Daily Tech Digest by Kannan Subbiah

January 04, 2014

Agile development practices: Three predictions for 2014
It's no secret that Agile development practices have taken the software industry by storm.Application lifecycle management, or ALM, vendors continue to come out with products and tools that help development teams embrace collaboration and continuously improve. Looking to 2014, I predict Agile will mature in three primary ways: More "custom" Agile processes; Growth of large-scale Agile; and Continued growth of DevOps

Human Technology Interfaces - What The Future Has In Store
Gadgets like Brain Link are already in the market, which coupled with related applications on smartphones gives beneficial gaming experience like attention training, meditation, neuro-social gaming, research and knowledge about brain. Most of us would have watched the movies 'Surrogates' wherein humans would stay indoors while their surrogates would go out to work and 'Minority Report' where the police and justice department would get alerts the moment some one think of committing a crime.

This Credit Card Startup Has A Way To Thwart Target-Style Hacking
“The root cause of fraud is the exposure of this information,” says William Gomez Jr., the co-founder and CEO. “The Epic One card does not hold any details of any credit cards. Neither does the Epic One application that runs on your smartphone. None of these devices hold any of your credit card information. The Epic One card grants you temporary access to your cloud wallet that is stored within Epic One’s back-end systems.”

Five Data Mining Techniques That Help Create Business Value
When developing your big data strategy it is important to have a clear understanding of what data mining is and how it can help you. The term data mining first appeared in the 1990s while before that, statisticians used the terms “Data Fishing” or “Data Dredging” to refer to analysing data without an a-priori hypothesis. The most important objective of any data mining process is to find useful information that is easily understood in large data sets. There are a few important classes of tasks that are involved with data mining:

17 exploits the NSA uses to hack PCs, routers and servers for surveillance
Some of the exploits are deployed remotely and others are physically installed. Those hands-on operations may occur while the product is being shipped; it could be snagged during shipping so an obscure group like an FBI black bag team can do the NSA’s domestic dirty work. There are too many exploits listed in the leak to cover in one post, but I thought you might like to know about some that target servers, routers and PCs.

Software requirements: Why the term 'nonfunctional requirements' misleads
You don't just need a bunch of usability. Usability is not nonfunctional. Usability is only relevant with respect to functionality. Moreover, usability requirements frequently differ from one function/use to another, and the differences are defined in terms of relevant characteristics, not some sizing unit as the single-entry-per-type approach implies. Consequently, when gathering data to discover requirements, inquiries about various functions each need also to address applicable nonfunctional characteristics, of which there may be many.

What to expect of Internet of Things in 2014
“Right now, if you think about it, the Internet of Things in your household will probably require you to go and re-purchase many devices that you have today, and I’m not sure how many of us can take that hit in one calendar year,” Robert Stroud, a member of ISACA’s Strategic Advisory council and vice president of innovation and strategy at CA Technologies, says. “I actually think it might apply more in commercial ventures first.”

Durandal: Quick Start
With RequireJS as its base and a thin layer of conventions, Durandal can provide amazing productivity while helping you to maintain SOLID coding practices. Pair that with out-of-the-box support for rich UI composition, modal dialogs, eventing/messaging, widgets, transitions, routing and more....and there's no doubt you'll be able to build whatever apps you can imagine. While Durandal has only been publicly available for about a year now, the community has grown at a breakneck pace.

3 Key Risk Management Trends for 2014
In a recent interaction with a leading banking and financial services organization, MetricStream (my employer) discussed how risk and compliance scores were being used to drive vendor negotiations when renewals arose. At another institution, risk and governance metrics directly impact the performance-linked financial incentives taken home by the management circle. This shift toward leveraging risk metrics as it pertains to performance metrics and business critical processes has elevated risk intelligence from a nice piece to a "must have."

Enterprise Architecture: Getting Organized For The New Year
“The architecture describes primarily the current system/enterprise,” Grigoriu writes. “It may also describe the target system/enterprise in order to visualise its end state. The architecture is employed in the process of enterprise transformation to ensure that projects are aligned in an enterprise-wide portfolio covering all enterprise entities, the business and technology issues and their dependencies.” What a concept – knowing how changing a system will affect other parts of the system before it happens. In this regard, EA is the antithesis of spaghetti – whether it’s spaghetti code, spaghetti cabling, or something else.

Quote for the day:

"The only way to discover the limits of the possible is to venture a little past them … into the impossible." -- Arthur C. Clarke

January 03, 2014

GRC professionals' salaries increase as demand for their skills rises
As factors such as mobility and the cloud create new data security risks, GRC professionals should continue to expect their skill sets to be highly sought after, said Derek Gascon, executive director of the Compliance, Governance & Oversight Council. "Their skills are going to be unique, at least for a while," Gascon said. "All of the data that is being distributed through those mechanisms has to be managed somehow, and the governance people understand what kinds of policies are going to be necessary."

A year of living with Windows Phone: What I've learned so far
With Windows Phone my go-to-device, that aging iPhone is still part of my kit bag, only now it's relegated to iPod status. It turns out that the real tether that holds you in the iOS ecosystem is iTunes, and the myriad albums you've bought and ripped over a decade. Microsoft still hasn't delivered a workable tool for copying music from PC to phone - and while Spotify, Xbox Music and Nokia MixRadio meet my streaming needs, they're not really music library management tools.

The search for data scientists may not always mean IT
"We are focused 100 percent on data and infrastructure," Hoskins says. Hoskins agrees that big data is every bit the big deal that is being made of it. No hype here, he claims. "We are in the age of data now," Hoskins says, "and data is what really matters. I don't think it can be overstated the significance that this has for business and for all of us." More specifically, predictive analytics is what organizations are scrambling to master: turning mountains of data into identifiable patterns of behavior.

What Is Object Storage?
Object Storage is a technology where data is stored in self-contained entities called objects. Think of an object as a file. But unlike traditional file systems, this storage method is not dependent on a hierarchical layout of directories and sub-directories. Objects are given unique ID numbers which are managed in a ‘flat’ index reducing significantly the amount of metadata (data about data) needed to store and retrieve a file. Storage systems that have an object storage foundation can deliver a series of capabilities that should be of interest to data centers that need to store large amounts of files or objects.

How Big Data is changing the security analytics landscape
"The goal of Big Data analytics for security is to obtain actionable intelligence in real time," said Alvaro Cardenas, lead author of the report in the CSA press release. "Although Big Data analytics holds significant promise, there are a number of challenges that must be overcome to realize its true potential. We have only just begun, but are anxious to move forward in helping the industry understand its potential with new research directions in Big Data security."

What’s So Innovative about Innovation?
Are we as innovative as our competitors? What are we doing about being innovative? How do we get some of that innovation stuff? This author even jumped on the bandwagon by recently writing a column about successful CIOs that indicated how important the need for innovation was. However, after writing the piece a little handwringing ensued over what innovation really means, or perhaps should mean, to CIOs in the insurance industry.

NSA looks to crack all encryption with quantum computer, report says
The U.S. National Security Agency is attempting to build a new breed of supercomputer that theoretically could make short work of cracking most keys used for encrypted communications. The project to build "a cryptographically useful quantum computer" is part of an $80 million research project called "Penetrating Hard Targets" that is taking place at a campus in College Park, Maryland, according to The Washington Post. The newspaper quoted documents it said were provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

A CIO's journey to IT transformation begins with 10 steps
With so much new stuff coming our way, we simply do not have the time to keep our focus on the old stuff. For the first time in the history of the world, we are the persons and teams who can help the organization own the future. ... The organization needs us to be effective in leading change, delivering value and moving into the future (because the future is all about technology). A friend recently asked me what I meant by "transformational leaders."

Fifth Third Bank Pilots Analytics-Driven Deposit Pricing
Pricing is often more art than science, he points out. "The art of it is, you can look at what your competitors are offering," he says. "You might put that information in spreadsheets so you can sort and trend it, but it's still largely art and there's not a lot of science behind it." As it brings more science in, Fifth Third will analyze millions of records per month, looking at demand curves, interest rates, and deposit flows within households in reaction to product changes, aiming to find that ideal price point based on the volume of deposits it wants to gather and the maximum amount of interest expense it's willing to incur.

Top 6 Wi-Fi Trends to Expect in 2014!
The new 802.11ac standard is the call of the season. It represents a basic change in innovation of 802.11 standard protocols that boost gigabit speeds during wireless networking. This protocol increases performance of all the 802.11 ac devices by delivering more than one gigabit every second. ... Wi-Fi specific location analytics play a big role for the organization to improve business intelligence, determine security policy as well as improved customer Wi-Fi experience. You must expect Wi-Fi to offer more than just internet accessibility. The users will definitely look for more site- specific applications.

Quote for the day:

"Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak - and to sit down and listen" -- Winston Churchill

January 02, 2014

Google's Eric Schmidt reveals his biggest mistake
While Google is often ahead of the game, Schmidt admitted that during his time as CEO, the company missed a trick when social media began to change the face of the Internet. "At Google, the biggest mistake I made was not anticipating the rise of the social networking phenomenon,” Schmidt said. "Not a mistake we're going to make again. I guess in our defense we were busy working on many other things, but we should have been in that area and I take responsibility for that."

Add semantic analysis to ward off big data/bad analytics syndrome
So feeding data into a model for analysis doesn't erase the potential for bias and misinterpretation. That's because models themselves are biased -- they are all just a representation of reality, he said. And people can engage in "over fitting" or placing too much significance on the results from a sample; or they mistake correlation for causation; or they have a false sense of confidence in "the big data approach" -- namely that having so much data and so many variables cancels other factors out.

Can-Do vs. Can’t-Do Culture
The trouble with innovation is that truly innovative ideas often look like bad ideas at the time. That’s why they are innovative — until now, nobody ever figured out that they were good ideas. Creative big companies like Amazon and Google tend to be run by their innovators. Larry Page will unilaterally fund a good idea that looks like a bad idea and dismiss the reasons why it can’t be done. In this way, he creates a Can-Do Culture. Some people would like to turn the technology startup world into one great big company with a degenerative Can’t-Do Culture. This post attempts to answer that challenge and reverse that tragic trend.

DataWind faces uphill climb in India's smartphone market
The Indian tablet and cell phone manufacturer recently launched three potentially revolutionary smartphones in one of the world's hottest consumer electronics markets. Its PocketSurfer smartphones range from around US$55 to US$105 and are outfitted with 5-inch screens, which generally are not available at those price points in India. The devices come with Linux and Android platforms. ... After all, the Indian market has exhibited an insatiable appetite for smartphones, growing at a sizzling 250 percent annual growth rate and primarily in the medium-low price range that caters to notoriously price-sensitive Indian consumers.

4 Steps to Removing Leadership Bias
The main theme involved in why there is so much to learn about leadership is how little we really know about ourselves. So much behind how we think, perceive and behave is elusive at best and could be one reason why we are so driven to find and express that rhetorical recipe that nails it. ... To grow as leaders we need to constantly improve ourselves and that requires improving our understanding of self. We need to understand when to act on gut feelings and when not to. If we already know why we respond to such feelings I would suggest pragmatically testing them for bias.

Unencrypted Windows crash reports give 'significant advantage' to hackers, spies
"This information would definitely give an attacker a significant advantage. It would give them a blueprint of the [targeted] network," said Alex Watson, director of threat research at Websense, which on Sunday published preliminary findings of its Windows error-reporting investigation. Watson will present Websense's discovery in more detail at the RSA Conference in San Francisco on Feb. 24.

Raspberry Pi: Hands On with Arch Linux and Pidora
Nothing special is required for this, either in terms of knowledge or equipment; you can do it on pretty much any Linux or Windows system. If you don't even want to do this much yourself, you can buy an SD card preloaded with NOOBS from most Raspberry Pi retailers, such as the Pi Shop in Switzerland, where I got mine (I found them to be very friendly, knowlegeable and helpful.) Then just stick the SD card in the Pi, plug in power and it boots to an installer menu. Honestly, I can't imagine how it could be easier.

Healthcare digital signage: Starting small, but growing
Digital signage solutions are built around a central content manager, which serves as the brains of the installation. The content manager schedules what information appears on a display and when. Miller said Hammond primarily uses Scala's enterprise-level content management software. He said most large customers install the content manager as a virtual appliance. A few host the virtual instance in the cloud, tapping providers such as Amazon Web Services, he added.

Business Analytics and Multi-Wavelength Astronomy
This is similar to the task of practitioners in the analytics and enterprise performance management communities. An organization cannot make better decisions and improve its performance by focusing on only one variable, such as cost, time, quality, service-level and so on. These factors are interdependent. So, it is a much more complex problem. Plus there is more volatility today, caused in part by reduced trade barriers from globalization, which has increased uncertainty about the future. Analysts are on a mission to reduce uncertainty.

I’d Rather Be Coding – Writing Things Down
There are many times in the life of a project when a little documentation goes a long way. But to get those benefits, developers must take time away from coding to write things down. Here are some examples where I think they will find the juice was worth the squeeze. ... If no one bothers to write this process down, there’s a good chance it will be performed incorrectly or steps will be missed, wasting even more time. Furthermore, there’s no practical way to automate a process without first writing down the steps.

Quote for the day:

"The day people stop bringing you their problems is the day you have stopped leading them." -- Colin Powell

January 01, 2014

Decoding common virtual data storage terms
Sometimes we get carried away, and many times it's difficult to decipher virtual data storage terms, especially when you are comparing technologies or systems before a big purchasing decision. Just what is a "value-added, impactful solution" anyway? In this podcast, analyst firm Storage Switzerland LLC's senior analyst Eric Slack breaks down some common virtual data storage terms to help you decode sales and marketing gibberish and determine which technology and product is right for your environment.

Deadly Downtime: The Worst Network Outages Of 2013
No company is immune, no matter how sophisticated its technology. In 2013, some of the largest and most well-known technology companies in the world experienced downtime because of network failures. Companies such as Google, NASA, Facebook, Netflix, Twitter, and others all reported outages stemming from some problem in the network. Whether downtime is caused by a faulty piece of hardware, a software bug, a configuration error, or a denial-of-service attack, it causes the same response in customers, employees, users, and the IT professionals responsible for that network: Sheer panic.

Drake Baer: How To Create A Sustainable Culture Of Innovation
At Fast Company, Baer covers the intersection of psychology and work. He interviews the foremost minds in business for a living, including Clay Christensen, Nate Silver and Nassim Taleb. He also has a special interest in companies and bands on the brink of breaking big and the methods by which they do so. In this interview, he talks about why companies struggle with innovation, why leaders become irrelevant when they aren’t thinking forward, which companies are able to create sustainable innovation, sources of creativity and his career advice.

The security industry finds a dream enemy -- government spy agencies
The security industry has the enemy it always dreamed of to help it make the case for encryption adoption, but users looking to secure their data and communications need to be wary of claims made in marketing messages. Securing data in motion is the priority, experts say, and some large Internet firms are already making progress in this area, but encrypting data at rest without losing its usefulness will prove a greater challenge.

Rule Engine with Generic UI
A business rules engine works by separating execution code for business rules from the rest of the business process management system. This allows the end user to change business rules without having to ask a programmer for help. When a change is made, the engine will evaluate the change's effect on other rules in the system and flag the user if there is a conflict. Generic UI engine is a UI components that are common to various kinds of User Interfaces. That means: having generic UI Components that can be accessed using common Interfaces. Generic UI engine can be mapped to custom rule engine.

Enterprise mobility management: Embracing BYOD through secure app and data delivery
Given the paramount importance of security in IT’s mission, the natural instinct may be to try to limit peoples’ choice of devices or otherwise constrain the endpoint environment, even if it means sacrificing the benefits of greater productivity and flexibility. But simply barring the door to consumer device usage and BYOD is neither realistic nor desirable—it is inevitable that IT will face increasing pressure to provide access to any kind of app, anywhere, on any type of device. Simply put, IT has no choice but to enable and support consumer devices and BYOD; the only remaining question is how.

Four SSD best practices for efficient virtual machine storage
When solving the IOPS problem, IT managers have the choice of either server-side flash (basically, cache) or storage-side solid-state drives (SSDs). Either choice can deliver thousands or tens of thousands of IOPS (depending upon quantity) but they are not interchangeable; this is where the issue of latency comes in. Server-side flash has no more latency than other system cache, assuming the data is flash-resident -- meaning the data accessing the flash has to reside on the server as the flash does. If the system has to issue a read command to the hard disk drive (HDD), then there is no benefit to flash.

5 IT Hiring Trends In 2014
In a survey of 860 tech-focused hiring managers and recruiters, 73% reported planning to hire more candidates in the next six months, and 24% percent said their additional hiring will be substantial. That's good news for anyone looking to make a change in 2014. But expect the IT landscape to change, too. Here's a look at five predictions on hot skills, evolving roles, and how social media will change recruiting.

U.S. Struggles to Keep Pace in Delivering Broadband Service
The Obama administration effectively agrees. “While this country has made tremendous progress investing in and delivering high-speed broadband to an unprecedented number of Americans, significant areas for improvement remain,” said Tom Power, deputy chief technology officer for telecommunications at the White House. The disagreement comes over how far behind the United States really is in what many people consider as basic a utility as water and electricity — and how much it will affect the nation’s technological competitiveness over the next decade.

How the Financial Services Industry Should Use Big Data to Regain Trust
Analysing the usage of the many products that financial services firms have explains a lot about the behaviour of the customers. Although banks do not do this, or at least they say they do not do it, they have the possibility to understand customers better than customers understand themselves. The payment information explains a lot about customers. For that reason, when payment provider Equens (the largest pan-European payment processor) decided to sell the transaction data lot of negative reactions appeared and Equens had to withdraw their plan.

Quote for the day:

"All our final decisions are made in a state of mind that is not going to last." -- Marcel Proust

December 31, 2013

Spreadsheet governance tools make corporate finance Excel use feasible
In fact, the event that led the company to share its story was the discovery of a "material deficiency" that allowed an incorrect number to appear in a quarterly earnings report, a clear no-no, given that the company is publicly traded and thus regulated by the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. "Even though we had people eyeballing that stuff, we still published a wrong number," the source said.

The firm behind Healthcare.gov had top-notch credentials -- and it didn't help
Though CGI Federal got something of a black eye from the rollout, the CMMI certification it had did not come under fire , and no one has made a case that it should. Project requirements were changed late in the development cycle, warnings weren't heeded, and time for testing was cut short. Those actions are all anathema to CMMI's careful and measured development processes. If a project that's based on CMMI runs into problems, process defenders will usually cite issues with management and decision-making.

2014: Time to Rethink Privacy
In 2014, IT executives are going to have to make some very difficult decisions about privacy. Quite often when we talk about difficult decisions, we mean that we know what the right thing to do is, but it's just hard to bring ourselves to do it. In this case, though, part of the difficulty will be knowing what the right thing to do is. For that reason, every industry -- nay, every company -- will come to very different decisions based on the concerns of their employees and customers.

Raspberry Pi and Raspian, hands on
What could be better at Christmas than a shiny new gadget? Perhaps a shiny new gadget that runs Linux? One that reminds me of Heathkit, and TRS-80, and days of experimenting and playing with computers for no reason other than curiosity, and joy, and learning? That's what I got, a Raspberry Pi! What I intend to write here is "Jamie's Excellent Raspberry Adventures": it will document my own experiences, discoveries, successes and failures with this little gadget.

eBook: Keep only the data you want.
In today’s information economy, organizations are facing unfathomable data growth rates. In fact, Aberdeen Group estimates that data is growing at a rate of 56% year over year. And now, the big data phenomenon means data is growing in every single operational and analytic application. In fact, data is growing to the point that many organizations are facing impaired performance of their mission-critical applications, along with increasing costs associated with storing all of that data.

MDM vs. MAM: Comparing enterprise mobile security management options
IT teams must be able to successfully address the mobile device management challenge to adequately protect organizations while still allowing enough flexibility to reap the rewards of mobility. The landscape of mobile management products is dynamic and large. A common query is, "Which product is right for my organization, mobile application management (MAM) or mobile device management (MDM)?" The answer can be both and perhaps neither, depending on the use case.

Big Data: Too Much of a Good Thing?
Big data contains a virtual treasure trove of information about customers, trends and countless other valuable insights which may have the potential to transform businesses. However, in the race to unlock this promise, many enterprises now find they have more data than they are capable of handling. Here’s how CIOs, data warehouse managers and others can build the business case for data volume management to help them more effectively manage this data deluge.

An Innovator's Resolutions
Nothing prepares us more for a a journey into a new year, ripe with new promise and new opportunity, more than setting out the goals for the year, creating agreements with ourselves as to how we'll conduct ourselves in this new year. We start by reducing or eliminating cynicism about our organizations, recognizing that as innovators we are the spark of creativity that will lead others to better ideas. We decide now that developing interesting ideas into new products and services isn't easy but is possible, given the right sponsors and demonstrating the right possibilities.

Technologies To Look Out For In 2014
Spotting the next innovation, that could benefit customers or challenge the success of existing products, is top-of-mind for every company. Keeping a finger on the pulse of every innovation that could bring such a disruption can be daunting. At Cisco, a self-nominated team of enthusiasts, unaffiliated with any particular function or business unit take up the challenge of identifying technology developments worldwide. Technologies identified by this team are assessed by a panel of Distinguished Engineers, Fellows, Directors and VPs and a few are selected as novel and most relevant to Cisco.

Can Robots Better Spot Terrorists at Airports?
Aviation and government authorities are starting to use machines in lieu of people to verify the identities of fliers by scanning their faces, irises or fingerprints. Dozens of airports in Europe, Australia and the U.S. already employ such technology so passengers can pass immigration checks without showing identification to, or talking with, a person. Now, several major airports in Europe have started using these automated ID checks at security checkpoints and boarding gates.

Quote for the day:

"Keep true, never be ashamed of doing right, decide on what you think is right and stick to it." -- George Eliot

December 30, 2013

Managing Cyber Security Threats from Inside
In addition to NetFlow, security information and event management (SIEM) provides additional information about anomalous server or network behavior. SIEM solutions gather logs from various devices and systems, aggregating them into a correlation server. An event correlation application then mines unusual patterns or patterns known to be related to malicious behavior. Questionable activity is reported to security via email, SMS, or a Web portal.

Breaking down an IPv6 address: What it all mean
Let’s take a long hard look at an IPv6 address. Amazon supply IPv6 addresses with their EC2 cloud computers. ... There’s a lot of meaning packed into that strange-looking identifier. A few companies have tackled IPv6 but to most it’s just plain confusing. Why is it so confusing? And how can you decipher what it means? Connect to your AWS EC2 instance, find your network interface and its IPv6 address, and let’s do some serious IPv6 breakdown.

Introducing Enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit (EMET) 4.1
Many customers across the world now include EMET as part of their defense-in-depth strategy and appreciate how EMET helps businesses prevent attackers from gaining access to computers systems. Today, we’re releasing a new version, EMET 4.1, with updates that simplify configuration and accelerate deployment. EMET anticipates the most common techniques adversaries might use and shields computer systems against those security threats.

Software License Audits: Myths, Facts, and Microsoft
In this report, you’ll learn how ITAM and SAM in the Cloud “reboot” Microsoft software license audit preparation. By “reboot,” we mean shuttering some processes, optimizing others, erasing the problem, and starting a fresh new approach to audits. You’ll get a step-by-step action plan to prepare for an audit now. and you’ll learn the specific areas in which ITAM and SAM on the Cloud slash time- to-compliance-position while increasing accuracy and reducing organizational angst. With the ease, speed, and agility provided by Cloud-based ITAM and SAM, Microsoft audits become just “sheep in wolves’ clothing.”

Top 5 IT security webinars in 2013
2013 was the year IT security grew up. Leaks and prominent hacks were the focus for major news outlets and adoption of mobile and new targeted attacks were on the minds of IT security teams. ... The best IT security teams have moved from chasing security to proactively developing risk-based approaches and integrating their security practice with the business priorities of their organizations and the tools and services in the market have begun to reflect that. Without further ado, here are the top 5 IT security webinars in 2013:

Know your storage needs before installing a solid-state drive
With SSDs, Martin said, different drives are suited to different workloads, so it is important to select the right drive for your organization's needs. "SSDs, random, sequential, depending on the make, some of them are better than others, some it's the other way," he said. "It's a different animal." And, he noted, hard disk drives do well with sequential reads. So, depending on the workload, traditional disk may suit your needs.

2013: The tech year in cartoons
From Tim Cook's 'pay cut' to Steve Ballmer's 'retirement,' here's a look at some of the year's biggest IT stories from the pen of Computerworld's editorial cartoonist, John Klossner.

Carey Smith, on Becoming the Team’s ‘Hyperlink’
"I’m sort of a peripatetic manager, and I sometimes describe myself as a “hyperlink.” I have an office, but most of the time I just walk around and try to determine if we’ve got any problems. It might be a minor thing, but I’ll take that and then try to track it back. Sometimes you step on people’s toes, but the point is that everything and everybody are connected in some fashion. And they’re connected, if nothing else, through me doing this sort of thing."

Meet Business Demands by Making BI Effective and Relevant
To realize the full value of BI, businesses need to acknowledge how a solution fits with key business processes. The goal is to equip business users with consistent and specific information throughout all levels of the organization so each group or business unit can best understand and apply the information. The full spectrum of users—from the executive team to line-of-business managers—can use solutions that are relevant to their day-to-day responsibilities.

What does it take to transform an organization before a crisis hits
What can leaders do before the depth and scope of their companies’ crises come into focus? How can they initiate major transformations proactively? As researchers and managers who have been involved in numerous corporate transformations in recent years, we have learned that applying standard formulae to corporate transformations is, at best, ineffective and, at worst, dangerous. What’s needed is a new approach that enables executives to transform organizations proactively without resorting to fear.

Quote for the day:

"You cannot tailor-make the situations in life but you can tailor-make the attitudes to fit those situations." -- Zig Ziglar

December 29, 2013

5 Top Social Media Trends For 2014
"It's no longer passed over as a fad or something that's going away any time soon," he said. "Social media is now part of our fabric of society, like mobile phones and computers -- it's a staple of our everyday life." In 2014, expect a shift in priorities: a bigger focus on social media monetization, user-generated content, a great acceptance of sharing information, and more. Here's a look at the big trends for next year.

The Three Power-People You Need on Your Team
The enemy of success is isolation. The higher you go the easier isolation becomes, but, it’s a devastating problem at all levels of leadership. Isolated leaders fear conspiracies and feel misunderstood. Worse yet, ivory-tower leaders resort to control through authority. Us/them thinking destroys influence. Defeat isolation and enhance success by developing a high-power inner circle.

Proposing Architecture and Process Governance for Risk Mitigation in Organizational Change
Transformation does present new and complex challenges entailing the need for a number of changes, mainly organizational and governance processes. It is therefore necessary to study and analyze the potential risks which may arise from such changes and transformations. This thesis proposes an integrated approach to managing the risks associated with both outsourcing and the transformation of the FTC into a civilian entity mainly in terms of change management, organizational and governance process, using Enterprise Architecture (EA) as leverage, supported by other disciplines and methodologies.

The Chief Data Officer: An executive whose time has come
It takes more than a steep investment, however, to squeeze business value out of data. Companies have to establish an entire system to use data to drive competitive advantage. I believe that the head of this system should be the Chief Data Officer (CDO), an executive whose time to shine has finally come. The sooner businesses can empower a CDO, the sooner they can turn data into a business weapon to achieve business success similar to the aforementioned companies.

Probability and Monte Carlo methods
A common use of the Monte Carlo method is to perform numerical integration on a function that may be difficult to integrate analytically. This may seem surprising at first, but the intuition is rather straight forward. The key is to think about the problem geometrically and connect this with probability. Let’s take a simple polynomial function, say

to illustrate the idea.

The Big Lie of Strategic Planning
Strategic plans all tend to look pretty much the same. They usually have three major parts. The first is a vision or mission statement that sets out a relatively lofty and aspirational goal. The second is a list of initiatives—such as product launches, geographic expansions, and construction projects—that the organization will carry out in pursuit of the goal. This part of the strategic plan tends to be very organized but also very long. The length of the list is generally constrained only by affordability.

Monty Taylor and Jim Blair on CI and Test Automation at OpenStack
The OpenStack community has a team working on CI and test automation for the OpenStack developers submitting code. They run their own infrastructure - an OpenStack cloud by itself. Given the complexity of the project, with dozens of dependent projects and over 300 contributors submitting patches every month, standard CI systems simply wouldn't work. We talked with Monty Taylor and James Blair to investigate the build and test challenges they face, and how they managed to tackle them.

Data protection and privacy law for developers
Data protection in EU countries is based on what's known as a "directive" - in this case, its 95/46/ec. The directive is prescriptive in some areas, and in others leaves things up to the interpretation of the national government. This means that in general, data protection and privacy legislation across the different countries of the EU is more or less the same, with some local differences. It's difficult to get things perfectly right in all jurisdictions, but if you start with the core rules, you are most of the way there.

Big Data and the Role of Intuition
Major big data projects to create new products and services are often driven by intuition as well. Google’s self-driving car, for example, is described by its leaders as a big data project. Sebastian Thrun, a Google Fellow and Stanford professor, leads the project. He had an intuition that self-driving cars were possible well before all the necessary data, maps, and infrastructure were available. Motivated in part by the death of a friend in a traffic accident, he said in an interview that he formed a team to address the problem at Stanford without knowing what he was doing.

Establishing Enterprise Architecture Metrics: Seven Essential Steps
Today, the value of EA has become preeminent for most companies integrating their enterprisewide business applications. Many practitioners realize that in a rapidly changing and evolving business environment, an enterprise must measure, manage, and improve its flexibility in successfully deploying integration initiatives. EA can engage both the business and IT teams from the beginning, and EA metrics can present a consistent vehicle to measure most of the critical elements of business value.

Quote for the day:

"Goals are like stepping-stones to the stars. They should never be used to put a ceiling or a limit on achievement." -- Denis Waitley

December 28, 2013

Aaron Levie: The most refreshing voice in the enterprise
At a time when enterprise IT is laboring under constant pressure from reduced budgets, outsourcing pressure, and escalating security challenges, Levie stands out as one of the most refreshing voices in the technology industry. He still believes there's a lot of great work to be done in the enterprise and he's not just a talking a good game. At Box he's leading a team that is hyper-focused on solving enterprise problems.

Testing Basics May Have Averted Obamacare Health Site Fiasco
According to CBS, the security testing was never completed. Fox uncovered a testing bulletin from the day before launch which revealed the site could only handle 1,100 users “before response time gets too high.” The Washington Examiner revealed, via an anonymous source, that the full testing was delayed until just a few days before the launch and instead of the 4 to 6 months of testing that should have been conducted it was only tested for 4 to 6 days.

Welcome to the Lean Service Desk, Part 4: Root Cause Analysis
Lean encourages a structured, disciplined problem-solving approach that is more like informal scientific inquiry. For that reason, we are interested in identifying the root causes of the problem as a precondition to trying to identify solutions. By separating these activities in a very deliberate way, it’s possible to gain enough understanding of the problem to increase the chances of finding solutions that in fact address it.

The Ideas that Shaped Management in 2013
Compiling extremely long lists, struggling to shorten them, and over-thinking it all, when the point should just be to gather some really good reading for you for any free time you happen to find over the holiday. So this year, instead, we thought about the pieces that most surprised us or provoked us to think differently about an intractable problem or perennial question in management, we reviewed the whole year of data to remind ourselves what our readers found most compelling, and we looked for patterns in the subjects our authors raised most frequently and independently of our editorial urging

Do You Know What Life Will Be Like In 5 Years? IBM's Top Scientist Does
In the 5 in 5 report IBM’s top scientists report on what the world, supported by smart sensing and computing, will look like in five years. ... In five years, cities will be sentient. More buses will automatically run when there are more people to fill them. And doctors will use your DNA to tailor medical advice and smart computing to diagnose and plan treatment for big diseases like cancer not in months, but in minutes.

Merchant Warehouse Provides Visual Overview of the State of the Payments Industry
Focused on 4 main quadrants, the Merchant Warehouse State of the Payments Industry will examine and provide up-to-date information covering all aspects of the payment industry from consumer credit trends to important information on regulations and technology. While individual sections will be update regularly as new information and data become available, each quarter Merchant Warehouse will deliver a new report highlighting major updates and trends ensuring that our audience is fully aware of where the industry is and more importantly where it is headed.

Global Stock Exchanges Band Together on Cybersecurity Initiative
In addition to developing cybersecurity best practices, the Cyber Security Committee will focus on establishing a communication framework among participants based on mutual trust and, notably, facilitating information sharing, including threat intelligence, attack trends and useful policies, standards and technologies. Part of that will also be enhancing dialogue with policy makers, regulators and government organizations on cyber-threats and supporting improved defenses from both external and internal attacks.

Establishing Data Governance Policies: Four Issues to Get Them Right
A first-rate data governance policy improves an organization’s ability to demonstrate regulatory compliance, respond to legal inquiries, reduce risk and increase data quality and business process management for increased employee effectiveness and better decision-making. ... Faced with rapidly growing data volumes, varieties and obligations, it is imperative that organizations have data governance policies and technologies that support them in place. The following four steps can help any company manage their data assets

COBIT 5 and the Process Capability Model Improvements Provided for IT Governance Process

Starting from a general overview of this framework, the structure of the Process Capability Model will be analysed in detail in this paper. Then, a comparison with the Maturity Model of the previous version of the COBIT framework will be discussed. At the end of this paper, it will be seen that the new Process Capability approach results in an improvement of the assessment process; and in particular, in the formality and the rigor of the assessment.

Retrospectives Applied as “PROspectives"
Don’t worry if the PROspective needs more time than planned. As long as the participants - the owners and beneficiaries of the PROspective - are willing to continue, it is fine. You, as the facilitator, are responsible for keeping the process on track to enable reflection, learning, and inventing actions for improvements. If you think the team has lost track of that and the meeting has become a waste of time then share that impression with the participants. If they want to go on anyway, it is their decision. You are the enabler, not the director.

Quote for the day:

"Men meet with failure because of their lack of persistence in creating new plans to take the place of those which fail." -- Napolean Hill

December 27, 2013

The Big Picture for Big Data
Several weeks ago, Information Management had the opportunity to sit down for a wide-ranging discussion with Dr. Rob Walker, vice president of decision management at Pegasystems, the Cambridge, MA-based provider of BPM and CRM solutions. Walker, who holds a PhD in computer science and began his career pioneering predictive analytics at Capgemini in the 1980s, shared his perspectives on the growth of big data and the challenges faced by companies as they struggle to derive real business value from the multitude of data management technologies that ‘big data’ represents.

How application performance metrics keep healthcare software healthy
The application performance metrics you measure for a healthcare application should be focused on improving the customer end-user experience and positively affecting the quality of patient care. Metrics that measure how software applications perform is critical to improving patient care, satisfying regulatory requirements and allowing medical professionals to do a critical job without undue interference.

Top 10 Methods to Improve ETL Performance Using SSIS
SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) is the tool in the ETL family that is useful for developing and managing an enterprise data warehouse. A data warehouse by its own characterization works on a huge volume of data and performance is a big challenge when managing a huge volume of data for any Architect or DBA. The author in this article discusses on improving ETL performance or design a high performing ETL system with the help of SSIS.

Next step for connected devices? Connect the devices
The thinking is that the big opportunity will be for platforms, or hubs, like SmartThings, vying to tie together the so-called Internet of Things (a press friendly name for the connected device category), said IDC analyst Jonathan Gaw. With consumers actually starting to pay attention to connected products, the need will come for an easy way to manage all of them, despite their different manufacturers and ecosystems, Gaw said. To be clear, connected devices still have a long way to go before they become a mainstay, or even more than an occasional fixture, in American homes.

The first 3D printed organ -- a liver -- is expected in 2014
Advances in the 3D printing of human tissue have moved fast enough that San Diego-based bio-printing company Organovo now expects to unveil the world's first printed organ -- a human liver -- next year. Like other forms of 3D printing, bio-printing lays down layer after layer of material -- in this case, live cells -- to form a solid physical entity -- in this case, human tissue. The major stumbling block in creating tissue continues to be manufacturing the vascular system needed to provide it with life-sustaining oxygen and nutrients.

Penny Pritzker, on Hearing the Whole Story
"And when we get close to saying we want to hire someone, I will talk to them about what could get them fired. If you want to get fired, here’s what you need to do: first, lie, cheat or steal. But the other thing that will get you fired is if you have a problem and you keep it to yourself. Problems are going to happen, and it’s my job to help you with your problem. What I’ve learned is that the most troublesome people don’t tell you 100 percent of the story, and keep some facts to themselves."

2013: The Year Of Security Certification Bashing
The idea that a certification means that a person was capable of passing the test at one time is a sad statement, as it indicates stagnation in one of the least stagnant of professions. No one who worked with packet filtering firewalls has stayed in that era. The progress of the industry simply will not allow it. Most certifications require either upgrade tests or continuing professional education credits to keep the certification in good standing. This is the same method in use by other professions, such as attorneys, doctors, and accounts.

NCSU study says Android vulnerabilities are mostly from manufacturers
Researchers analyzed the customized apps that manufacturers build on top of the baseline version of Android shipped from Google. The apps provide unique features and a look and feel that's meant to make the smartphone stand out in the market. Eighty percent of the apps that come with devices are created by the manufacturers, not Google. "It is worrisome to notice that vendor customizations were, on the whole, responsible for the bulk of the security problems suffered by each device," the study said.

Data Profiling and Data Governance: How Good is This Data?
When dealing with large volumes of data coming in from a variety of sources, in different formats, and delivered by different methods a data profiling automation solution becomes a necessity to efficiently analyze data. Data profiling functionality can often be found as part of a larger data quality technology suite. Profiling tools can quickly process and analyze large data sets and automatically produce a baseline profile, thus replacing the need to run manual queries.

Building a Real-time, Personalized Recommendation System with Kiji
A typical Kiji application will include some number of KijiScoring servers, which are stateless Java processes that can be scaled out, and that are able to run a ScoringFunction using a single entity’s data as input. A Kiji application will funnel client requests through the KijiScoring server, which determines whether or not data is fresh. If necessary, it will run a ScoringFunction to refresh any recommendations before they are passed back to the client, and write the recomputed data back to HBase for later use.

Quote for the day:

"One of the most important tasks of a manager is to eliminate his people's excuses for failure." -- Robert Townsend

December 26, 2013

The top 10 cloud provider tips of 2013
Cloud service providers have had many different opportunities for growth this year, from developing cloud partner programs to building industry-specific cloud markets. Software-defined networking (SDN) was a hot topic for cloud providers this year with several of our most popular expert tips covering everything from overcoming barriers to SDN adoption to determining which model of SDN to deploy. Check out our full list of top cloud provider tips for 2013, including advice on FISMA compliance and an analysis of what "open" cloud services really mean.

Four Tech Predictions for 2014 (From PayPal’s CTO)
What happens when new products and services deliver capabilities that help innovators envision better ways of eliminating friction points that people have been living with for years? What happens is that you get the perfect conditions for the kind of rapid technology-driven transformation that has been gathering momentum in the payment industry for the past couple of years. It’s a transformation that promises to revolutionize commerce by rendering the transaction all but invisible while making the payments process itself a foundation for new experiences that connects consumers and merchants in powerful new ways.

Make a high-performance computing and high-availability datacentre
Datacentre professionals must note also that although the use of virtualisation provides a better level of inherent availability, it is not a universal panacea. Virtual images of applications, virtual storage pools and virtual network paths are still dependent on the physical resources assigned to them, and the datacentre design must take this into account. If the server running the virtual image fails, it will still be necessary to spin up a new image elsewhere on the physical server system and reassign connections.

Leading by Letting Go
The trouble was that the scripts, metrics, and rules were getting in the way. Heavily scripted representatives couldn’t form genuinely warm and empathic relationships. They sounded wooden and stilted. Real relationships are built on open, person-to-person communication, one caring human being to another. ... The results? Call-handling time edged up slightly at the very beginning, then dropped and kept falling. Likelihood-to-recommend scores doubled, indicating far more enthusiastic advocacy of American Express on the part of customers. Employee attrition was cut in half.

The reality of android soldiers and why laws for robots are doomed to failure
For Sharkey robot soldiers can't comply with the basic rules of war. They can't distinguish between a combatant or a civilian or between a wounded soldier and a legitimate target. "There are no AI robotic systems capable of doing that at all," he argues, pointing to one UK-built system that can tell the difference between a human and a car "but has problems with a dancing bear or a dog on its hind legs." A robot weapons system won't be able to judge proportionality either, he argues; that is, judge whether civilian losses are acceptable and in proportion to the military advantage gained by an attack.

SOA Best Practices in the Mobile Age
The new opportunity in APIs is BaaS, an extension to the service API model. The goal of BaaS is to convert common and useful elements of mobile application logic-storage, identity management, social network integration, photo enhancing into Representational State Transfer (REST) Web services that the application invokes as needed, making these services "back ends” to mobile apps. As a concept, BaaS is similar to Software as a Service (SaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS); it offers functionality as a Web service.

Martin: Issues to consider when using SSD
There may be a lot of benefits when you add solid-state storage to your environment: greater speed, lower costs of energy and greater efficiency. But the technology has a new set of issues you'll need to monitor. Dennis Martin, president of Demartek, discusses those variables in this Storage Decisions video. He noted that users of solid-state drives have to keep track of data writes to their drives, a practice that isn't necessary with hard disk.

Should everyone learn how to code?
Are good coders simply born and not made? Of course not. But it's true that the best are frequently self-taught and loved coding from the start. Without strong self-motivation, it's very, very difficult to slog your way through the painstaking labor and long hours required to become a decent programmer. To be an excellent one, you need a whole lot of experience, which is why I've heard hiring managers say they're more impressed by an applicant who wrote a mobile app at age 14 than one with a BSCS from a good school.

Venture capitalist proposes California 2.0, a plan for six new states
”Something’s not working in our state, and I’m convinced that it is with the existing system, the existing breadth of industry and varying interests. California is untenable and un-governable,” Draper told a sparsely attended news conference at the Silicon Valley school for entrepreneurship that he created and that bears his name. There were about 20 people in the room, although only six appeared to be reporters.

Visualizing Java Garbage Collection
Modern GC is highly efficient, far more so than manual allocation typical in earlier languages. People from other language backgrounds often focus on GC pauses without fully understanding the context that automatic memory management operates in. Mark & Sweep is the fundamental algorithm used for GC by Java (and other runtimes). In the Mark & Sweep algorithm you have references pointing from the frames of each stack's thread, which point into program heap.

Quote for the day:

"The final test of a leader is that he leaves behind him in other men, the conviction and the will to carry on."— -- Walter Lippmann