Daily Tech Digest by Kannan Subbiah

September 06, 2013

Successfully Integrating Project-Impacting Processes
If project-impacting processes are not aligned, project risk may increase because a project team may not be aware of applicable policies, standards, or best practices; or due to the effort involved in complying with all of them. To minimize this risk, PMOs can expand their scope to include alignment of these requirements/policies/mandates.

How PayPal Can Succeed Where Google Wallet Failed
Nothing will dampen consumer curiosity and enthusiasm faster than failed attempts to use loudly touted cool new features and services. PayPal is facing the proverbial chicken and egg situation of mobile payments. PayPal says it has been very focused on demonstrating and delivering value to merchants, but only time will tell if it receives the required return on its investment to soon claim “success” with in-person mobile payments.

Culture Eats Strategy for Lunch: How True Is It?
Culture eats strategy for lunch, culture as the most invisible but powerful corporate fabric, is both 'hard' competency and 'soft’ asset of business. Effective execution of a strategy relies on a strong culture. When does a weak culture ‘eats’ strategy and undermine success? How shall you be mindful of culture? What are the strong culture traits, and how can culture, like water, to push the organization toward the right direction and reach the destination?

Integration on the Edge: Data Explosion & Next-Gen Integration
Instead of spending your organization's hard-earned money on the three iPaaS Research Reports, take one of the two following options instead: Spend a little more money and invest in an hour of Pezzini's time and have him explain it all to you; or Buy & read the research reports and THEN cough up a bit more cash to get an hour of Pezzini's time so that he can explain it all to you.

IBM Database Conversion Workbench, Part 1: Overview
DCW provides the following benefits: Common graphical interface with uniform look and feel for all phases of the conversion; A consolidated process with well-defined steps based on best practices; Faster enablement for client and partner teams in conversion methodology; and Wizards that guide you through all steps of the conversion

Small businesses' BYOD practices leave them one cyber attack away from bankruptcy
"The main thing criminals are trying to do is get banking Trojans into the system so they can get login details for online banking. You don't see with SMBs any kind of espionage, they're too small it's all financially based. It's usually the stuff you can buy and customise, things like Zeus and SpyEye, all those families of malware," said Ben-Itzhak.

CIOs Say Mobilizing Enterprise Apps Is Not That Easy
Surprisingly, 53 percent of enterprise apps are Web-based, so you'd think they'd be easy to mobilize. So what's putting the brakes on the mobile movement? The biggest barrier is mobile development costs, say 65 percent of CIOs. The cost of re-engineering enterprise apps as mobile apps is high because of the ballooning platform fragmentation of the market, particularly the many flavors of the Android operating system.

Google fights to kill email-scanning lawsuit brought by Gmail users
"This case involves plaintiffs' effort to criminalize ordinary business practices that have been part of Google's free Gmail service since it was introduced nearly a decade ago," Google lawyers said in a motion filed with the court. "While Plaintiffs go to great lengths to portray Google in a sinister light, the complaint actually confirms that the automated processes at issue are Google's ordinary business practices implemented as part of providing the free Gmail service to the public. This is fatal to Plaintiffs' claims."

Enabling the Third Platform
In some ways, the move toward the third platform has been foreshadowed by another trend that has been building for years – the bring your own device phenomenon. This trend of employees working on their own, unsecure devices is occurring because they want mobility that their organizations may not provide. In the third platform era, it’s a foregone conclusion that many of the mobile devices involved will be employee-owned and outside the control of IT administrators.

For cloud providers, fraud detection is integral part of business plan
"While cloud has been a phenomenal enabler for legitimate businesses, it's also been a phenomenal -- and I mean phenomenal -- enabler for fraud and fraudulent activity," said John Rowell, senior vice president of research and development as well as global service operations at Dimension Data, a South African cloud and managed services provider. "Fraud is a huge deal on the business side."

Quote for the day:

"3 Rules of Work: Out of clutter find simplicity; From discord find harmony; In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity." -- Albert Einstein

September 05, 2013

Active/Active WAN-based Replication in GemFire vs Oracle and MySQL
The type of replication it uses is parallel replication. Parallel replication spreads the work across servers and eliminates contention, or communication bottlenecks between data stores. Data partitioning breaks the data and work apart across many servers, building in horizontal scalability. Each partition has a replication queue that has one or more redundant backups in case of failure and streams data to a disk store for recovery.

WAN optimizer technologies to counteract data center network hogs

It's hard to maintain fast and reliable wide area network (WAN) connectivity in the face of increasing data center workloads, user bases and real-time traffic. This acute demand for WAN services, combined with more geographic separation between physical data centers and/or service providers, creates bandwidth and latency problems. To address WAN bottlenecks, you can add costly WAN connectivity to the data center, curb network services to end users or deploy WAN optimizer technologies.

No Extract, Transform and Load? Really?
By eliminating ETL with a drag and drop tools without knowing the adverse impacts to enterprise data enablement can land the average project sponsors in to serious trouble. In order to take the best advantage of the data acqusition tools that claim to eliminate or reduce ETL, make sure that the business situation where this can be experimented on. The following are some such business scenarios,

The Five Definitions of ROI
Return on Investment. That's what the term ROI has signified all along. But based on my recent posts, this term has taken on other dimensions, because enterprises look for returns from various dimensions of investment, whether it’s information, infrastructure, innovation, or individuals. The fact that all these terms start with the letter “I” is merely coincidental. It behooves enterprises to take the right steps to realize the returns from the perspective of all these dimensions. Let’s see how:

Fluid Motion aims to make gesture recognition tech more accessible
According to Abhinav, their presentation application was recently used at the India Design Forum by the Indian School of Design and Innovation to showcase the upcoming design school and latest courses in a really immersive and interactive way. It also garnered attention at the Rolls Royce exhibition where customers could interactively design their own Rolls Royce by simple hand gestures.

A Tiny, Boring Kodak Takes Consumers out of the Picture
Boring, however, may prove to be beautiful for a company that teetered on the brink of the abyss. If all goes according to Kodak’s reorganization plan, the company will post $2.5 billion in revenue this year and $167 million in earnings before interest, taxes, and such noncash expenses as depreciation and amortization. It will also have only 8,500 workers, down from almost 64,000 a decade ago.

Championing Telecoms Innovation in the Middle East
Sleep deprivation aside, heading a telecommunications company at this point in history is not a position everyone would aspire to. The stress of second guessing what’s coming and the demand for ever more broadband from limited resources is intense. Meanwhile, industry leaders are making major capital investments in next-generation services over IP networks and want to monetise their investments with new products and services as rapidly as possible.

DataStax Building NoSQL, Big Data Partner Program
NoSQL adoption has accelerated in recent years as customers pursue new ways to manage Big Data applications. Forrester Research predicts the NoSQL market will grow from $200 million in 2013 to $1 billion in 2017. ... In the meantime, the foundation for a partner program is already in place for the open source company. Schweitzer says the intial channel effort includes about 80 partners across six market segments:

'Hash Hunters' Web service cracks password hashes for bitcoins
Hash Hunters is a bit rough around the edges, Gosney wrote. It doesn't use "https," which is a standard security technology that encrypts communication between a client and a server. Gosney, who created an account on Hash Hunters, said it doesn't seem to have a reliable way for contract password crackers to communicate with their clients, the site crashes occasionally and it doesn't appear that cracked passwords can be uploaded.

How cloud computing changes (almost) everything about the skills you need
"Traditional sysadmin skills will inevitably be in less demand in future, certainly in the SME space. Managing the relationship between the business and its suppliers will become ever more critical," he says.
Kevin Leypoldt, IS director at Structural Integrity Associates, is of similar mind: "I am now refocusing on customer service and desktop/helpdesk support as we move the hosting/infrastructure to the cloud. Because we have that skillset already, it's now becoming a larger focus."

Quote for the day:

"The only way to do great work is to love the work you do." -- Steve Jobs

September 04, 2013

How to Assess Security Risks in a Scientific Fashion
This advanced understanding from the medical field can be applied towards handling risks that information infrastructures face. Considering information assets to be patients, incidents including hacking and malicious programmes to be diseases, technical counter measures and controls to be medicines and different processes, policies and practices to be treatment protocols, we can draw a fair parallel between medical risk management and information security risk management practices.

How to decide when to pass on PaaS
In the current world of PaaS, you are required to commit to a combination of platform components in a similar way. The difference is that there are arguably a lot more moving parts. Back in the 80s, your platform often ran in a single box, such as a VAX or some Unix-based mini-computer. Platforms in today’s world of distributed computing usually involve a whole landscape of servers and services.

10 Wearable Devices To Keep Patients Healthy
Thanks in part to trends such as wearable devices, the overall mobile health market is growing substantially. Research and analysis firm GlobalData expects the market to grow in value from an estimated $0.5 billion in 2010 to over $8 billion by 2018, significantly revolutionizing healthcare delivery and management. Take a look at the range of devices in use now, from hospital settings to homes.

How Much CSS Should You Have?
According to the HTTP Archive, the average website has 35KB of CSS, and CSS transfer size has the highest correlation to render time. If you look at the graph directly above the one for render time at that link, you will also notice that total transfer size has the highest correlation to page load time. This makes the case for reducing the overall weight of your CSS pretty strong. Based on this data and what I've seen in my own work, you shouldshoot for less than 30KB of CSS on each page of your site (after gzip).

Creating a Performance Culture
Creating a culture of performance at your company is about creating a culture of quality. This is especially true because best (and worst) practices propagate quickly at web companies. Code written for product A is reused by product B. And folks who worked on team A transfer over to team C. If product A is built in a high performance way, those best practices are carried forward by the code and team members.

HR Departments Invaded By Data Scientists
IT must be at the center of the unfolding data-driven transformation. Not everyone has an HR data scientist like GM. Arena emphasizes the importance of his partnership with Bill Houghton, GM's CIO for global corporate functions. "A big piece is integration--ensuring the right systems are connected so we know where to draw the data from," says Arena. "IT has to play a role in that."

Cloud Leaders: Cloud, CXO and Data Conversation with Dana Gardner
C-level domains need to break down a little so there’s more cooperation between organizations, allowing them to propel efficiency instead of slowing it down. A top-down hierarchical vertical approach can be a detriment to agile business. ERP and business apps have traditionally acted as the glue for how business processes can be applied across the organization, and processes can be made efficient around manufacturing logistics/procurement/R&D.

9 Fallacies of Java Performance
Java performance has the reputation of being something of a Dark Art. Partly this is due to the sophistication of the platform, which makes it hard to reason about in many cases. However, there has historically also been a trend for Java performance techniques to consist of a body of folk wisdom rather than applied statistics and empirical reasoning. In this article, I hope to address some of the most egregious of these technical fairy tales.

EMC optimizes VNX hybrid array for flash
The performance gains from this and other improvements of the line are dramatic, according to EMC. With a similar configuration, a VNX from the current generation would top out at 240,000 IOPS (I/O operations per second) and the new version would reach 1.1 million IOPS, Herzog said. The VNX's bandwidth has tripled and its maximum capacity has doubled from 3PB to 6PB.

Network configuration tools: It's not your father's backup solution
With businesses throwing everything they can think of onto networks today, investing in a full-featured configuration and performance management tool pays immediate dividends. When problems occur, especially trouble that's more challenging to diagnose than a down interface, tools that combine configuration and performance contexts can take the headache out of troubleshooting.

Quote for the day:

"Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it." -- George Bernard Shaw

September 03, 2013

Data Scientist or Business Scientist?
Go-to guys provide an indispensible service to the organization. These are the Type IIIs in our model. What do they lack to move into a Type II role, defined in Figure 1 as Type II-B: light data scientist? Essentially, they need to learn about the data sources such as Twitter feeds, weblogs and other sources; they need to learn how to use (but not program) analytical, statistical and algorithmic models.

Can China's Xiaomi Make it Globally?
Xiaomi is joining the ranks of other Chinese smartphone vendors wanting to make it big in the international market. Telecommunication equipment vendors Huawei and ZTE have been selling handsets in the U.S., and PC maker Lenovo is also eyeing mature markets for its smartphone sales. But so far Chinese branded phones have yet to gain the worldwide recognition their rivals Apple and Samsung Electronics enjoy.

What Are the Questions to Ask When Developing a Big Data Strategy?
Everyone talks about asking the right questions, but what are the questions you can ask depending on the choices you have made? Each strategy or each use case requires different questions to be asked. In addition, the analyses done and the tools used also result in different important questions that need to be asked before, during and after developing and implementing a big data strategy.

Is Quantum Cryptography Really Secure?
Not everyone is on board with the idea that quantum cryptography is unhackable; and regardless of whether it delivers perfect security in theory, if real implementations are less than ideal (which they always are), avenues of exploitation will remain. These avenues may be more or less accessible, but it’s all a matter of economics: if the rewards outweigh the risks (and costs), someone will find a way to beat the system

Shift employee engagement measurement from snapshot to real time
By using analytics software, HR managers can begin to mine data, which might help to uncover the root causes of disengagement. "A lot of people will do a survey of their employees, or they might move to the next step and do some social network analysis, but what about mining the data behind absenteeism? That can tell you a lot about the drivers for disengagement," Cameron said.

Francisco D’Souza of Cognizant, on Finding Company Heroes
It’s very hard to see your blind spots, by definition, and it’s very easy to fall into comfort zones, because people like patterns and a sense of familiarity. I’ve tried consciously to say, “What are the tools I can use to identify these blind spots and push through comfort zones?” And I always tell myself that if I wake up in the morning and feel comfortable, I’m probably not pushing myself hard enough.

Best tools for protecting passwords
For enterprises trying to get a handle on password management, the good news is that there are products that can help implement stronger password policies for end users logging into corporate and personal Web-based services, as well as for employees who share a local server login. The goal here is to make the password process more secure, and also to let users login to particular resources without having to remember all of their individual passwords.

Mobile Devices Burying Banks in Data
As consumers use multiple devices to execute financial tasks, banks are forced to evaluate how mobile trends impact other touch points. Generally, banks report digital customers have lower attrition rates and deeper engagement. Deciding what to measure remains an art. "You can't know from the outset that you are focusing on the right things," he says.

The Biggest Threat to Cloud Computing? The U.S. Government
“The recent revelations about the extent to which the National Security Agency (NSA) and other U.S. law enforcement and national security agencies have used provisions in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) and USA PATRIOT Act to obtain electronic data from third-parties will likely have an immediate and lasting impact on the competitiveness of the U.S. cloud computing industry if foreign customers decide the risks of storing data with a U.S. company outweigh the benefit,” stated an article by ITIF.

Five flow charting applications
As a freelance technology writer, I find myself often having to create various types of charts. In doing so, I have discovered that there are a number of different tools available to help you to create flowcharts. Here are five such tools.

Quote for the day:

"When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change" -- Wayne Dyer

September 02, 2013

Application-defined networking grows with variety of vendor approaches
Cisco Systems recently announced its Application Centric Infrastructure initiative that would enable applications to run in any environment, cloud or traditional data center, virtually or on bare metal. The goal is that users will be able to specify application requirements via open interfaces, and the infrastructure will automatically supply network, compute and storage needs.

Postgres 9.2 invites large-scale enterprise deployment
Perhaps most notably, Postgres 9.2 can now run as a single instance across 64 processor cores, a big bump from the previous official limit of 16 cores in version 9.1. The new version can also write and read the data much more quickly than before. ... As for performance, Postgres can now respond to as many as 350,000 read queries per second, four times as many as previous versions, according to the software's developers. It can perform up to 14,000 writes per second, five times as many as before.

ITIL Dinner Conversation: "Please Pass the Whine"
You can’t force ITIL down someone’s throat, especially if it’s devoid of specific implementation guidance. To make people accountable you must give them very specific goals and objectives and guidance on how to achieve those goals. The more specific the better. That leaves less room for interpretation and more focus on execution

Next Microsoft CEO Faces Rocky Road in Easing NSA-Fueled Privacy Worries
In the latest fallout from the NSA's terrorist-hunting, the German national weekly newspaper Die Zeit reported that experts are warning the government not to use Windows 8 or its successor because they contain a backdoor that could be exploited by the U.S. agency Ironically, the offending technology, called Trusted Computing, is the foundation for a much higher level of security than what has existed in Windows PCs in the past.

The hot, confusing mess that is digital privacy
Here’s the TL;DR version: The secret court has no idea what’s going on and no real way to to find out other than by taking the NSA’s word for it. Its power to rule on the legality of certain actions is hamstrung as a result. The NSA seems actually to kind ofcare about doing things legally, but even it has a hard time keeping track of the deluge of data it’s collecting.

Agile vs. Waterfall development: Embracing each method appropriately
By comparison, Agile seems more natural. It's adaptive, flexible and responsive, and you don't have to go back to the beginning if you encounter a problem. Do not pass "Go," do not collect $200. Scope creep isn't a problem, because Agile is about getting something out the door. It is the opposite of the Waterfall method, which can be like a Pekingese in need of a haircut when it hits a wall -- unable to maneuver quickly around new obstacles or requirements.

Game On! 6 Tips for Gamification in a Global Workforce
Gamification – or setting up game-like rewards to motivate people – hits nearly every one of the factors on the happiness at work list: ambition, challenge, a sense of purpose and mastery. Walmart’s program, for example, gives associates an “on the sales floor” game experience to teach them about the company’s products, processes, and culture. Gamification engages while training the workforce, especially remotely.

Adventures in Data Profiling (Part 4)
One of the possibilities is that we could have postal addresses from countries that do not have a postal code system. Just a few examples would be: Aruba, Bahamas (sorry fellow fans of the Beach Boys, but both Jamaica and Bermuda have a postal code system, and therefore I could not take you down to Kokomo), Fiji (home of my favorite bottled water), and Ireland (home of my ancestors and inventors of my second favorite coffee).

The Fail-Safe Organization
Getting to know people better does not require team lunches, parties, potlucks, or the occasional random surprise afternoon off to see the new Star Trek movie. These well-intentioned “team builders” may be fun but they don’t do a lot to build teams. Mostly what builds teams is trust among the people in them. Trust is something we build by getting to know people day in and day out in the context of our work together—and by letting people get to know us.

6 Ways To Develop Internal IT Talent
Prioritizing and rewarding employee skills development can improve hiring and retention, for starters. It can also help build internal technical expertise, even in organizations that lack a robust centralized IT department. Take heed, small and midsize business (SMB) pros. "I am a firm believer that technology-savvy people are always looking to improve their knowledge and work with cutting-edge technology," said Rona Borre, CEO and founder of IT recruitment firm Instant Technology, in an email interview.

Quote for the day:

"Failure is the line of least persistence." --W.A. Clarke

September 01, 2013

US, Others Criticize New Vietnamese Internet Law
Decree 72 is scheduled to go into effect on Sept. 1. It restricts the use of blogs and social media to the exchange of personal information. Posting of information that "harms national security" or "opposes" the government is banned. Further, it requires Internet companies and providers of information in Vietnam to cooperate with the government on enforcement of the decree.

Capture Knowledge and Make Decisions Transparent in a Design Thinking Process
During the Design Thinking process a lot of knowledge is created and it is very difficult to capture that knowledge in a structured way. Furthermore, you need to re-focus several times during the project. The team needs a basis on which to make and document good decisions. Both needs - (a) capturing of knowledge and (b) having a basis for making and documenting decisions - are supported by an Impact Map.

Suvola Appliance Technology
Leverage the power of ARM Based Servers: 1/10th the footprint, 1/10th the energy consumption, ½ the acquisition cost. An entire computer server on a chip – including multiple CPU cores, memory controllers, I/O controllers, interconnect switches and more; Dramatic reductions in footprint – e.g. four complete servers featuring 16 cores and 16 SATA ports on a card measuring 10 inches long

Service will be the next SaaS differentiator
“My entire career has been spent in the SaaS world, and customers always had very high expectations,” said Gardner. “But it didn’t change the fact that we initially had some growing here to do in the area of what was expected of customer service from our IT staff. In IT, you hire many individuals who are coming from an internal IT organization and dealing with co-workers.

The Best Of Open Source For Big Data
It was not easy to select a few out of many Open Source projects. My objective was to choose the ones that fit Big Data’s needs most. What has changed in the world of Open Source is that the big players have become stakeholders; IBM’s alliance with Cloud Foundry, Microsoft providing a development platform for Hadoop, Dell’s Open Stack-Powered Cloud Solution, VMware and EMC partnering on Cloud, Oracle releasing its NoSql database as Open Source.

Seven over 70
We meet extraordinary older innovators all the time, who after a lifetime of creativity are still solving big problems, generating wealth, or expanding our conception of what it means to be human. Below, in reverse alphabetical order, are seven innovators over the age of 70, chosen arbitrarily, because I am attracted to their lives, work, and character, and not according to the formal nomination and judging process that selected the 35 Innovators Under 35.

Google Glass for Bespectacled Coming in a 'few Months'
"In the next few months we will release a version that will integrate into glasses. So if you are wearing glasses, you'd be able to use this," said Babak Parviz, founder and head of the Google Glass project at Google, during a speech at the Hot Chips conference in Stanford, California, on Tuesday. If the Google Glass platform is successful, "you'll see different optics," Parviz said.

How Enterprise Architecture approach can help CSPs align IT with business goals
After an EA transformation, system availability improved 50 percent and was more predictable, and technology architecture capital expenses decreased by close to 8 percent. With a consolidated IT portfolio, operational costs and time also decreased. Call handling time at call centers decreased by 25 percent and customer experience measures improved by 50 percent.

Cognitive BPM - Making BPM Systems Learn with Experience
One of the key aspects which has remained largely unchanged is that the improvements have been largely around the Process and Technology aspects of the problem, while the People aspects have remained largely unchanged. There are obviously several challenges faced when trying to improve the People aspect, which has led to limited innovation in this front.

Insider Threat: Limit Privileged Access
A hacker or rogue employee can use these accounts to change firewall configurations, modify network settings and edit server logs to hide their activities. These accounts give anyone "god-like access" over the network, Chiu says. Controlling who has access to these accounts and tracking and monitoring exactly how they are being used is a critical part of preventing data leaks and network breaches.

Quote for the day:

"The art of leadership is saying no, not yes. It is very easy to say yes" -- Tony Blair

August 31, 2013

FTC: Medical lab lost patient info on peer-to-peer network
LabMD said it will "vigorously" fight against the FTC allegations. "The Federal Trade Commission's enforcement action against LabMD based, in part, on the alleged actions of Internet trolls, is yet another example of the FTC's pattern of abusing its authority to engage in an ongoing witch hunt against private businesses," the company said in a statement. "The allegations in the FTC's complaint are just that: allegations."

AWS down again? Nobody seems to care
The outcry when Amazon.com went down last week was much more muted, and last Sunday’s event really seems to have been barely a blip on most people’s radar. Despite the consistent pattern of failure with AWS and US-East, customers don’t seem to care. Consumers are seem to becoming acclimated to the semi-regular failures, developing an “It’s down, I’ll get back to it later” attitude during these outages. But that isn’t a good thing.

4 Tips for Mentoring Young Professionals
Established leaders, also have an obligation to pass the baton and help develop leadership in others. This, more than anything, is the hallmark of good leadership. Just as John Quincy Adams once noted, “If your actions inspire others to learn more, dream more, do more, and become more, you are a leader.” If you have young people in either your professional or personal life, lift them up and in so doing, inspire an entire generation of future leaders. Here’s how:

Test Studio: A Quick & Easy Solution To Automated AJAX App Testing Problems
Automating dynamic interfaces and complex AJAX applications is not an easy job. A major hurdle that one faces is, getting the proper reference to the dynamically created HTML objects once the DOM tree has been modified. Usually, a number of workarounds are necessary in order for your code to find the proper HTML element. Well, all these issues can be resolved in a jiffy with Telerik Test Studio, find out how. ASP.NET and AJAX applications have QAs face two major challenges:

Predictive Analytics for Insurers: Tackling the Seemingly Unpredictable
Insurers should deploy predictive analytics for marketing, product development, channel management, new market identification, customer acquisition and retention, customer service, litigation management, claims management risk management and cost control, the report notes. The insurance industry exists in a world filled with more and more rich data, according to Barry Rabkin, principal analyst at Ovum. Insurers must take the steps necessary to leverage all this information.

Theory vs. Learning Models
What the visualizations suggested to me is that the features Mike’s analyses hypothesized/tested as significant were indeed so, but that some of the relationships might in fact be non-linear and there may well be interaction effects in the data not captured in the regression models. And I suspect that by training and testing on the same data, the reported models might be somewhat overfit -- the actual relationships not as strong as those reported.

Why is Agile Data Warehousing Important?
It is difficult to translate a software development methodology to data warehousing, but it can be done. In this interview with TDWI’s David Stodder, Bruce Szalwinski discusses the value found in Cobalt’s commitment to the iterative style and incremental delivery of agile development for data warehousing.

Leadership Caffeine—Surviving and Thriving Under Uncertainty
The modern form of the organization allows us to assemble remarkably intelligent individuals and to organize in groups that when properly motivated, are capable of anything they set their collective mind on. The lack of pre-prescribed approaches or the constantly shifting rules of engagement in our markets and industries is indeed the fuel for the pursuit of great achievement.

Under legal pressure, Facebook clarifies how it uses your data
Facebook is not issuing the clarifications purely for altruistic reasons. On Monday a U.S. judge approved a US$20 million fund for Facebook to settle a class-action lawsuit against the site's "sponsored stories" advertising program, which pairs some Facebook members' information with commercial content to deliver ads to people on the site. Plaintiffs had claimed that their names and likenesses, such as their profile photos, were being misappropriated to promote advertisers' products and services.

Online Project Management Services
With cloud and SaaS becoming mainstream, product vendors are seriously revisiting their product offerings and many are moving towards services as against products. Project Management is one such area, where many have started to offer software tools as a service. Here is a list of SaaS based project management tools with varying abilities and pricing.

Quote for the day:

"No person was ever honored for what he received. Honor has been the reward for what he gave." -- Calvin Coolidge

August 30, 2013

Six data loss prevention strategies for mobile environments
Mobile data security strategies should include measures that apply not only at the employee level but also throughout the chain of command. C-level executives need to understand how much data could be lost when employees routinely store files in their Dropbox accounts. IT departments have to help executives understand the implications of unsecured data and access to corporate systems.

Common & Practical Problems of Requirements Elicitation
Requirement elicitation is an important and challenging phase of any software project. This holds good for both product and project development activities, but the approach, techniques might vary. A well specified requirement has been found to considerably improve success rates of projects. Though various methods and techniques have evolved over the last couple of decades to better produce a good requirements specification, many struggle to get it done well.

Enterprise software: 'Do our customers love us?'
Focusing on outcomes stands in stark contrast to feature-based selling, which historically has been the approach used by technology and enterprise software companies. For example, we are all aware of "feature wars," in which software companies publish endless lists of product attributes in an effort to demonstrate greater value and benefit than the competition.

5 Key Questions to Ask for Maximum Business Performance
It seems that no time is convenient to pause the action and review strategy. When you’re in the thick of the battle to produce a product on time, under budget, with superior quality, a strategic review may seem like a waste of time or a misuse of resources. That said, failure to review strategy may result in getting to the wrong destination while doing so very efficiently. By asking five basic questions and considering the answers, you might optimize business performance and not just operations performance.

Amazon's Push to the Cloud Adds to Server-Market Woes
"There will absolutely be fewer buyers of physical machines," predicts Bryan Cantrill, a senior vice president at Joyent Inc., another company that hosts computing operations. "But we don't know if there will be fewer physical machines sold." The crosscurrents can be seen in new data from market researchers. Gartner, for example, on Wednesday said second-quarter server revenue declined 3.8% from the year-earlier period.

BYOT: Where does it fit into future IT trends? Readers sound off
In a SearchCIO tweet jam recap, participants suggested current trends toward bring your own technology would continue to offer unique opportunities for enterprise IT departments, but also raise new management headaches. Their predictions shed some light on future IT trends, and we followed up by polling our readers, "Are BYOD policies a major concern for CIOs or a fizzling priority?"

The Database Administrator's Back-to-School Checklist
The DBA is responsible for recoverability, data availability, data access performance, and security. Within each of these areas there are many possible places to begin. Below, I provide the three most important areas for the DBA to address immediately. The current quiet period between summer vacations and peak season provides time for contingency planning in order to be ready for the expected upcoming resource and capacity constraints.

NIST subjects draft cybersecurity framework to more public scrutiny
The agency is scheduled to release a full preliminary draft in October, for public review. It will then issue the final 1.0 version of the framework in February 2014 and continue to update the framework thereafter. When finished, the framework will provide guidance for organizations on how to manage cybersecurity risk, "in a manner similar to financial, safety, and operational risk," the document states.

How Social Analytics Can Improve Enterprise IT Efficiency
"Think of it like a 3D networking topography," says VoloMetrix CEO Ryan Fuller. "A general organizational chart is flat -- it shows who reports to whom, but it doesn't show who's collaborating across departments and divisions and with whom, who's working together on certain projects, the dependencies and the connections. This is a great source of untapped data," Fuller says.

Preparing for Continuous Delivery in the Enterprise
As a concept, Continuous Delivery has been around for a while, and has indeed been practiced by the front runners in this field for many years. As a result, there are plenty of books and other references describing the principles and practices of Continuous Delivery, as well as sketching out in detail what the “goal state” can look like. These materials can provide an important theoretical grounding and help you develop your Continuous Delivery vision.

Quote for the day:

"Excellence is in the details. Give attention to the details and excellence will come." -- Perry Paxton

August 29, 2013

Human-to-human brain interface
“The Internet was a way to connect computers, and now it can be a way to connect brains. We want to take the knowledge of a brain and transmit it directly from brain to brain,” said Andrea Stocco whose finger moved on a keyboard in response to his colleague Rajesh Rao’s thoughts. “It was both exciting and eerie to watch an imagined action from my brain get translated into actual action by another brain,” Rao added.

The end of Moore's Law is more than just about physics
The end of Moore's Law may ultimately be as much about economics as physics, says a DARPA director. "My thesis here is that it's time to start planning for the end of Moore's Law, and that it's worth pondering how it will end, not just when," Robert Colwell, director of the Microsystems Technology Office at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, told CNET.

The Stone Wars of Root Cause Analysis
Believing that you have found and eliminated the root cause of all your data quality problems is like believing that after you have removed the stones from your pond (i.e., data cleansing), you can stop the stone-throwers by building a high stone-deflecting wall around your pond (i.e., defect prevention). However, there will always be stones (i.e., data quality issues) and there will always be stone-throwers (i.e., people and processes) that will find a way to throw a stone in your pond

What WebRTC applications will and won't do for enterprises
There is a great deal of hype around what enterprises can expect from WebRTC functionality, and just as many misconceptions. While the protocol will not replace legacy Voice over IP (VoIP) infrastructure or video conferencing systems, early WebRTC applications and capabilities are starting to impact the enterprise, offering simpler and cheaper real-time communications options, said Irwin Lazar, vice president and service director at Mokena, Ill.-based Nemertes Research Group Inc.

Q&A: Patterns of Information Management

The authors of Patterns of Information Management -- Mandy Chessell and Harald Smith -- recommend taking a holistic view of how information flows around your organization's information systems. Think of this information supply chain as you might a manufacturer's transformation of raw material into finish goods.

VMware's virtualization quest could shake up data storage, too
Storage virtualization is an industry trend that could affect how enterprises deal with data, Gartner analyst Chris Wolf said. In addition to VMware's latest strides, Microsoft is doing similar things with its Storage Spaces technology, he said. "To us, this is really technology that's inevitable," Wolf said. Storage virtualization in hypervisors will allow many enterprises to do more with less expensive commodity storage, leaving control of those resources to the software, he said.

The Decline of Star Trek and Its Implications for Requirements Management
The customer is rewarded for allowing a certain vagueness in the scope documents by having the latitude to “move the goalposts,” or surreptitiously add scope without increasing costs. The contractor is rewarded for imprecision in the scope baseline by delivering a cheaper product that fulfills the most basic interpretation of the contract terms. ... that improving the communications will not necessarily help remediate the most common problems encountered in requirements management space.

Uncover the note-taking power of Google Keep
Being on the go is all about working as efficiently and effortlessly as possible. And if you're a power tablet users, you know that having the right tool to do the job is tantamount to successful mobile work. Sometimes, however, the right tool might be a bit deceiving. Such is the case with Google Keep. This particular Google application allows you to create and save quick text notes, audio notes, and pictures.

VMware: Enterprises Still Need Data Centers
When it comes to everything moving into the cloud, "We couldn't agree less," Gelsinger threw in for good measure. The data center is going to be a fixture of the enterprise for several decades to come, he assured the crowd, acknowledging that VMware has proudly virtualized a lot of legacy systems and would continue to play a role in the data center for many years to come. Gelsinger's response contained a spark that had been missing in his other appearances at VMworld.

Big Data, Disaster Resilience and Lord of the Rings
There’s been push-back of late against Big Data, with many promoting the notion of Small Data. “For many problems and questions, small data in itself is enough”. Yes, for specific problems: locally disconnected problems. But we live in an increasingly interdependent and connected world with coupled systems that run the risk of experiencing synchronous failure and collapse. Our sensors cannot be purely local since the resilience of our communities is no longer mostly place-based. This is where the rings come in.

Quote for the day:

"One person with a belief is equal to a force of ninety-nine with only interests." -- John Stuart Mill

August 28, 2013

Why Banks Are Finally Embracing Cloud Computing
The first use case for cloud computing in banks is application testing and development. It's a natural fit, since thorough testing of applications requires considerable computing resources but often takes just three to six months — so investing in equipment to test on doesn't make sense. In the next phase of cloud adoption for banks, they're starting to use human resources, accounting and operations apps in public clouds.

New SPARC M6 chip runs Oracle software faster
The latest SPARC processor has 12 processor cores, effectively doubling the number of cores than its predecessor, M5, which shipped earlier this year. Each M6 core will be able to run 8 threads simultaneously, giving the chip the ability to run 96 threads simultaneously, said Ali Vahidsafa , senior hardware engineer at Oracle, during a presentation about M6 at the Hot Chips conference in Stanford, California.

MIT Develops 110-core Processor for More Power-efficient Computing
Typically a lot of data migration takes place between cores and cache, and the 110-core chip has replaced the cache with a shared memory pool, which reduces the data transfer channels. The chip is also able to predict data movement trends, which reduces the number of cycles required to transfer and process data. The benefits of power-efficient data transfers could apply to mobile devices and databases, Lis said on the sidelines of the conference.

Has RAID5 stopped working?
If you had a 8 drive array with 2 TB drives with one failure your chance of having a unrecoverable read error would be near 100%. That second unreadable block during a RAID5 recovery is enough to destroy the RAID group and wipe out all the data on it. Not good! Even with a four drive RAID5 - and 2TB drives - you would have around a 40% chance of a rebuild failure. Better, but not good enough.

Static and dynamic testing in the software development life cycle
Securing your system requires different approaches and tools as a function of your phase in the life cycle (see Figure 1). During the design phase, you rely on good, secure design processes and reviews (and possibly some formal methods such as specification or modeling languages). In the development and verification phase, you have code that you can touch and test as well as perfect for automated review and inspection while under execution. In production, you can inspect the application under execution.

5 Simple Ways to Become a Better Leader
"Building a real personal connection with your teammates is vital to developing the shared trust necessary to build a strong culture of accountability and exceptional performance," said Terry 'Starbucker' St. Marie, a leadership writer and consultant. "With that culture in place, the team can achieve a successful business, a happy team and a fulfilled leader." St. Marie believes that being what he calls a "more human" leader requires positivity, purpose, empathy, compassion, humility and love.

We Win In Scalability & Performance Area Among Top NoSQL Databases Says Couchbase CEO
Database industry is 35 billion dollars today and vast majority of that industry is based on proprietary software. The NoSql technologies, the Operational databases, Analytics support provided by Hadoop and things like that are causing a major-major disruption in the database industry and we think that the winners with all this new technology will all be based on open source.

Adopt Centralised Flow Management to Optimize Network Performance
Such networks are resilient to failures of links and switching nodes—the loop protection and routing protocols reconverge onto a new forwarding topology, and data continues to flow. Congestion bottlenecks can be dealt with reasonably effectively —Quality of Service (QoS) rules prioritize real-time and critical data; selective packet dropping can slow TCP sessions down to a rate appropriate to the current traffic conditions; pause control requests end-points to back off for a while.

How to Enhance the Efficiency of Application Development
Although all output-based metrics have their pros and cons and can be challenging to implement, we believe the best solution to this problem is to combine use cases (UCs)—a method for gathering requirements for application-development projects—with use-case points (UCPs), an output metric that captures the amount of software functionality delivered. For most organizations, this path would involve a two-step transformation journey—first adopting UCs and then UCPs.

With all of this innovating, isn’t it time for some innovation accounting?
The trick with innovation accounting is to measure the stuff that really matters. That means trading in “vanity metrics” for metrics that can drive the business forward, according to Ries. Vanity metrics aren’t wrong, per se, but they don’t provide insight into what might be the next best steps or what might need to be changed in order to meet customer interest or demand. Actionable metrics are more complex and provide an opportunity for comparison.

Quote for the day:

"Never accept the proposition that just because a solution satisfies a problem, that it must be the only solution." -- Raymond E. Feist