important than technical skills to ensure IT success!

Why Commenting Code Is Still a Bad Idea
To make life easier for the next developer, code should be written and rewritten to be as obvious as possible. What's left for comments to do is explain what the compiler doesn't have access to: why the code is there. Adding comments to explain how your code does its job -- which (I think) some readers were recommending -- is not the solution. It's just adding more cost.

The Countdown Begins: Support for Windows XP Ends on April 8, 2014
Computers running Windows XP routinely experience a significantly higher malware infection rate than computers running any other supported version of Windows. Much of the elevated infection rate on Windows XP can be attributed to the fact that some of the key built-in security features included with more recent versions of Windows are not present in Windows XP.

Quote for the day:

"You have to think anyway, so why not think big?" -- Donald Trump

July 29, 2013

New virtual networking technologies make convergence real
The fact that there are three distinct SDN models shouldn't discourage advocates of virtualization-based convergence. All three models offer improved Network as a Service capabilities, even though they differ in whether they focus on segmenting connectivity for the isolation of tenants and applications, or managing network traffic.

New Zealand updates cloud code of practice as ACS looks on
The code has two key tenets. The first is not calling the offering "cloud computing" unless it actually is. Cloud computing is defined in the code as: "On-demand scalable resources, such as networks, servers, and applications, which are provided as a service, are accessible by the end user and can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal effort or service provider interaction."

Feds Move To Open Source Databases Pressures Oracle
"The traditional, burdensome licensing practices of the big proprietary guys have really started to put new kinds of pressure on government agencies," he said. "Most of the licensing firms have come up with very inventive ways to make sure the price per year goes up and not down, and that's in direct conflict with the way government agencies are trying to operate now."

Quick Tips: Breaking Bad Employee Habits
Being motivated is key to high productivity, and 47% of employers value it as the most critical trait. If you have an unmotivated worker, his or her bad habits of showing up late to meetings, not being actively involved in brainstorming sessions, or not coming up with new, innovative ways to help the company may be resolved by teaming them up with one of your top performers.

How Android’s new App Ops controls could encourage privacy by design
It looks like the latest version of Android has an interesting little feature tucked away: granular controls for app permissions. The Android 4.3 feature, called “App Ops”, has just been flagged up by Android Police on Friday, and it looks like it could be a game-changer when it comes to privacy. ... For many developers, however, it could prove an utter nightmare. In the quest for privacy or longer battery life, many users may turn off bits of functionality then later wonder why those elements of the app don’t work.

Global worker communities emerge as Amcor thinks outside the box
“It’s a very decentralised business model that’s focused very much on business groups, which are all based in different countries and on different products,” corporate communications manager Zed Ivankovic said at an IBM social-business event in Melbourne. “From a technical point of view, we’ve found challenges around really simple things that you take for granted when you’re working in a one-site environment – things like sharing files, collaborating on files, and that sort of thing.”

How to improve network performance via advanced NIC options
Most NICs support jumbo frames, which means handling packets, or frames, of up to 9,000 bytes. Jumbo frames contain more data in each packet, so fewer packets are needed to convey data across the network. Throughput improves with less overhead -- packet headers and other packet content -- and CPU overhead shrinks.

How Rackspace hires admins: Textbook questions vs. break-fix challenges
But Walsh said if a candidate doesn't get a strong score on the online test, that doesn't necessarily exclude them from a job. An interview may reveal that a candidate who didn't do well on the test, is "a really solid systems administrator at a pretty high level," said Walsh. ... "We need people who can easily talk through situations with customers, as well as log-in and actually do the work," said Walsh.

Five Forces of Collaboration in a 24/7 Globalized World
Hardly a day passes without reference to today’s “globalized world” or its “borderless markets” as the justification for a particular business strategy. This type of connectedness plays a big part in building and extending a collaborative ecosystem that spans teams, departments and geographies. But to fully immerse a business in a connected, collaborative environment, it’s important to first understand what exactly connectedness is.

What to look for in a software engineering culture
Using the Mondrian tool at Google, we had a very clear code review process, where a changelist could not actually be submitted until the reviewer gave the "approval." Using Github's more lightweight code reviews at Coursera, we've had to come up with our own conventions on top of it, where the reviewer will say "Merge when ready" when they're happy or the reviewee will say "Please take another look" if they want a second review.

Quote for the day:

"Satisfaction lies in the effort, not in the attainment. Full effort is full victory. " -- Mohandas Gandhi

July 28, 2013

Gamification is the best way to engage consumers say experts
David Smith, ceo of The GFF, reveals that gamification is being used in both the public and private sector, including government. “Changing the way we interact rather than being prescriptive to being playful and game means we’re being encouraged to do the right thing rather than being forced to do the right thing. It’s a very positive thing if used well.” “San Francisco has gamified the idea of speed control,” Smith explains.

Internet Traffic Jams, Meet Your Robot Nemesis
Remy is not designed to run on individual PCs and servers, but someday it may be used to develop better algorithms to run on those systems, said Hari Balakrishnan, the Fujitsu professor in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT. For now, it's churning out millions of possible algorithms and testing them against simulated networks to find the best possible one for a given objective.

How do you build the right thing?
This eBook, first in a series of three, tries to answer the question “Where did the design phase go?” It collects a series of essays from ThoughtWorks designers around the world who are addressing product design challenges head-on by fusing agile development practices with the disciplines of interaction design.

IBM’s Big Data University Gears Up to Meet Enterprise Demand
IBM is committed to big data because we see the value of big data in every industry. Our goal is to enable the customers to really own their businesses. Not just teaching them how to program, but take them through the technology and its capabilities in the context of the applications and use cases. ... The correct mindset is to be open, bring creativity, do an exploration of the data. There is technology available to explore that data quickly and cost-effectively. That fear factor has to away.

3 Ways to Build Leadership Credibility in Tough Times
The America’s Workforce survey delivered some meaningful insights on areas leaders can focus on to build leadership credibility and lead more effectively. After all, we can keep talking about what is not right or we can focus on what we know we can do to make a difference. The survey results suggest that top leaders do three things effectively in successful organizations.

How to find on-demand expertise using crowdsourcing
Developing reputation systems is challenging. Although LinkedIn leads in terms of access to finding and connecting to professionals, the task of evaluation still falls to clients. But an expanding universe of smaller marketplaces, crowds, and communities provides not only connections but also evaluation in the form of reputation systems.

A New Breed of CFO
“Thinking about the ‘new breed’ of CFO, the analytical piece is a big differentiator and a reason I was chosen for this role over other candidates,” says Hightail’s Sizer, 47. “Folks like me are in high demand today to solve a data problem.” That is, most companies, but especially online technology companies, have massive amounts of data and must figure out how to use it to drive business performance improvements.

How To Help Top Talent Thrive
The smartest people often have unconventional expectations. They’re likely to assume managers don’t understand what they are doing, but they want respect for what they do. They want managers to recognize their ideas, and reward them with access to corporate leadership, information and resources. They want freedom to explore new territory, and permission to fail, because failure ultimately can lead to better outcomes.

Does anyone in IT truly relax on vacation?
Brian Kelley, the CIO of Portage County IT Services in Ravenna, Ohio, said, "Work will always impede upon my vacations to some degree." Similar to de Lima, Kelley says that checking on things makes the return from vacation easier. "By managing some work while on vacation, I can rest assured that when I return to work catching up will not be a major headache nor require that I put in long days to do so," he said.

Quote for the day:

"To have long term success as a coach or in any position of leadership, you have to be obsessed in some way." -- Pat Riley