Daily Tech Digest by Kannan Subbiah

March 15, 2014

Dubai Aims To Be City of Gold Standard in Tech
What is interesting is that a lot of companies see the Expo as a catalyst for growth and innovation, particularly in the tech sector. In truth, it’s a massive challenge. The UAE as a whole ranks low in terms of innovation and investment. According to a World Bank report it comes in at 39, below Costa Rica and Romania. As world tech cities go, it doesn’t fare any better. Dubai didn’t feature in a World Economic Forum report this month and it doesn’t feature in various lists of the World’s top areas for tech startups.

How Target detected hack but failed to act
A team of security professionals was set up in Bangalore to monitor Target's network servers and alert security operators in Minneapolis of any detected malware. And this process worked as expected during the November hack. After detecting the hack, the people in Bangalore alerted the people in Minneapolis. But that's where the ball got dropped, according to Bloomberg. The hack continued on its merry way. Why was the hack successful despite all the warning signs? Bloomberg's sources pointed to a few reasons.

Exchange CEOs say they are on high alert over cyber security
More than half of the world's exchanges were hit by cyber attacks in 2012, according to a paper released last year by the World Federation of Exchanges Office and the research department of the International Organization of Securities Commissions. "We are worried a lot and we are far more worried now than we were just a couple of years ago," Magnus Bocker, chief executive of Singapore Exchange Ltd, said during a panel discussion at the Futures Industry Association conference in Boca Raton, Florida on Wednesday.

CA Technologies Partners with the Wharton School's Mack Institute for Innovation Management
"Software is disrupting many industries and fundamentally redefining business models. CA Technologies has been one of the leaders in the enterprise software space for nearly 40 years, and its solutions are at the center of the world's largest and most complex enterprises. With this rich industry heritage and focus on continued innovation, CA Technologies brings a very valuable perspective to the Mack Institute," said Mack Institute Co-director Nicolaj Siggelkow.

Long Live Television: Digital Video Ad Convergence Keeps TV Relevant
Now, TV as an ad platform has started to absorb many of the characteristics of the digital ad world (i.e. rich viewing data, enhanced measurement techniques, etc.)…our participants agreed that this presents TV companies, which already have large audiences, valuable content and tens of billions of dollars in advertising revenue, with the opportunity to be pivotal players in the future of video advertising. The Nielson report went on to form this general conclusion about Digital Video Ad Convergence: For this convergence to take place, the advertising industry will need to embrace video as a platform agnostic medium. Then video, not the delivery channels, becomes the medium.

IT Age Discrimination: You're Not The Dinosaur
In my last column, I wrote that if you've had a rich, accomplished career and you've kept your skill set sharp, there's more work to be had and done. One snarky reader replied: "Yeah, move to India." Really? So you're saying on one hand that you're expert, skilled and motivated? But on the other hand, you're saying there's nowhere else in the U.S. for you to contribute value and get paid for it? Perhaps you're not looking beyond the big, idiotic IT employers. It's time to take a look at small and midsize companies, those that are growing quickly and whose business practices aren't steeped in generations of dysfunction and shortsightedness.

Embarcadero buys CA's Erwin data modeling tools
The acquisition puts Embarcadero in the lead of the data modeling market, according to Al Hilwa, program director for application development software research the IT analyst firm IDC. The data and systems modeling market will grow in the next few years, as organizations work to implement and manage big-data-styled collection and analysis systems, Hilwa said. To meet customer expectations, tool vendors must integrate modeling with other aspects of system building and maintenance, such as project planning or investment management.

A World-Class London Needs Free, Fast Broadband
Surely, making London a single free zone providing secure, reliable and comprehensive WiFi and other modes of internet access is vital if London is to continue attracting talented people to live and work here? Some power-brokers have long talked a good game on this front. Mayor of London candidate Brian Paddick in 2008 said he would cut Transport for London’s advertising budget to invest in free city-wide WiFi for all. "London is a 21st century city and as Mayor I would want to see 21st century technology accessible to all," said Paddick.

Banks Pushed Toward Cloud Computing by Cost Pressures
"Financial services is experiencing a fundamental shift in enterprise IT while it suffers from a credit crisis hangover," says Tony Bishop, the chief strategy officer at 451 Research, who built one of the first internal clouds in financial services at Wachovia several years ago. A secondary reason for switching to the cloud is that the broader economy is shifting towards all things digitally delivered and consumed, over a variety of devices. "This is remaking how enterprise IT must support customers, employees, and partners," Bishop says.

OpenJDK and HashMap …. Safely Teaching an Old Dog New (Off-Heap!) Tricks
Achieving high performance when using "synchronized" requires low contention rates. This is very common, so in many cases, it is not as bad as it sounds. However once you introduce any contention (multiple threads trying to operate on the same collection at the same time) performance will be impacted. In the worst case, with high lock contention, you might end up having multiple threads exhibiting poorer performance than a single thread's performance (operating with no locking or contention of any kind).

Quote for the day:

"Leadership development is a lifetime journey, not a quick trip." -- John Maxwell

March 14, 2014

Social engineering attacks: Is security focused on the wrong problem?
Anyone -- even pros -- can become a victim of a social-engineering attack. "It's nearly impossible to detect you've been socially engineered," said Daniel Cohen, head of knowledge delivery and business development for RSA's FraudAction group, who says malicious social engineering is one of the biggest problems for security. "As long as there's a conscious interface between man and machine, social engineering will always exist." Money is the main reason malicious social engineering is so pervasive. In October 2013, RSA identified more than 62,000 phishing attacks, which raised the bar in terms of number of attacks carried out within a single month.

Defense Department Adopts NIST Security Standards
The change in policy reflects a "move away from unique DOD standards, to a more broad use of the NIST standards and other government standards," Takai told InformationWeek in an interview last December in advance of the instruction letter's formal release. The change was prompted in part because, she said, "we were concerned we're driving up our costs by virtue of having companies have to fit our standards as well as to other national standards."

Why Leaders Are Poor Communicators
It’s often said that employees don’t leave a job; they leave their manager. A manager doesn’t have to be malevolent. It’s a tough slog when you don’t know what your boss wants or if there’s simply no connection to leadership or a common purpose. Further, communications builds trust – and erodes it quickly when missing or bungled. To that point, in a study captured in the article, “How Poor Leaders Become Good Leaders,” most of the improvements listed by Harvard Business Review contributors Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman involve shifts in how managers communicated with others.

NSA Disputes Report On Program To Automate Infection Of 'Millions' Of Machines
The agency said it does not "use its technical capabilities to impersonate U.S. company websites" and it only targets users under proper legal authority. "Reports of indiscriminate computer exploitation operations are simply false," according to the NSA. "NSA’s authorities require that its foreign intelligence operations support valid national security requirements, protect the legitimate privacy interests of all persons, and be as tailored as feasible." Meanwhile, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg today said he had called President Obama to voice his concerns about media reports on government surveillance.

5 Ways CIOs Can Rationalize Application Portfolios
"There's a striking difference from 2011: IT is considered much more, particularly by the business side, as something that helps them innovate and inform themselves," says Ron Tolido, senior vice president, Application Services, at consulting, technology and outsourcing services provider Capgemini. Tolido is also the author of Capgemini's recently released Application Landscape Report 2014, a follow-up to a 2011 report on the same subject. "In 2011, IT was much more looked at for cost reduction," Tolido adds. "Now it's seen as a strategic enabler. It puts a lot of the CIOs that we've been surveying under a lot of additional pressure."

The new security perimeter: Human Sensors
So how long have you been a responsible cyber citizen? Where did you learn to become one? We all learned how to drive a car and hopefully we are responsible drivers, at least there is training and a test for drivers of automobiles. What about being a responsible cyber citizen? There is no official curriculum in our schools for it? Can you actually cause your country and yourself significant monetary losses or worse, just by not being aware of the dangers that lurk on the internet? The point is, over time malware has become quite sophisticated, what started as a prank in the 1980s is now a multi-billion dollar cyber-crime industry.

Enterprise social media: New battleground for CIO influence
First, social media is part of the ongoing digital transformation taking place in almost all industries. Although social media remains centralized among a few people in a single team, the role of social will eventually expand beyond marketing and customer service to encompass aspects of core operations. Business is about communication so it makes sense that the importance of social media, which means communication, will grow over time. Smart CIOs will embrace this future today rather than waiting.

Mobility bandwagon: Developing enterprise mobile applications
The second fundamental concern an organization must address is security testing. If IT security teams are going to expose the application, its data and the back-end services to the Internet, they have to know that it's packaged for the potential onslaught of malicious actors and curious users. With every interface a potential source of attacks, development teams need to ensure that they understand the risks these applications can add and the vulnerabilities that exist.

Have Liberal Arts Degree, Will Code
Some employers have learned to look for this combination of talents. Dan Melton, deputy chief technology officer at Granicus, a San Francisco-based startup that puts government data in the cloud, has hired two students with humanities backgrounds from App Academy. He said he looks for those students because they’re able to work better with other programmers and clients and understand the larger meaning of the work. “We already have a lot of software whiz kids,” Melton said. “We like to hire people who are interested in public affairs and civic engagement.”

Huawei chip partnership looks toward Ethernet hitting 400 gigabits
At the Optical Fiber Communications (OFC) conference in San Francisco, Huawei and Xilinx showed off a router line card that they say could handle 400Gbps Ethernet. The part is only a prototype and Huawei doesn't plan to sell a pre-standard product, but the demonstration shows the two vendors are already gearing up for the next version of Ethernet, said Chuck Adams, distinguished standards strategist at Huawei's U.S. R&D center.

Quote for the day:

"Nothing is so potent as the silent influence of a good example" -- James Kent

March 13, 2014

Lambda Architecture: Design Simpler, Resilient, Maintainable and Scalable Big Data Solutions
Lambda Architecture proposes a simpler, elegant paradigm that is designed to tame complexity while being able to store and effectively process large amounts of data. The Lambda Architecture was originally presented by Nathan Marz, who is well known in the big data community for his work on the Storm project. In this article, we will present the motivation behind the Lambda Architecture, review its structure, and end with a working sample. For further details on the Lambda Architecture, readers are advised to refer to Nathan Marz’s upcoming book Big Data.

Want secure software? Listen to Marge Simpson
When it comes to sourcing our security software, the great analyst Marge Simpson was right: "We can't afford to shop at any store that has a philosophy" — whether that philosophy is about being designed by Apple in California, or many eyes, or freedom, or whatever hand-waving feelpinions people might proffer. No, we don't need a philosophy so much as need need science — or, more accurately, engineering.

IT partnership investment: Measuring ROI of the vendor-partner relationship
PartnerPath predicts that someday the tables will turn completely, and it will be the solution providers -- rather than the vendors -- that set the requirements to qualify vendors as gold- or platinum-level partners, for example. On the topic of profitability, Lowe said it involves more than just front-end margins. In fact, he described it as a complicated formula. The equation: Opportunity divided by investment equals profitability return. Opportunity breaks down into three buckets: market demand, financial reward and program support. Investment also breaks down into three buckets: enablement, relationship and ease of doing business.

Will Microsoft's new activist board member force it to clean up its Windows act?
The new board member is G. Mason Morfit, president of ValueAct Capital, and he essentially pushed his way into Microsoft's board room. ValueAct, an investment firm with over $14 billion in assets, had been accumulating Microsoft stock, and had gathered 0.8 percent. That's a lot more sizable number than it seems, given that it is held by a single company -- especially an activist one like ValueAct.

Can anti-virus technology morph into breach detection systems?
"The premise of breach detection is things will get through all your defenses and you need to contain it as soon as possible," says Randy Abrams, research director at NSS Labs, which has begun testing what it calls BDS products that can identify evidence of stealthy cyberattacks, track down what corporate computers and networks were hit and quickly mitigate against any malware dropped in that attack which would be used to spy and exfiltrate sensitive data. BDS products, however they do it -- through sandboxing, an endpoint agent or other approach -- should be able to at least catch the breach within 48 hours, he says.

Entrepreneurs’ tips for managing employees with different worldviews
The Young Entrepreneur Council is an invite-only organization comprised of the world’s most promising young entrepreneurs. YEC recently launched StartupCollective, a free virtual mentorship program that helps millions of entrepreneurs start and grow businesses.Read previous SmartBlogs posts by YEC.

Q&A with Microsoft's channel chief Phil Sorgen
If we take cloud, one of the biggest transformations going on right now, of the successful cloud companies growing the fastest what they sell looks different from what it did previously as they are doing more managed services and more IP related services and they are getting into repeatable methodologies and repeatable IP. They are finding they can expand their footprint geographically more readily than in the past so customer acquisition in the cloud can be faster.

NSA: Our zero days put you at risk, but we do what we like with them
While the NSA is known to build and use exploits for zero day flaws in its foreign intelligence missions, little is known about what rules, if any, it follows for disclosing flaws to vendors so that organisations in the US and allied countries can mitigate the risk of attacks that are being used in the wild. NSA chief nominee US Navy vice admiral Michael S Rogers on Tuesday gave a vague outline of rules the spy agency has for handling such flaws, which includes an internal "adjudication process" for determining whether to let the vendor of an affected product know about it; or just keep it under wraps for spying.

Sustaining Kanban in the Enterprise
The key here not to use pre-cooked solutions (e.g. use a standard visualization board and standard policies). These canned solutions will probably help in the (very) short term - the team starts with “something” - but it will very quickly fail the team by not mapping to the team’s reality and challenges. The biggest problem with pre-cooked solutions is that they let the team members believe that they do not need to think, as someone else (in an totally different context) has already done the thinking for them.

Cisco on mission to outfit all office rooms with video conferencing systems
Cisco isn't the only company focusing on this. Microsoft is also making a strong push with its Lync unified communications server, which can be deployed on customer premises and, with a subset of the functionality, accessed via the Office 365 public cloud suite. Other competing providers of UC and video conferencing systems in particular include IBM, Avaya, Siemens' Unify, Alcatel-Lucent, Mitel and ShoreTel. Of course, Cisco has been a big player in video conferencing for years, catering to the low-end of the market with its WebEx line of products and to the high-end with its whole-room Tandberg systems.

Quote for the day:

“Nothing gives so much direction to a person's life as a sound set of principles.” -- Ralph Waldo Emerson

March 12, 2014

AI researcher says amoral robots pose a danger to humanity
Robots are only now beginning to act autonomously. A DARPA robotics challenge late last year showed just how much human control robots -- especially, humanoid robots -- still need. The same is true with weaponized autonomous robots, which the U.S. military has said need human controllers for big, and potentially lethal, decisions. But what happens in 10 or 20 years when robots have advanced exponentially and are working in homes as human aides and care givers? What happens when robots are fully at work in the military or law enforcement, or have control of a nation's missile defense system?

UK to help lead world fight against cyber crime
“To get access to those skills we have to look at how we can engage with industry through programmes which allow people to work with law enforcement on a part-time voluntary basis,” he said. Looking to the future, Archibald said the NCCU is investing a “considerable amount of money” in developing law enforcement officers from officers on the beat all the way up to the high-end skills. Finally, he admitted that in the past, engagement with industry had tended to be on the terms of law enforcement, which had made decisions on things like media coverage with little regard to reputational damage to the businesses involved.

Do-it-yourself corporate cloud with ownCloud 6 Enterprise Edition
The Enterprise Edition is designed to seamlessly integrate with your existing infrastructure. Designed from the ground up to be fully deployed on premises, it enables integration into existing user management tools, governance processes, and security, monitoring, and back-up tools. ... As you would expect, ownCloud Enterprise Edition is based on ownCloud Community Edition. With more than 1.3 million users, the Community Edition is one of the world’s most popular open source file sync and share software programs.

Aruba Announces 5 Software Tools for Optimizing Wi-Fi Networks
Several of the software improvements -- all free to existing customers -- are designed to help IT managers optimize their oversight of Wi-Fi networks, which can lower help desk complaints and improve worker efficiency. One of the new tools, Auto Sign-On, is focused on helping end users. Instead of signing in to each enterprise application, such as SalesForce.com, with a lengthy password that's hard to input on a small smartphone keyboard, the tool uses a worker's Wi-Fi login to automatically authenticate an employee with single sign-on.

25 years of the World Wide Web
The Web has changed the way we work, share our lives with family and friends and even play games. This one innovation has brought an astonishing level of change in a short amount of time. Today, the Web is marking its 25th anniversary. On March 12, 1989, Tim Berners-Lee, a British computer scientist, introduced the idea of the World Wide Web in a proposal for an information system. Here, technology leaders, including Vint Cerf, and executives from Intel and AOL, reflect on how the Web has affected the world we live in.

Twitter's Biz Stone is a humble 'Hallucinogenic optimist'
Biz Stone is way too humble. What’s the point in hitting the jackpot when you are too self conscious to use the money in a way that you weren’t able? Time to grow up and grow into your money. You are forty years old. You can live well and do well too. Money is more than philanthropy it is also a means of actively creating the future. Techno-optimists must also become techno-activists — to make sure we get the right future. It won’t come about by itself. We could easily end up in some nightmarish version of a tech-enabled North Korea.

Internet of things cannot be about products alone, warn experts
While they agree that the government funding is a huge opportunity for the UK technology industry, they believe that ongoing success is dependent on companies ensuring they can keep both personal and commercial data safe, and building security and privacy into products from the start. “The benefits that these intelligent, connected devices bring to our lives are almost too numerous to count. However, when we gift these things with intelligence and senses, we also fundamentally change their very nature,” said Marc Rogers, principal security researcher at Lookout.

eBook: The practical approach to Windows Phone 8 development.
The Windows Phone 8 operating system is closely tied to the hardware of Windows Phones, enabling the development of high-performance apps that provide excellent user experiences. With Windows Phone 8 Development Succinctly by Matteo Pagani, you’ll go from creating a “Hello World” app to managing network data usage, enabling users to talk to your application through speech APIs, and earning money through in-app purchases. Dozens of additional features are covered in the book, including launchers, choosers, and geolocation services, so you’ll have a place to start no matter what you want your app to do.

GPS tech built to find missing aircraft not always used
Aviation authorities around the world are starting to implement plans to supplement radar with GPS technologies, but that won't happen everywhere for another 10 years or so, he said. Eventually, all position data will come from the plane. "We're not there yet," Graham said. The major aircraft tracking technologies include Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B), said Ric Peri, vice president of government and industry affairs at the Aircraft Electronics Association. Rather than relying on a radar ping, ADS-B uses a GPS signal and an aircraft's navigation system to determine the position of a flight and then broadcast that information, he said.

Is Office 365 worth spending 3x more than on Google Apps?
Microsoft's messaging products (Exchange, Outlook) are ubiquitous. Microsoft and Google both know how to operate secure, cloud-scale operations. Office Web Apps and Google Docs are feature-equivalent. The advantage Microsoft has is the enormous, and universal capabilities of full, installed Office. The curious thing is that although you probably don't really need it, and by extension don't need to pay for it, it's sufficiently cheap that you might as well operate on the old maxim that it's easier just to pay for it, and forget about thinking about it.

Quote for the day:

"We must walk consciously only part way toward our goal and then leap in the dark to our success." -- Henry David Thoreau

March 11, 2014

User Experience Design Guidelines for Tablets running Android
While the mobile devices we have today and incredibly powerful compared to computers of just a few years back, they don’t compare to the memory and processor power your desktop computer has. Because your users are mobile and using your application as they move about, you need to keep your application fast and responsive. Your users could be on a bus or train in a moving environment and need to be able to reliably use the UI (can they press a small button when the screen is moving around?). Additionally you need to account for the possibility of drops in network coverage.

Embracing SOA and the cloud: Hybrid integration paradigms offer choices
"It was a multi-enterprise business integration play," said Stamas. "We don't look at it as application integration, but business integration. We are connecting the applications and systems of business partners and service providers. We wanted to embrace SOA and the cloud. SOA provides the abstraction for the applications. The cloud providers provide the abstractions for the hardware and scalability." This hybrid approach allowed them to focus on managing the business process rather than the technology.

Intel's fastest connector lights up data transfers
The cables are smaller, more durable and have a range of up to 300 meters, compared to copper, which can cover only a limited distance, Paniccia said. Ethernet is slower per lane and signals could degrade on cables that are longer than tens of meters, Paniccia said. "It really drives the ability for bandwidth and distance separation," Paniccia said. "We believe the transition's happening to move to fiber." Pricing for the cables was not provided by Corning, which said it would start making cables for end customers in the third quarter.

This Is Why It Feels Like Apple Stopped Innovating Three Years Ago
"If not, chances are your customer will recall the negatives of the feature far more than the positives." Can you imagine how frustrating it would be if the touchscreen only worked 79% of the time? Very few people would have ever bought an iPhone. The reason it feels like Apple has stopped innovating to so many people is that the last time it tried to do what it does best - perfect a technology that allows humans to interact with computers - it failed. And that was two and a half years ago. The last time it succeed was 2006 - eight years ago.

The secrets to executive presence
Why is dress so important? Well, the clothes still don’t make the wo/man, but often they do help you feel like you’re ready for that big step. And it’s that feeling — of confidence and readiness — that communicates most powerfully about your ability in the moments after the person across the meeting table notices your new outfit. What’s with that “feeling”? Isn’t that a bit squishy? People know “boardroom presence” when they see it, but how can you develop it if you’ve never been in the boardroom hot seat? It seems like a chicken-and-egg problem, doesn’t it?

Is privacy undermining trade in digital services?
“Any protectionist measure is a bad thing, particularly in the cloud industry which is essentially global. There’s no harm in selling to customers in the EU on the basis it will keep data within the EU if it’s what they want; but for data protection law it should be kept secure no matter where in world.” A similar warning comes from Thomas Boué ... He says there are proposals going around Brussels with elements of digital protectionism, and cites a European Parliament report calling for the suspension of the Safe Harbour mechanism with the US and to keep European data within Europe.

Design Patterns in ASP.NET
Design patterns are the most powerful tool for software developer. It is important to understand design patterns rather than memorizing its classes, methods and properties. It is also important to learn how to apply pattern to specific problem to get the desired result. This will be required continuous practice of using and applying design patterns in day to day software development. First, identify the software design problem, then see how to address these problems using design patterns and find out the best suited design problem to solve the problem.

Snowden at SXSW: We need better encryption to save us from the surveillance state
Building better end-to-end encryption is the proposed solution to save us from the surveillance state; encryption that happens “automatically and seamlessly” so that average users can use it. If we can make it so that encryption is so easy that even non-techies can use it, then mass surveillance will be ineffective. Then the NSA “cannot spy on innocent people” simply “because they can.” Encryption will make it “too expensive to spy on everyone.” Granted, if the NSA targets you, then they will just hack into your devices, but "hacking doesn't scale."

Enterprise considerations for cloud firewall management and automation
While host-based cloud firewall management seems to be maturing, most enterprises still struggle with developing and maintaining network-based firewall rule sets in the cloud. Some of those difficulties are due to the lack of granularity and capability in many cloud providers' own firewalls, but other challenges often arise from building an automation strategy that can easily keep up with wire-speed firewalls and their complex rule sets in IaaS environments.

Big Data Makes CFOs More Effective
"In our discussions with CFOs over the past decade, the significance of technology and analytical tools in transforming the finance function and broader enterprise has continuously risen," said Bill Fuessler ... "Data has always sat in the center of a CFO's job responsibilities, and CFOs now recognize how insights from big data are helping their company become more competitive. CFOs are being asked to anticipate the future and discover new areas of revenue growth—we anticipate this will spur a new strategic alliance between the CFO and CMO as they partner to drive the corporate growth agenda."

Quote for the day:

"What is not started today is never finished tomorrow." -- Johann Wolfgang von

March 10, 2014

CIOs hold fire over datacentre decisions
The research identified four main forces impeding CIOs’ ability to plan effectively for future datacentre needs: uncertainty over where to locate data; the challenges of risk and compliance; ongoing business transformation; and the need to better manage energy consumption. The Four Forces of Data Centre Disruptionreport said: “In short, this combination of business issues serves to slow down datacentre strategy and responsiveness. This comes at a crucial time when data strategy needs to be as agile and dynamic as possible.”

Antifragile Systems: Designing for Agility vs. Stability
In recent years, IT has been focusing more on agility to keep up with the speed of business. Agile methodologies have been embraced in an effort to release software more frequently. Often, the shift to agile methodologies came at the expense of stabile systems. Many steps that ensured stability were skipped or not fully vetted causing various “cracks in the armor” of systems. The emergence of the DevOps movement is the intersection between agility and stability, where we aim to deliver software faster but with a high degree of automation, measurement, and quality.

5 Reasons Netflix Is Spearheading The HR Revolution
When Patty McCord, former chief talent officer at Netflix, drafted a simple PowerPoint presentation explaining some of the unconventional changes the company had made in its HR policy, she had no idea it would go viral. Since the presentation started circulating, it has been viewed over 5 million times and has been described by Sheryl Sandberg as one of the most important documents to emerge from Silicon Valley. ... In a Harvard Business Review article, McCord lays out five principles that drove her wide-scale transformation of Netflix’s HR strategy:

The Legacy IT Conundrum: Money Pit or Value-Add?
An analysis of IBM's new BlueMix project, which puts most of IBM's software in the cloud, reveals that 80 percent of IT spending goes to legacy systems. As organizations finally learn to stop worrying and love the cloud, IT departments will have to decide if they will continue to be a money pit or can find a way to add value to new cloud systems. ... However, it leaves undisturbed that 80% of IT budgets devoted to "legacy." Therein poses the danger to IT organizations.

Skype-based malware shows how 'peculiar' malicious code can be
This malicious software had accomplished what some had predicted about eight years ago could be done to exploit Skype when “researchers discovered the ability to use Skype as a remote-control procedure,” says Butterworth, executive director of commercial services at ManTech. The malware had been designed using a modified version of the old “SkypeKit” SDK which existed before Microsoft acquired Skype, and it appeared to include a backdoor functionality.

IT Champs Badly Needed in Business
The question therefore is how do you achieve this IT agility and how do you achieve it through IT governance? Governance, as defined by ISACA, comprises three parameters – benefit realisation, risk optimization, and resource optimization. Governance has to consider these three aspects and come out with very clear directions for the management to follow, achieve the objectives, and secure the results. Essentially, governance entails understanding what is required by business, prioritizing these needs and setting the right direction. To me, there is no other alternative but to use IT governance in a very judicious and convincing manner to achieve agility and the end objective of benefit realisation.

UK more than doubles funds to build internet of things
"I see the internet of things as a huge transformative development - a way of boosting productivity, of keeping us healthier, making transport more efficient, reducing energy needs, tackling climate change," said Cameron. He said the UK and Germany could find themselves at the forefront of a new industrial revolution by working in partnership. "We are on the brink of a new industrial revolution and I want us – the UK and Germany – to lead it,” said Cameron.

BYOD and security: Five tips to keep boundaries between work and home
The end result of BYOD is that employees are now using their personal mobile devices to manage their personal livesand their work lives. While it is easy to see the huge cost savings to corporations with a BYOD policy, this merging of work apps onto employees' personal mobile devices can have a negative impact on their work productivity and time off. In this article, I offer five quick tips to help managers assist employees to establish healthy boundaries between their work life and personal life so that both companies and employees can receive the full benefits of BYOD.

Don’t Panic: But Are We Ready for Bring Your Own Everything?
Looking at it in the cold sober light of day, BYOX sounds like one cheesy industry-speak too far, but let’s thing about it for a second. BYOX could mean BYOK i.e. Bring Your Own Keyboard and the keyboard in question (wireless or Bluetooth or whatever) could be transferring drivers, log files and all manner of other unnecessary (and perhaps harmful) data into the corporate network. Are keyboards dangerous? Well yes, in the BYOK Bring Your Own Keyboard world they are.

How to Be Agile in a Waterfall Company
Dror is a senior consultant at CodeValue. His first encounter with agile happened a few years ago while working for a software vendor specializing in unit testing tools, since then he has been evangelizing Agile wherever he went – at his work, speaking at conferences and today as a consultant. He shares from his experience implementing Agile practices in his team, outlining the do and don'ts that can make all the difference. He addresses teams working in a non-agile environment.

Quote for the day:

"There are no great people in this world, only great challenges which ordinary people rise to meet." -- William Frederick Halsey, Jr.

March 09, 2014

Sustainable Architectural Design Decisions
Software architects must create designs that can endure throughout software evolution. Today, software architecture comprises not only a system’s core structure but also essential design decisions.1,2 So, to achieve sustainable architectures, we need sustainable design decisions. In correspondence with Heiko Koziolek’s definition of architecture sustainability,3 we argue that architectural design decision sustainability involves: the time period when the right and relevant decisions remain unchanged; and the cost efficiency of required changes to those decisions.

Self-service analytics tools have value, carry risks
Speaking at the 2014 TDWI BI Executive Summit in Las Vegas, Peter Mueller, head of the global business analytics program at Lonza Pharma & Biotech, said people often refer to data as a corporate asset. But that view of information's business value can be jeopardized by out-of-control BI and analytics applications, particularly when the analysis is done by workers with little training. If a company isn't careful, the analysis process can be mismanaged or misinterpreted, leading to potentially damaging data inconsistencies and faulty findings.

The Principles of Agile Enterprise Architecture Management
The Agile Enterprise Architecture is all about letting changes happen and thus keep the Architectural Principles continuously evolving. This will also call for having an appropriate lifecycle that facilitates the evolution, development and adaption of the current and the target reference architecture continuously. This will keep the maturity levels of various IT management functions also changing over time. In this blog, let us focus on the key principles that enables an Agile Enterprise Architecture Management

Eight Eye-openers From Salesforce.com's Annual Report
Last week, Salesforce.com reported its fourth-quarter and year-end fiscal 2014 results, announcing a major bump in revenue and even raising its guidance significantly. But the fast-growing cloud vendor is also continuing to post significant losses as it spends big on sales, marketing and acquisitions. Salesforce.com's annual report, which was released this week, paints a fuller picture of the vendor's opportunities and challenges, while also revealing a series of eyebrow-raising facts. Here's a look at some of the highlights.

Information Management: A Love Triangle
Let’s take a closer look at the interplay among these three categories. We have all heard the expression “time is money.” How many of us have stopped to consider that in the realm of resource management, information is money? Literally! For many, the information resource is literally, a financial resource. How many people receive a paycheck anymore? In 2008, according to the U.S. Treasury Department, 66 percent of Americans used direct deposit where, in essence, information representing money is transferred from one entity such as an employer to another entity such as a bank, credit union or savings and loan.

Health IT benefits outweigh the negative, report shows
The report underscored quality as the metric most improved by implementing health information technology, as the lion's share of studies, 58 percent, saw positive outcomes, and another 24 percent saw mixed-positive results. When officials drilled down further into the data, they also found clinical decision support, computerized provider order entry and meaningful use all produced the most beneficial outcomes, at 66 percent, 64 percent and 63 percent positive respectively. Contrastingly, electronic prescribing was the least able to prove its worth, as more than one-fourth of all studies reported negative outcomes.

Coaching the CxO
To most managers, regardless of the level, change is considered a threat. This is particularly the case when changes imply that their own role will change, which is quite often the case for managers in agile transformations. The human brain responds to this threat in the same way as when you would encounter the growling bear. To the brain, a threat is a threat no matter if it is a life-threatening situation or if someone feels threatened in his or her organizational position.

Enterprise architecture best practices for Agile development
"There seems to be a correlation of success for enterprise architecture teams working in a collaborative, lightweight manner. Teams that are not working like that have a much higher failure rate," said Scott Ambler, senior consulting partner of Toronto-based Scott Ambler + Associates. What does it mean to work in a lightweight manner? "They're not producing a lot of documents or models because detailed artifacts tend to be ignored by development teams, if they are read at all. They are helping teams to understand what the architectural vision is and [are] actively helping to build it out," Ambler said.

Big data: Handle with care
There are two fears – coming across as ‘big brother’ and data leaks and misuses that become public, such as the OfficeMax story. Both can have a serious effect on customer retention and loyalty. In fact, studies indicate that 66 percent of your customers would leave if you lost or mistreated their data. It turns out that the mysterious asset of ‘brand loyalty’ can be quantified after all. Fearing the negative consequences of big data is a healthy exercise, but abstaining from big data projects is not. For organizations sitting on the sidelines and waiting until all the unknowns are known, you picking the wrong strategy.

Knowing the Value within your Business Model is Vital
Although much of the architecture of any business model is not seen, it is the ‘heart’ of what delivers the value. We can’t ignore or gloss over the value architecture, we must address it fully. Fluidminds business model approach devotes much of its ‘canvas’ to this part. The initial questions of clarifying the offer, the value chain, the need for identifying core capabilities, for explaining the distribution and communication channels and who the (potential) partners are, all are initially raised specifically within the canvas to be addressed.

Quote for the day:

"It takes time to succeed because success is merely the natural reward of taking time to do anything well." -- Joseph Ross

March 08, 2014

Getting The Right Confidence With “Go Cloud” Strategy
Of course, no technology is without risks, and cloud for one does have its fair share of risks, but the trick is the see how much cloud and how to manage the risks around what is put on the cloud. Amongst the several risks include issues surrounding service provider continuity, contracting and SLAs, data protection, regulatory compliance, audit and assurances etc. In ensuring that the organization’s cloud strategy will deliver the promised value in the long run, what is required is a governance based approach that aligns the management and operational requirements underlying cloud operations with the enterprise cloud strategy.

Video: Introducing the Wolfram Language – Knowledge-based Functional Programming
In this video, Stephen Wolfram introduces the Wolfram Language, a “knowledge based” symbolic programming language that enables powerful functional programming, querying of large databases, flexible interactivity, and easy deployment. The Wolfram Language provides seamless access to the curated and continuously updated Wolfram Knowledgebase used in Wolfram|Alpha—which includes a wide range of types of data for physics and chemistry. Free-form linguistics provide a convenient mechanism for accessing all available data; more common categories also have specific associated Wolfram Language functions.

Is Artificial Intelligence About to Change Doing Business Forever?
So there are many different benefits to be achieved with Artificial Intelligence, but it is not all hallelujah. Artificial Intelligence has already made promises for decades and only recently we are seeing some, significant, results. There are many challenges involved in creating truly intelligent software and machines. We are still very far away and currently the best AI, the ConceptNet 4 Artificial Intelligence, is said to be as smart as a four-year-old. Big Data startups working on AI solutions therefore require a lot of time to improve the applications.

Networked World: What It means To People Processes?
A simple enough example, but what it clearly highlights is that people processes are no longer predominantly uni dimensional. That in many ways actually implies that no processes are uni dimensional anymore and that leads us to a very radical conclusion which is – “ prefixes defining what kind of processes they might are slowly becoming obsolete for if not all, most processes“. For the HR professional – the implication is far reaching; the rules defining how we work with our associates have changed dramatically.

Sorry, phone number, but it’s time for you to die
It doesn’t take an argonaut to understand the benefits of using a different identifier and an internet-based calling platform. Today, a U.S. citizen that travels to England can buy a SIM card in a vending machine upon landing, load it up with data, and effectively use their smartphone exactly as they would in the United States… save for the whole “calling and texting” thing. When you swap the SIM out, your phone number goes dead for the duration of your trip. But why? That new SIM is fully capable of channeling voice calls to your phone via data networks—the only thing we need is implementation.

Use the Codename: BlueMix DataCache service in a Node.js app
This article explains how to use the DataCache service in a Node.js application hosted byCodename: BlueMix. DataCache is a distributed cache (powered by WebSphere® eXtreme Scale technology) that you can use as an efficient and reliable key-value data store. I provide a client Node.js module that you can extend and use in applications that you choose to host on BlueMix. You use the DataCache service over the network through its REST API. The client module abstracts the REST bits, providing higher-level methods for managing key-value objects.

Virtual Reality Startups Look Back to the Future
“There’s an extremely intense enthusiast community that loves VR,” Lanier says. “But it can create an illusion that interest is perhaps larger than it really is. I believe Oculus Rift could launch tomorrow and comfortably sell a few hundred thousand units. But the real challenge is how to sell 200 million units. The enthusiast community is loud and adorable, but no matter how much you please them, you won’t necessarily reach beyond them.” Luckey is, understandably, a great deal more positive. “People have wanted virtual reality for decades,” he says.

Mobile Tech Extends Hospitals' Reach Into The Home
The evolution of devices like Fitbits is "incredibly exciting," agreed Marc Probts, CIO of InterMountain Healthcare in Salt Lake City. Home monitoring has "tremendous" potential, he added. Doctors don't need to analyze every byte patients produce, said Weschler. Rather, clinicians can quickly check if patients' measurements lie within baselines, perhaps via a red light/green light dashboard icon. Real-time monitoring would also alert emergency services if a patient appears to need immediate medical assistance, he said.

CFOs say companies will hire more techies in 2014, but not in IT
Another facet of the overall picture, which might explain CFOs' optimism, is how IT positions can be redefined or shuttled about within a company. As InfoWorld's Bill Snyder put it in the above link, "Many IT jobs within enterprises have moved out of the traditional IT ghetto and into various business-related departments." In other words, the jobs traditionally labeled "IT" might well be migrating out from under those umbrellas -- although that in turn depends on who's applying the labels and to what end.

Breaking The Cycle Of Legacy IT Investment
While the cost of maintaining legacy software can be a hidden parasite draining the lifeblood of the IT department, it can be eradicated through a careful and thoughtful modernization project. Whereas the high costs of legacy application upkeep deprives the IT department of resources, the time and funds saved from a systems upgrade can be used to promote faster, more aggressive innovation throughout an organization.

Quote for the day:

"Don't let what you cannot do interfere with what you can do." -- John Wooden

March 07, 2014

The dashboard is due for disruption
In-vehicle systems also have long qualification cycles because carmakers have to worry about safety, reliability and heavy regulations. As a result, they are risk averse, and once they approve a set of hardware and software, they don’t make changes for a long time. That’s why Nvidia has announced that it plans to keep the Tegra 2 and 3 in production for a decade. Finally cars have long lifecycles. Smartphone lifecycles are measured in months while the average age of a car on the road in the U.S. is more than 11 years--a lifetime in the tech industry.

Europol issues public Wi-Fi security warning
Typically, attackers set up rogue Wi-Fi hotspots to dupe victims into mistaking them for official public Wi-Fi hotspots and connecting to them. This means attackers are able to monitor all communications through the rogue Wi-Fi access points and steal data exchanged with banks, retailers and other online service providers. "Everything that you send through the Wi-Fi is potentially at risk, and this is something that we need to be very concerned about,” said Oerting.

Toshiba's OCZ cranks up speed on new 3.2TB solid state drives
At 3.2TB, OCZ is offering the highest storage available in SSDs. SSDs are catching up fast to hard-drives, which have reached a maximum capacity of 6TB. However, SSDs remain more expensive than hard drives. OCZ will continue to offer its own line of SSDs, and nothing is affected by Toshiba's acquisition, said Scott Harlin, director of marketing communications for enterprise at OCZ. "Toshiba will continue to develop, produce, and market their own line of Toshiba-branded SSDs while we will focus on developing, producing and marketing OCZ-branded SSDs that leverage our in-house technology," Harlin said in an email.

Crazy theories and global manhunts for Bitcoin's creator Satoshi Nakamoto
Many have looked at the name "Satoshi Nakamoto" as a puzzle itself, meant to hide the identity of the people or groups behind Bitcoin.The most popular of these is the idea of an invisible hand controlled by a corporate consortium. The name Satoshi Nakamoto, in this theory, derives from these four names: Samsung, Toshiba, Nakamichi Motorola. Others have translated the name to try to find clues. One such theory alleges that the name "Satoshi Nakamoto" shows ties to the CIA. From a Bitcoin forum post just weeks ago:

How To Use Analytics To Build A Smarter Mobile Website
Frequently, design and development teams will be asked to redesign a dated website to be responsive. Looking at existing data would provide crucial insight into how best to present information to mobile users. Google Analytics offers a number of free features for incredibly detailed analysis of mobile activity, with the ability to easily compare to desktop activity. If you haven’t yet installed Google Analytics, setting it up is easy. Just create a free account, and then Google will walk you through the process. You’ll need to place a tracking code in your page before you can start to collect the sort of data that we’ll review in this article.

Security by design still not a reality, says security veteran
Apart from research, Limnell sees security training as a key element to tackling threats. “Companies spend millions on technological controls, but few spend anything on education, which is stupid,” he said. There also has to be a shift to a new security paradigm that aims at achieving cyber resilience. “This approaches starts with the assumption that a network can and will be breached,” said Limnell. “It cannot only be about keeping the bad guys out, you have got to have a plan for dealing with attackers when they breach your defences; identifying the intrusion and containing it,” he said.

Security Manager's Journal: Security flaw shakes faith in Apple mobile devices
Last week, Apple released an update known as iOS Version 7.0.6 to repair a security flaw in the SSL encryption implementation that could allow encrypted traffic to be intercepted and decrypted, thus compromising private data. My company's private data, to be precise. Updates such as this present several challenges to organizations like mine. First, we now need to have a process in place for getting critical security patches on phones, as we do for computers. And that's not easy to do. For computers, we have software that manages patches and can deploy an emergency security fix very quickly, with minimal intervention by system administrators or end users. On phones, we don't.

5 reasons to re-examine how leaders communicate
Here’s the problem with this masking approach, according to Mitchiner: “Employees have a sensitive BS detector and can smell when they aren’t hearing the whole story. They don’t voice this concern; they just walk out, thinking, ‘Management is not leveling with us.’ When employees don’t have the whole story, they themselves fill in the missing pieces. The resulting rumors can be far more damaging than if management had simply told the unvarnished truth in the first place.”

Surface tablets with digitized pens gain a toehold in healthcare
"Microsoft…is realizing that verticals can sort of 'surface' these opportunities where the platform offers benefits you couldn't get in desktop PCs," said Wes Miller, research vice president, Directions on Microsoft, an IT consulting organization based in Kirkland, Wash. Healthcare often uses Windows devices that miss the benefits of using a stylus or touch, he added. The big void is guidance from Microsoft on how corporations can build unique applications for their business, instead of just marketing Surface Pro as a desktop PC replacement, Miller said.

How Women Leaders Have Transformed Management
The emergent leadership Bock is talking about seems to be both non-positional (based on personal qualities rather than one’s title or formal power) and nonhierarchical (when people are comfortable acting from the center of a collaborative web). This model has, of course, been developing for some time—and I believe this shift has occurred at least partly because women have become profoundly interwoven into the fabric of most organizations

Quote for the day:

“The growth and development of people is the highest calling of leadership.” -- Harvey S. Firestone

March 06, 2014

IBM 'as a service' cloud pieces fall into place
IBM in recent days has bought its way to a near complete cloud computing stack. After a bit of integration work, IBM's cloud plans will become clear as it battles everyone from Oracle to HP to Amazon Web Services in a race to offset slowing hardware sales. Add it up and you could say all of IBM's as a services (aaSes) are coming together. ... That take may be a bit gushy, but IBM clearly has more cloud parts in place than it had just a few quarters ago. Here's a look at IBM's relatively new stack and where Watson is likely to f it into the mix.

New CTO previews VMware hybrid cloud strategy beyond DRaaS
The real issue with DR is that when you get into the SMB [small and medium-sized businesses] sector, most medium-sized enterprises don't have a budget for disaster recovery. They have a budget for backup, but not necessarily for DR as well. Where I see that whole DR as a Service market moving eventually is where providers will offer Backup as a Service but provide disaster recovery as a feature. Just about every organization understands that they need backup and that they need to recover files, so that's fine, just make it a feature of a Backup as a Service.

Google Cloud Performance Stability: A Closer Look
The claim that Google provides more consistent performance will have to be tested by each enterprise that moves applications and data to its cloud. I would recommend that they create a series of tests, using different loading profiles, such as simulating end-of-year processing using increasing loads on compute and storage, and then sustained loads for several days. This type of testing will tell you a lot. As most of us who have migrated applications to the cloud know, the characteristics and profile of each application are more of a determination of performance than the platform.

FACE Software Effort Builds Momentum
“We’re really trying to break that pattern by standardizing software and putting the business incentives in place to really change the way the government procures software and the way the vendors provide it.” More than ever, software drives the cost of avionics functionality, Howington says. The FACE initiative is addressing the cost and schedule-drivers behind avionics software development and deployment. “Done right, [FACE] will directly impact the conversation on how to meet military avionics needs in the current fiscal environment,” he says.

7 historical decisions that continue to pain programmers
Software developers make decisions all day long about how to best implement functionality, fix bugs, improve application performance, etc. But they also live with the consequences of decisions made by others in the past in the design of the languages, systems and tools they use to do their jobs. Some of those choices, which may have made sense or seemed inconsequential at the time, have turned out to have unintended, long lasting and painful effects on those who write code every day. Here are 7 choices made in the development of languages or operating systems that continue to give developers headaches to this day.

Red Hat polishes business process management suite
JBoss BRMS provides a platform for defining business rules so computers can make decisions based on these roles. For instance, an automobile insurance company may have a set of rules for guiding how much to charge customers, based on their age and type of vehicle. BRMS, and other business rules management software, minimizes the need to encode business rules directly into an application, which can be cumbersome to update should the rules change over time.

MongoDB chief: Why the clock's ticking for relational databases
"The first rule of a relational database is that every row in a table has to have the same set of columns as every other row, which we didn't think reflected reality," he said. "Relational databases in general — certainly all the leading products from the big vendors — don't have the capability built into the product to take a query and decide where the data is, execute the query there, bring it back and, if the data is in multiple places, aggregate it. "If the data on one of the servers is more than it can handle, move some of that data to another server that's less heavily loaded. The leading vendors still have to build those capabilities."

What do SaaS implementations mean for IT?
Indeed, organizations that adopt SaaS software are largely at the mercy of the provider when it comes to the availability of the application, Harzog said. Traditional monitoring tools are of little help with SaaS apps, since they require an agent on the application server. "Salesforce.com is not going to let you do that," he said, referring to the popular hosted customer relationship management suite. Meanwhile, application performance monitoring tools tend to monitor code, which is also a non-starter for SaaS-delivered apps.

Do You See Prison Bars or the Stars?
One way to remove organizational cultural barriers is to acknowledge a problem within organizations. Many companies suffer from an imbalance of how much emphasis to place on being smart versus than being healthy. Most organizations over-emphasize trying to be smart by hiring MBAs and management consultants with a quest to achieve a run-it-by-the-numbers management style. These organizations miss the relevance of how important is to also be healthy – assuring that employee morale is high and employee turnover is low.

Top Challenges and Roadblocks for CIOs in 2014
CIOs are today faced with lots of challenges and in this new era, the successful CIOs are those who can innovate with technology and bring a difference to the business of the organisation. Going forward, CIO can expect to face numerous roadblocks in achieving success and we at CIO&Leader thought of asking some of the CIOs what are the roadblocks do they expect in this calender year. According to Tridib Bordoloi, CIO, PTI, “We stay in a connected world where information is power and the access to information is phenomenal. In the emerging economic scenario business priorities are changing rapidly.

Quote for the day:

“Try not to become a man of success but a man of value.” -- Albert Einstein