Daily Tech Digest by Kannan Subbiah

May 05, 2014

The stories behind 13 programming language names
Programmers generally agree that one of the hardest tasks in software development is naming things. One of things they have to name, though not very often, are new programming languages. When a new language is designed, the name chosen for it often follows one of several formulas: it's an acronym or abbreviation based on what it is (e.g., BASIC, COBOL, TCL, LISP), the name is derived from an existing language (e.g., C++, C#, CoffeeScript) or it's named after someone famous from math or computer science (e.g., Ada, Pascal, Turing). Sometimes, though, language designers get more creative when choosing a name. Here are the stories behind 13 of the the more unusual programming language names.

Why user experience and ecosystem will rule the cloud
It’s easy enough to start offering a cloud platform, but doing so successfully is a lot more difficult. James Urquhart explains how Amazon Web Services, Cloud Foundry and others are capitalizing on great user experiences and great ecosystems. Over the course of the last year or two, one key, fundamental rule of succeeding in the cloud computing business has become exceedingly clear: If you want to define and control any aspect of the cloud marketplace, you need to succeed at user experience and ecosystem. This is something that Amazon Web Services and Cloud Foundry clearly understand, and they’ve flourished as a result.

Revolutionary computers are on the way. Now we just need to know how to program them
A team of Stanford scientists has created a circuit board, dubbed “NeuroGrid,”consisting of 16 computing cores that simulate more than 1 million neurons and billion of synapses. They think it could be mass produced for about $400 per board, meaning it would be economically feasible to embed the boards into everything from robots to artificial limbs in order to speed up their computing cycles while significantly reducing their power consumption. But even if that’s possible, there would still be one big problem: Right now, NeuroGrid requires, essentially, a neuroscientist in order to program it.

9 Consultant Skills They Don't Teach You in Business School
In my 20 years as an international consultant, I’ve observed my colleagues in action: from the very predictable cohort of gray-suited analysts to the egotistical and colorful “friend” of the CEO. And then, they are those who do great work. These often discreet consultants share nine skills, not taught in business school, that separate the effective from the awesome:

Internet Of Things: What's Holding Us Back
Whirlpool CIO Michael Heim says "our toe is in the water on connected devices," as the company figures out the kind of connections customers really want in their homes, and what they'll pay for. Heim does see huge potential, and not just the cliché scenario of your refrigerator knowing all its contents and emailing you when the milk's running low. If customers let Whirlpool track appliance usage remotely, that would be a boon to product development, providing a window into what features people really use. What if the fridge told you when temperatures are varying, suggesting a pending failure, or your icemaker lost water pressure, suggesting a busted pipe might be spraying water all over your kitchen? What if your washer could be diagnosed remotely, since many appliances already generate electronic error codes?

Data breaches 9% more costly in 2013 than year before
Ponemon points out the 9% increase in breach costs is a big change from the past few years when breach costs either did not drop or rose only a bit. The cost stood at $214 per record lost in 2011. Factors in tallying data-breach costs include everything from forensics experts, outsourcing hotline support and free credit monitoring subscriptions, discounts to customers to make amends, in-house investigations, legal and all the extra work that mounts up after a breach. Heavily regulated industries such as healthcare, transportation, energy, financial services, communications, pharmaceuticals and manufacturing tend to have a higher per capita breach cost, the report says.

11 reasons encryption is (almost) dead
Encryption isn't always perfect, and even when the core algorithms are truly solid, many other links in the chain can go kablooie. There are hundreds of steps and millions of lines of code protecting our secrets. If any one of them fails, the data can be as easy to read as the face of a five-year-old playing Go Fish. ... Encryption is under assault more than ever -- and from more directions than previously thought. This doesn't mean you should forgo securing sensitive data, but forewarned is forearmed. It's impossible to secure the entire stack and chain. Here are 11 reasons encryption is no longer all it's cracked up to be.

3 Dimensions of Purpose
Here’s a test for purpose: Ask a colleague what they “do.” Most likely, they will respond with a short description of their role, and of the company or organization for which they work. Then ask them “why” they work. It’s in this answer that you will find out their purpose, and whether or not they find meaning in the cause or business for which they work. By asking these questions of your team, you will quickly learn how well you have communicated your purpose, and if there is alignment between their personal purposes and that of the company.

The Rising Strategic Risks of Cyberattacks
Organizations large and small lack the facts to make effective decisions, and traditional “protect the perimeter” technology strategies are proving insufficient. Most companies also have difficulty quantifying the impact of risks and mitigation plans. Much of the damage results from an inadequate response to a breach rather than the breach itself. Complicating matters further for executives, mitigating the effect of attacks often requires making complicated trade-offs between reducing risk and keeping pace with business demands (see sidebar “Seizing the initiative on cybersecurity: A top-team checklist”). Only a few CEOs realize that the real cost of cybercrime stems from delayed or lost technological innovation—problems resulting in part from how thoroughly companies are screening technology investments for their potential impact on the cyberrisk profile.

Bankers see a historic moment as mobile services boom
"It's a huge change ... you will come out with a completely new banking sector," said Clausen, head of the biggest bank in the Nordic region, where customers use online or smartphone banking more than anywhere else in the world. The surge in the take-up of mobile banking has taken many banks by surprise, prompting some to accelerate plans to close branches or adapt how their costly bricks-and-mortar branches are used. Granted, some executives said talk of the death of the branch is premature. Banks will push routine transactions on to tablet PCs or other automated platforms, but some branches will stay - albeit with a new look.

Quote for the day:

"No one can possibly achieve any real or lasting success... in business by being a conformist." -- J Paul Getty

May 04, 2014

The technology world's sexism needs to end
How do these locker-room attitudes impact women in IT? Head over to the Everyday Sexism project to read testimony like this example: "Despite the fact that I had, on average, five years more experience and two years more education than any of the men on the team, took only the challenging service calls and those that involved cleaning up messes made by some of the more junior men on the team, and consistently outperformed everyone else on the team by every measure, I was paid $2 less per hour than even the entry-level guys. Management rationalized this to me (and themselves) by claiming that it was simply 'risky' to hire women in IT," a female techie notes.

Where’s the Next Heartbleed Bug Lurking?
“The problem with open source is that you have the ‘free rider’ problem,” says Chris Wysopal, a well-known computer security expert and chief technology officer and cofounder of Veracode, an application-security assessment firm. “People and companies who are using it, and getting huge value out of it, are not giving a lot of money to keep it going.” Even three weeks after the bug was discovered, some laggard businesses are still updating servers, installing new cryptographic certificates, and directing users to reset their passwords. More troubling for experts like Wysopal is that other foundational components of the Internet are, like OpenSSL, small open-source projects.

Digital Influences More than $1 Trillion in Retail Store Sales
"Each interaction is an opportunity for a retailer to enhance the customer experience and tell its brand story," said Jeff Simpson, director, Deloitte Consulting LLP and co-author of the study. "However, retailers often measure success solely on how many widgets they sell through their web or mobile sites. For example, retailers might regard online shopping cart abandonment as a failed conversion when in reality, it may represent a customer who started their wish list in the online basket, but chose to purchase the items in the store. In that case, digital engagement may have led to a sale in the physical store. This impact is much higher when measured holistically across the organization and regardless of channels, rather than force-fitted to a single point of purchase."

Demystifying Design Thinking: Interview with Tamara Christensen
I think the biggest obstacle to understanding Design Thinking is to treat it as a rigid process, a series of steps that must be followed in a particular sequence. I have seen this happen time and again when a team tries to apply Design Thinking with questionable success and then decides “Design Thinking doesn’t work.” In reality, what doesn’t work is treating Design Thinking like a recipe that must be adhered to. It is more like a mindset, multiple modes of thinking and doing that are iteratively utilized as the project requires. Design Thinking is first and foremost about people and keeping them at the center of the process.

Auditing and Assessing IT Governance
In this session, we will hear from three experts on the topic of IT Governance. Steve Romero, who is a renowned evangelist for IT governance, will explain what IT governance is. Then, Brian Barnier, an advisor to finance and IT executives and a member of the COBIT 5 development team, will share his views on the value to the organization of effective IT governance. Finally, Dan Swanson, an experienced practitioner and editor of the EDPACS magazine, will discuss his recommended approach to assessing the effectiveness of IT governance. The session will be moderated by Norman Marks, an evangelist for better run business with over 30 years’ experience in IT auditing and management.

GRC, Security and the Temple of Doom
That thought of “how did I get so old?” happens so quickly. Some reference to something from the past celebrating an anniversary will immediately trigger it. So when I saw the CNN article “Happy 30th, Dr. Jones: 10 Things a Hero Taught Us”, I immediately cringed. ... I am even older than I first thought. But I comforted myself with the “I am not older; I am better” internal speech all of us old timers are so readily able to spin. Then I sighed and clicked on the link to find out what the indomitable hero Dr. Henry Walton “Indiana” Jones Jr. has taught us. Read the article above first and then see what can GRC and Security programs can learn from the legendary Dr. Jones.

Voice phishing scheme lets hackers steal personal data from banks
According to LaCour, attackers install their IVR software on hacked servers and route calls to it from compromised VoIP servers. They use free text-to-speech tools to generate the IVR interactive messages and email-to-SMS gateways to send out text messages to thousands of users. "Targeted companies often encounter difficulties when attempting to mitigate vishing attacks," LaCour said. "It can take weeks for an organization to navigate the structures of telecom providers, carriers, and service providers and effectively shut down the phone numbers used to scam customers."

Startups Experiment with Ads That Know How You Drive
Ads tailored to driving behavior will be possible thanks to a partnership with fellow startup Mojio. It will launch a $149 device in June that plugs into a car’s diagnostic port and streams vehicle data to a smartphone app to help users track their driving, their fuel economy, and their vehicle’s maintenance status. Kiip will use data from that device to target promotions inside the Mojio phone app. Sprague says that getting access to data from a car’s engine and safety systems could unlock some unprecedented approaches to ad targeting. Mojio’s device can tell when a car’s airbags are deployed, or whether crash sensors on the bumpers have been triggered, potentially allowing ads pegged to incidents on the road.

The Elusive Dependency
What materialised during the replacement effort, were design assumptions within the extensions about the old system’s currency rounding strategy (e.g., number of decimals per calculation step). The extension designers had taken great care with the interface specifications, and the new application was both functionally and technically compatible with the extensions . . . except customer invoices now had what looked like elementary rounding errors. The obvious lesson here is to avoid making assumptions about how another system works – a form of defensive design where you aim to minimise external dependencies as much as possible.

Defining Test Automation Metrics
Tom DeMarco wrote “You can’t control what you cannot measure”. If test automation has always been actively discussed, the returns of automated tests were usually described in a very general way. There have been so far very few methodologies that can provide you with unbiased assessment of your software testing automation process. This article proposes some of methods to define test automation key performance indicator (KPI). The emphasis in proposed metrics is made upon two points: cost difference and duration difference

Quote for the day:

"The greatest leaders mobilize others by coalescing people around a shared vision." -- Ken Blanchard

May 03, 2014

Intel searches for the value in open data
Intel is one of several large tech companies seeking economic value in open data. A research network called the Governance Lab, or GovLab, at New York University recently began publishing OpenData500, a list of companies using government data to generate new business, including include Amazon Web Services, Garmin, IBM and Yelp. In exploring open data, Intel’s hypothesis is that “any kind of silo-ed, isolated data set is. . . really limited in its ability to discover insights you didn’t know you were looking for,” said Brandon Barnett, director of business innovation.

Cathy O'Neil talks about trust in data analysis
I guess if I had to pinpoint my single most massive peeve, which really cannot be termed "pet," it would have to be hiding perverse incentives (and almost all incentives are perverse in some way) behind what people present at "objective truth". In my experience, outside of the world of sports where everything is transparent (except steroid use), there is always some opacity and gaming going on and someone's either making money off of it, gaining status from its publication, or wielding power through it. And come to think of it, you've asked me the wrong question altogether. My biggest peeve with data interpretations is how many aren't published at all.

The promise of information
What sets information design apart from other design disciplines, aside from a commitment to what Two Twelve’s David Gibson listed as ‘hierarchy, logic, clarity, context’, is a belief in a kind of metadesigner, an ‘architect’ if you will, who will coordinate and transform information on behalf of the user. The ‘transformer’ was one subject of the first information design conference, so it was nice to hear Sue Walker from the University of Reading looking at how the Isotype folk, who coined the term, developed children’s information books in the 1940s and 50s.

Why the operating system still (kind of) matters
“If you look at the single-node Linux story, there is only one story, which is Red Hat,” Shuttleworth acknowledged. “What is more interesting, though, is if you look at Linux at large, you realize that single-node enterprise Linux story is a decreasing share of Linux in total. There are now vastly more Ubuntu servers running for enterprises than Red Hat servers running for enterprises. If you just look at what people are running on the web, for example, you see that very clearly.” So, he argues, as more companies start looking to build private clouds, they’ll want to keep those applications running on Ubuntu because its truer open source license structure is better suited to the idea of an elastic environment.

The Surprising Secret to Employee Engagement
Too often, Mark says, leaders fail to provide appreciation frequently enough. We often get so caught up in the push for continuous achievement that we forget to take to time to recognize what people have already achieved. Mark recommends that we actually schedule time for recognition each week. If it's on our calendars, we're much more likely to actually take the time to recognize what people have done well. He also recommends that we don't just recognize the top two or three performers. This can create a culture where most people don't feel appreciated.

Why Facial Recognition Isn't the Way of the Future...Yet
Jay Hauhn, CTO and VP of Industry Relations for Tyco Integrated Security, breaks down the use of facial recognition into two categories: cooperative environments and non-cooperative environments. In the former, the person whose face is going to be scanned is aware of it and is opting into a process where it's serving as their credential; they're going to look straight into a camera with no attempt to obscure their face. Non-cooperative environments, however, are when the subject is not necessarily aware that their face is being scanned and is making no attempt to look directly at the camera."In cooperative environments, it works fairly well," says Hauhn.

Microsoft Readies a Virtual Assistant for the Corporate World
“It knows everything I’m doing—what I’m reading, what I’m liking, who I’m following, the people I’m interacting with, who I’m responding to fastest—and serves up a personalized experience about what content is most interesting, what things I should be involved in, what people I should interact with,” says Julia White, general manager of the Microsoft Office suite. “My work is no longer about who sent me e-mail most recently; it’s about what’s most important to me.” Oslo is the first app built on a platform known as the Office Graph, a database developed by the former employees of Fast Search & Transfer in Oslo, Norway, which Microsoft acquired in 2009.

Infor and 'No Fugly Software': Design as a competitive weapon
For Infor, design is therefore a euphemism for the broad collaboration associated with distilling processes and information down to what the user really needs, presenting that information in the most compelling and useful manner, and making it all look and feel good. Empathy for the user is central to this process. Although other large software vendors, like SAP, have embraced this kind of design thinking, the extent to which Infor is retooling both products and corporate culture around design appears unrivaled among companies of its size. As I noted on Twitter, Infor is actively trying to incorporate design as a core strategic theme into its cultural DNA.

Parsing EDI to XML (and vice verse)
Most of the articles related to EDI revolved around business controversies and comparisons between the different formats and dialects. Completely irrelevant to my research. I still don't understand why do so many EDI formats still co-exist nowadays (> 5000). It appeared to me that EDI was veiled in mystery and the lack of information and cooperation was not something to be considered as a simple act of randomness... I will leap over the entertaining side of EDI, like the conspiracy behind the multiple formats, the rebellious movement against VANs, and the ever ongoing discussion on whether XML will eventually bury EDI (with UBL being the latest contender). My goal here is to share my knowledge on the basics of parsing an EDI message, and hope that someone else may find that useful.

Why Is RAID Dying a Slow Death?
First and foremost, one of the more common RAID levels -- RAID 5 -- began to show serious weakness as disk sizes continued to grow ever larger. Today, there are disks on the market that are a whopping 5 TB in size, which is massive by the standards of the era in which RAID was born. Back then, RAID adapters could rebuild the relatively small disks of that era relatively quickly. That is, when a disk in an array failed, it didn't take too long to rebuild the failed disk. However, as disk capacity continued to increase, the amount of time that it took to rebuild failed disks also increased. The problem: During a rebuild, there is additional stress on the whole array as bits are gathered to rebuild the lost disk. As such, the potential for a double-disk fault increases.

Quote for the day:

“A person who cannot handle setbacks will never handle victories either.” -- Orrin Woodward

May 02, 2014

Afraid of the cloud? How to handle your fears
"I don't know if it's a matter of distrust," said Jagdish Rebello, an analyst with IHS. "They are wary of the hype. The enterprise IT folks are being very, very cautious about their migration to the cloud. They see the cost benefits but when they look at reliability and security, there is essentially a fear of going wholeheartedly to the cloud." Enterprises are still fairly new to the cloud computing phenomenon, but have long read headlines about cloud outages and security breaches, which, said Rebello, is enough to make any executive nervous.

Enterprise software: The big trends and why they matter
Cloud technologies can also been seen as the biggest threat to the established order of on-premise software and the vendors that supply it. "It's sort of scary for them because you can see a world in which people say, 'I'm going to buy order management from him, item master management from him, and vendor management from him and I will make it all work together, or the semantic web will'," Forrester Research VP and principal analyst George Lawrie told ZDNet. To counter the growing appetite for cloud services, one of the approaches employed by big enterprise software vendors is to work with firms such as Accenture, Deloitte, Infosys and Wipro, according to Lawrie.

Why authentication, registration are keys to cloud-based file sharing
Security policies should also indicate how to respond to an excessive number of failed login attempts on mobile devices. While locking an account may be sufficient for failed login attempts on an on-premises desktop, excessive login failures on a mobile device may signal that it has been lost or stolen. If the setting is available in your cloud-based file sharing service, configure alerts to notify admins of excessive login failures on mobile devices. Consider setting your file-sharing or device management service to have excessive login failures trigger a remote wipe, if that feature is available.

Everything You Need to Know About Email Infrastructure
Managing a commercial email infrastructure is no easy task - and that's why hundreds of businesses rely on SendGrid's hosted solutions. If you have questions on email infrastructure, this guide has the answers you're looking for. We cover it all from SMTP, MTA's and managing IPs to handling bounces, getting on ISP Feedback loops and understanding whitelists. SendGrid's Email Infrastructure Guide will provide you with: Tips to avoid costly blunders that could get your IPs blacklisted; Solutions for managing your IPs and authentication records so ISPs can easily identify your legitimate, wanted email from spam; and Comprehensive glossary to keep you up to date with email infrastructure terms.

Data Doesn’t Speak for Itself
A senior leader may wish to understand the significance of the story for extending data quality across the organization. While the main story will be the same for each, the emphases should be very different. Be aware that many people are skeptical about analytics, big data, data mining, and statistics (perhaps recalling the famous observation, “There are three kinds of lies. Lies, damned lies, and statistics.”). Whether this skepticism is justified or not, it does enormous damage by slowing, or even stopping, the penetration of good ideas into organizations. As a data presenter, you have a sacred trust to build support for data among your audience.

Data Protection Fears Vs. US Cloud Market
Many European and Canadian companies have avoided hosting data in the US since the USA Patriot Act in the early 2000s, which permitted the government to inspect data on any servers in the US, even if the data was owned by non-US customers. European companies' concerns around the Patriot Act grew so strong by 2011 that it began to hamper the growth of the cloud industry in Europe, as service providers in France, Germany, and elsewhere limited their customer base by "walling off" their clouds from North America. In fact, an Informa report revealed that European providers accounted for just 7% of carrier cloud investments worldwide in 2011.

SanDisk announces 4TB SSD, hopes for 8TB next year
SanDisk's new 4TB Optimus MAX SAS SSD is the highest capacity 2.5-in. SSD drive to date. The SSDs come with a 6Gbps SAS interface. The drive is aimed at read-intensive applications, such as data warehousing, media streaming and web servers. The typical workload envisioned for the 4TB drive is 90% read and 10% write, SanDisk stated. The Optimus MAX SAS SSD is capable of up to 400 MBps sequential reads and writes and up to 75,000 random I/Os per second (IOPS) for both reads and writes, the company said.

Pica8 claims to be first vendor to support OpenFlow 1.4
Pica8 has updated its PicOS operating system to support OpenFlow 1.4, which the Open Networking Foundation standardized late last year. Pica8 packages the software with white box switches and a version of the open source Ryu controller, which also supports OpenFlow 1.4. OpenFlow 1.4 includes several new features that improve the resiliency and scalability of an OpenFlow network. A new bundling feature allows OpenFlow controllers to make modification requests to multiple OpenFlow switches through a single message.

Generation Y demand cloud computing
Generation Y recruits will now ask, "Why use a limited storage corporate Microsoft Outlook email account, when I can use unlimited storage email like Google's Gmail, which also has the familiar interface I use when doing my personal stuff?" This is one reason an increasing number of organisations are adopting cloud-based email and desktop productivity services such as Microsoft Office 365 and Google Apps. Such services offer unlimited storage and access from any device connected to the internet. Generation Y will also ask, "Why carry a bog standard business mobile when I can play around with my own top-of-the-range iPhone or Samsung Galaxy, for instance?"

All Eyes on Digital Marketing Budgets in 2014
"Marketing leaders are securing bigger budgets to define markets, develop offerings, and attract, acquire and retain customers," said Yvonne Genovese, managing vice president at Gartner. "Digital marketing is taking an increasing share of the marketing budget with annual digital marketing operating budgets totaling 3.1 per cent of a company's revenue in 2013, as compared with 2.6 per cent in 2012, representing a 20 per cent increase." Eleven per cent of respondents said they spent more than half of their marketing budgets on digital activities in 2013 compared with only 3.0 per cent in 2012. Digital marketing represented an average of 28.5 per cent of the total marketing budget in 2013, as compared with 25.5 per cent in 2012

Quote for the day:

“It's hard to lead a cavalry charge if you think you look funny on a horse.” -- Adlai E. Stevenson II

May 01, 2014

First 100 Days As a CIO
“Formation of a proper IT organisational structure was my first challenge and priority... I was aware that without a competent team I would not be able to justify my role in the organisation,” says Jade “So, the first thing I did was to evaluate the existing IT team and according to the assessment, form a new structure by hiring / changing the roles of the existing team and surrendering some IT employees.” At this point, the focus was on the IT Infrastructure which was obsolete and not sufficiently equipped to meet the company’s ambitious growth projections. As a strategy, while deploying new infrastructure, Jade simultaneously began outsourcing activities that were part of the IT strategy.

Keeping the promise of wireless charging
"Without giving any specific names," Lachman said, "we are hearing from the companies whom we work with that on the integration side that the process electronics manufacturers have to go through to integrate wireless charging isn't viable. Their engineering costs have crossed the line of impossibility. ... Humavox is pitching its product on three sides: that it's simple to use, and therefore user friendly; it transfers energy more efficiently than magnetic induction charging; and it's low cost — handy given the electronics manufacturers that include wireless charging in the devices are unlikely to charge extra for the feature.

4 Ways to Overcome Age-Related Tension in the Office
Across all generations, a quarter of people admit to avoiding conflict with colleagues of a different age. If they did speak up, they spoke in generalities and danced around the real issues. We also found that younger generations hesitate to hold older generations accountable. On the other hand, older generations admitted to losing their temper more easily with more than one in four people saying they became frustrated, upset or angry during a difficult conversation. Most alarming, perhaps, is that Millennials -- who make up the majority of working America -- are the least confident in their ability to handle a difficult situation.

Metadata, Connection, and the Big Data Story
According to Marie Wallace, “the biggest piece of missing information isn’t the content itself, but the metadata that connects various pieces of content into a cohesive story.” What sort of metadata? Stephen Pulman refers to properties of the message (for example, whether it’s humorous, sincere, or likely fake) and of the author, such as sex, age, and maybe also influence and ideology, which “tell us how we should treat the content of the message, as well as being interesting in themselves.” As if expanding on Pulman’s thought, Marie Wallace asks, “if I don’t know the individual and the background behind her current communication, how can I really decide what her mood or intent is, and most importantly take effective action?”

Change the Game with APS and PolyBase
What is PolyBase, how does it work, and why is it such an important, innovative technology? Put simply - it’s the bridge to your business data. Why is it important? It is unique, innovative technology and it is available today in APS. PolyBase was created by the team at the Jim Gray Systems Lab, led by Dr David DeWitt. Dr DeWitt is a technical fellow at Microsoft (i.e. he is important) and he’s also been a PASS Summit key-note speaker for several years. If you’ve never seen any of his presentations then you should absolutely address that. They are all free to watch and are available now; including a great session on PolyBase.

MongoDB releases new version, aligns with Cloudera
While not ruling out integration with other prospective partners, it lays down the gauntlet that both popular platforms will commit to joint development. The announcement comes on the heels of MongoDB’s GA release of v2.6, which rewrote the platform’s query engine while delivering incremental enhancements aimed at scalability and security. The takeaway for enterprises is that two leading players in the NoSQL and Hadoop data platform spaces are teaming up, with the likely goal of delivering a de facto NoSQL/Hadoop integrated technology stack that will be equivalent to, and potentially compete with, the traditional database/enterprise data warehouse pairing that is common in large enterprise environments.

Where hybrid excels: Looking beyond scalability and flexibility in the cloud
Hybrid cloud models deliver the simplicity and flexibility companies expect from the cloud, while offering data protection solutions needed to quickly back up data without diminishing network performance. Since hybrid cloud rely upon a combination of on-premise environments and the cloud, and don’t solely depend on the Internet to transport data – like public or private clouds do – large scale backups and restores can be handled without saturating the network. This benefit not only keeps the network clear for business needs, but also leads to a significant cut in backup window time. To wit: Cobalt Iron, an adaptive cloud data protection service provider, helps clients backup resources on both on-premise and public cloud deployments.

Australian govt should harness outsourcing: Commission of Audit
"The Commission considers that the Government should appoint a highly credentialed business technology expert to oversee the new system design, working with experts from the Department of Human Services." The prospect of outsourcing the system was raised in the report, with the touted benefits of such a move being increased effectiveness, efficiency and lower cost. Any move in this direction would be complicated by the need to simplify the system, ensure the protection of citizen rights, and the quality of any requirements scoping, the report said. "Specialist outsourcing providers prefer high volume, low complexity stand-alone activities because they are generally low risk and can be managed relatively easily," it said.

Hackers Lurking in Vents and Soda Machines
Security experts say vendors are tempting targets for hackers because they tend to run older systems, like Microsoft’s Windows XP software. Also, security experts say these seemingly innocuous devices — videoconference equipment, thermostats, vending machines and printers — often are delivered with the security settings switched off by default. Once hackers have found a way in, the devices offer them a place to hide in plain sight. “The beauty is no one is looking there,” said George Kurtz, the chief executive of Crowdstrike, a security firm. “So it’s very easy for the adversary to hide in these places.”

Harnessing the power of the cloud
Cloud computing and mobile devices have untethered CPAs from their desks and desktops, allowing them to do work and access data on a virtually anytime, anywhere basis. ... The internet also brings danger. Security breaches such as those at Target and Nieman Marcus show how cybercriminals are ready to exploit weaknesses to gain access to confidential financial information CPAs leveraging the web for their business efforts need to be aware of the security concerns and protect themselves and their clients’ and companies’ data. To help CPAs navigate the technological seas, the JofA gathered three of the top experts in accounting technology for a round-table discussion of the most crucial tech issues facing the profession.

Quote for the day:

"Leaders keep their eyes on the horizon, not just on the bottom line." -- Warren G. Bennis

April 29, 2014

Dissecting data measurement: Key metrics for assessing data quality
Arkady Maydanchik defines the purpose of data quality assessment: to identify data errors and erroneous data elements and to measure the impact of various data-driven business processes. Both components -- to identify errors and to understand their implications -- are critical. Data quality assessment can be accomplished in different ways, from simple qualitative assessment to detailed quantitative measurement. Assessments can be made based on general knowledge, guiding principles or specific standards. Data can be assessed at the macro level of general content or at the micro level of specific fields or values.

Windows 8.1 tablets with 8-inch screens: Which one is right for you?
There is a specific category of Windows 8.1 tablets with 8-inch screens that share the same minimum specs: Intel Atom Z3740 processors, 2GB RAM, 32GB onboard storage, Bluetooth, front- and rear-facing cameras, micro SD slot, micro USB 2.0 port, and Microsoft Office Home & Student 2013 pre-installed. ... Five major computer makers are selling such Windows 8.1 tablets with 8-inch screens. Because it can be tough to tell them apart, we put together this guide to quickly explain why you may (or may not) want to buy a particular model.

The Secret Path to Innovation
In meetings, the person in control of the conversation is often a leader who is forwarding a well thought-out agenda. But for the employee who is listening to the information, it may be perceived as uninteresting or even threatening. When we are uninterested, the RAS is not activated and what we hear just becomes noise. And when we feel threatened by something because we don't understand it or it seems overly burdensome, many of us shut down. Bolt, the fastest pigeon in the world was sold for £300,000 last year to a Chinese millionaire.

White House report on big data and privacy: Too little, too late
The White House is either late to the game -- or, as with exploit sales, a system with opportunistic holes hasn't been such a bad thing for defense. Stalking victims, civil and privacy rights groups, targeted segments of the population, and even the Federal Trade Commission have been fighting sellers like Spokeo -- and losing the battle -- for years. The FTC recently settled two cases with data brokers Checkmate and InfoTrack for selling consumer data to prospective employers and landlords in violation of the Fair Credit Reporting Act. In June 2012, Spokeo paid $800,000 to settle an FTC suit that alleged Spokeo illegally sold personal information.

How Moore’s Law Is Changing Everything
Saying that the pace of change in today’s business world is accelerating has become a leading cliché among executives and business consultants. But most of us leave it there. You can’t prove it, right? Besides, it’s not like we’re the first people to live through a time of aggressive transformation. Consider how British business leaders must have felt during the reign of King George III, as the steam engine, the cotton gin, and the railroad upended the old commercial world order. In their new book, however, MIT professors Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee make the case that the cliché is indeed true, and they do it in a highly persuasive manner.

The state of the Internet: Faster, with more IPv6 -- and more attacks
With the increase in speed has also come an increase in IPv6 connectivity, particularly among educational institutions and a few key ISPs, such as Google Fiber and Verizon Wireless. It makes sense that Google Fiber is IPv6-connected by default, given the sheer newness of the network; ditto Verizon Wireless, which has a relatively rapid turnover in mobile devices and a newly deployed 4G LTE network. But IPv6 connectivity isn't close to what it ought to be, especially considering IPv4 addresses are expected to be entirely allocated by the end of the year.

The First Step Toward Successful Innovation
There are many steps along the path to delivering successful innovation: idea generation, identifying the most worthy ideas and delivering a fully formed product or technology to market. I’ve been thinking lately about the first phase of the innovation journey — creating or finding the right ideas in the sea of concepts competing for our attention. Sometimes I hear concerns that companies are overlooking promising ideas from employees already within the company; other times I hear worries that “not invented here” syndrome is keeping teams overly focused in their existing network echo chamber, unable to see the great ideas just outside their own walls.

Agile doesn't (necessarily) mean fragile
According to Gene Kim, founder of IT security firm Tripwire and DevOps author and speaker says that this highly cooperative and iterative environment doesn't create the shoddy environment (security wise, that is) they fear: in fact it can enhance security. "We've witnessed this downward spiral that happens in almost every IT organization. It became typical that whenever you wanted a new release or deployment, in most enterprises, it would take days or weeks or longer to complete. It involves tons of project sign-offs and hand-offs. This includes developers, DBAs, release teams, security and compliance people, operations teams and so on. This creates delays and is itself very error prone," Kim says.

Perceptive Software's closing the gaps in enterprise content management
Also newsworthy is Perceptive Software's entrance into the Leaders quadrant of Gartner's ECM Magic Quadrant report in September 2013. Gartner cited Perceptive Software's "strong execution and customer focus," adding that "customers are generally highly satisfied" with their product line and its ease of deployment. Since 2010, Perceptive has used acquisitions (with financial and strategic support from Lexmark) to fuel a substantial part of its double-digit growth. In the ECM Magic Quadrant report, Gartner wrote that Perceptive "needs to better articulate its strategy and road map" for its acquisitions, noting that its purchase of Twistage and Acuo Technologies helped to strengthen its solutions in healthcare and higher education.

Being Agile: Eleven Breakthrough Techniques to Keep You from "Waterfalling Backward"
Having teams work closely together on one thing at a time helps eliminate multi-tasking – the each team shares a common goal (i.e., completing a user story) and any interruptions are met with stiff resistance because it impacts what the team is trying to accomplish. What we tend to see when teams don’t get the whole team approach is individual team members off in their cubes, isolated from each other, working for a week or two at a time, and being relatively unaware of what other team members are doing. The results are usually predictable – major problems at the end of an iteration due to a lack of regular interaction.

Quote for the day:

"Success is often the result of taking a misstep in the right direction." -- Al Bernstein

April 28, 2014

Software Is Eating the World, and It Could Eat Your Business
One might say the events of the past three years have only served to reinforce Andreessen's perspective. Today Airbnb and Uber are reshaping the lodging and taxi industries by incorporating a crowdsourcing twist to their offerings. Creating communities of users and providers, these companies threaten incumbents by coordinating information about the services without having to invest in the resources necessary to deliver the services themselves. These businesses are asset-light and information-rich. Their growth is starting to bite: One hotel chain recently hired a CIO when it realized that Airbnb's 2013 bookings represented more than half of the total provided by this chain across all of its properties around the world.

U.S. search warrant can acquire foreign cloud, email data, judge rules
The move puts the U.S. further in conflict with foreign laws, particularly European data protection and privacy law, which aim to protect data from being taken outside the 28 member state's jurisdiction. It's long been known that U.S. authorities can legally, under its own legal system, acquire data from outside the United States. But the ruling by U.S. Magistrate Judge James Francis in New York has now further entrenched existing opinions shared by U.S. Dept. of Homeland Security and the Justice Dept. into the judicial system.

High-profile breaches throw a wrench into security policy management
"You have to pay attention to the tank pointed at your front door, but you also have to be aware that there are probably termites in your house, too. Taking care of the little security items always seem to get pushed to the back burner,"Buraglio said. "There's always going to be something larger that security professionals could be working on. But in reality, if they just focused on the fundamentals -- like keeping patches up to date -- they'd be so much further along," said John Pironti, president of Rowley, Mass.-based consultancy IP Architects LLC.

Six Steps for Deploying Data Security Controls
The best approach to implementing DLP is to start small and move methodically through all the steps to fully understand the project and results. iP is a good place to start before moving to larger datasets with more owners and business processes. The six steps below for deploying data security controls come from Neil Thacker, information security and strategy officer for the Websense office of the CSO and former head of security operations for Camelot (UK national Lottery) and Deutsche Bank.

Homeland Security struggles to tempt, retain cyber talent
Experts say Homeland Security doesn't have to wait for legislation. "It's self-inflicted damage, it's not that they need something from Congress," said Alan Paller, co-chairman of a task force DHS set up two years ago to recommend ways DHS could improve its cyber force. DHS can bypass time-consuming security clearances and fight cyber attacks more efficiently by declassifying work that is not secret, said Amit Yoran, a senior vice president at security company RSA who held top DHS posts in the George W. Bush administration. He warned lawmakers about the hiring problems in 2009.

Data manipulation tricks: Even better in R
After covering a recent session on data munging with Excel, I wanted to see how those tasks could be accomplished in R. Surely anything you can do in a spreadsheet should be doable in a platform designed for heavy-duty statistical analysis! (New to R? You can get up and running with our Beginner's guide to R series.) To more easily follow these tips and code, we have a companion PDF that you can download here. (Free registration is required.) To get started, you can download the Excel Magic PDF and sample data spreadsheet and then follow along. (The original Excel tips come from MaryJo Webster, senior data reporter with Digital First Media.)

Hackonomics: The cost of getting caught
Operating within layers of secrecy and razor-sharp opsec are the players in the cybercrime black market and thus the market's behavior: the market necessitates a fanatical obsession of trying not to get caught. The fear of getting caught dictates much more about the market than its conditions. Surely this has a cost, too. To get an understanding of a hacker's potential cost of getting caught doing black market business, ZDNet spoke with a number of high-profile attorneys. Marcia Hofmann is a litigator specializing in digital rights cases who woked on Andrew “Weev” Auernheimer's case.

The Courage of the Transparent CIO
The problem with being transparent is that it is not the path that leads you to getting what you want or even what you know is best for the organization. Being truly transparent requires a degree of trust and vulnerability. You must possess enough confidence in what you're presenting and in your organization's ability to recognize the right course of action. Most important, when the organization doesn't choose what you think is the best option, you must have the courage to accept that decision.

How to Negotiate a Collaborative Outsourcing Deal
It's sad. Why do companies outsource if they can't trust their supplier? If they need to change suppliers, they could do so. But what we find is that they don't trust any suppliers. Lack of trust was something that plagued Dell in their outsourcing relationship with GENCO, which had managed Dell's North American reverse logistic operations for eight years. The two decided to have a strategic meeting in a neutral location to discuss their lack of trust and what was causing it.

7 Golden Rules for Big Data Projects
It seems every organisation has either jumped or is seriously contemplating jumping onto the Big Data bandwagon. In an industry where the hype is often followed by the despair, I feel somewhat ashamed that the IT Industry that I work in pushes the barrow often before the horse. As a result, organisations get hyped up around the advantages and the outcomes of the technology without putting in place the safeguards to ensure project success. Often when I talk to my customers about Big Data, I like to ask some basic questions to ensure that whatever we deliver is achievable and is not going to be just another piece of technology sitting on the shelf.

Quote for the day:

"The pessimist complains about the wind. The optimist expects it to change. The Leader adjusts the sails." --John C. Maxwell

April 27, 2014

An Easy Interface for the Internet of Things
With a new service called Freeboard, Bug Labs is giving people a simple one-click way to publish data from a “thing” to its own Web page (Bug Labs calls this “dweeting”). To get a sense of this, visit Dweet.io with your computer or mobile phone, click “try it now,” and you’ll see raw data from your device itself: its GPS coordinates and even the position of your computer mouse. The data is now on a public Web page and available for analysis and aggregation; another click stops this sharing. Freeboard, expected to be launched Tuesday, makes sense of such streams of data.

NHS 24’s new IT system plagued by testing issues
NHS 24’s chief executive John Turner said: "The new system is being built by BT and Capgemini, and our intention is to continue to develop the system with our suppliers and to deploy it when it is safe to do so. In the meantime, the current systems continue to work effectively in supporting the delivery of our services across Scotland, and people should not hesitate to contact the NHS 24 service if they need to. "In recent years, NHS 24 has been developing a programme to update our technology systems for the future. This will enable us to continue to provide safe and effective services to patients, to enhance the way NHS 24 works by delivering a more streamlined service for patients and staff, and to expand services in the years ahead.”

WAF - Typical Detection & Protection Techniques
WAF - Web Application Firewalls is a new breed of information security technology that offers protection to web sites and web applications from malicious attacks. As the name suggests, WAF solution is intended scanning the HTTP and HTTPS traffic alone. The WAF solutions have evolved over the last few years and are capable of preventing attacks that network firewalls and intrusion detection systems can't. The WAF offering typically comes in the form of a packaged appliance, i.e. with a purpose built hardware and a software running on it and is plugged in to the network. Different appliances offer different level of deployment capabilities, like, active / passive modes, support for High Availability,etc.

What is Apache Tez?
Tez generalizes the MapReduce paradigm to a more powerful framework based on expressing computations as a dataflow graph. Tez is not meant directly for end-users – in fact it enables developers to build end-user applications with much better performance and flexibility. Hadoop has traditionally been a batch-processing platform for large amounts of data. However, there are a lot of use cases for near-real-time performance of query processing. There are also several workloads, such as Machine Learning, which do not fit will into the MapReduce paradigm. Tez helps Hadoop address these use cases.

Big Data: Profitability, Potential and Problems in Banking
The truth is that financial institutions are struggling to profit from ever-increasing volumes of data. Banks are only using a small portion of this data to generate insights that enhance the customer experience. For instance, research reveals that less than half of banks analyze customers’ external data, such as social media activities and online behavior. And only 29% analyze customers’ share of wallet, one of the key measures of a bank’s relationship with its customers. Only 37% of banks have hands-on experience with live big data implementations, while the majority of banks are still focusing on pilots and experiments.

Implementing Compliance Incentives In Your Company
Make integrity, ethics and compliance part of the promotion, compensation and evaluation processes as well. For at the end of the day, the most effective way to communicate that “doing the right thing” is a priority is to reward it. Conversely, if employees are led to believe that, when it comes to compensation and career advancement, all that counts is short-term profitability, and that cutting ethical corners is an acceptable way of getting there, they’ll perform to that measure. To cite an example from a different walk of life: a college football coach can be told that the graduation rates of his players are what matters, but he’ll know differently if the sole focus of his contract extension talks [about] or the decision to fire him is [based on] his win-loss record.

The Deadly Data Science Sin of Confirmation Bias
Data scientists exhibit confirmation bias when they actively seek out and assign more weight to evidence that confirms their hypothesis, and ignore or underweigh evidence that could disconfirm their hypothesis. This is a type of selection bias in collecting evidence. Note that confirmation biases are not limited to the collection of evidence: even if two (2) data scientists have the same evidence, their respective interpretations may be biased. In my experience, many data scientists exhibit a hidden yet deadly form of confirmation bias when they interpret ambiguous evidence as supporting their existing position. This is difficult and sometimes impossible to detect yet occurs frequently.

Increasingly, Robots of All Sizes Are Human Workmates
Human-robot collaboration is “gaining an enormous amount of momentum,” says Henrik Christensen, executive director of the Institute for Robotics and Intelligent Machines at Georgia Tech. “In the past, robots have penetrated 10 percent of the industry. There’s still 90 percent of the industry, and that’s where you need collaborative robots.” The Robotic Industries Association, a U.S. trade group, last week organized its first conference dedicated to collaborative robots, at which robot manufacturers and customers gathered to discuss the trend. Christensen was a keynote speaker.

Roadmaps in Enterprise Architecture: Work Packages and Timelines
An architect can identify a set of standard threads or dimensions that run through all Work Packages. These standard dimensions will generally indicate what has been achieved at that Milestone, so that we can look for improvements across a lifecycle. For each of these threads, there can be a status indicator at any given project Milestone. This is achieved using color-coding so that stakeholders can tell, at a glance, the status of a given Work Package at different points in time. Examples of these dimensions are Cost Savings, Resource Requirements, Risk, Classification etc.

The Zachman Framework - The Perfect Tool for Operating Model Management
On this blog I have covered various aspects of Zachman Framework and thinking behind it from John in a number of posts. His thoughts on using the framework to address complexity and change, the framework being ontology - a classification for Enterprise Assets and components are well documented in my previous posts and hence I won't repeat in this post. I will try and briefly cover how the latest version can be used to address the Operating Model creation and management challenges.

Quote for the day:

"Those who will not reason, are bigots, those who cannot, are fools, and those who dare not are slaves" -- Lord Byron

April 26, 2014

The High Cost of Low Quality IT
Ultimately, technology purchases and implementations aren’t like buying widgets. A half-baked solution full of “second choice” technologies may end up being unusable to end-users, especially over a prolonged period of time. And cut-rate implementations that are seriously delayed or over-budget can translate into lost revenues, and/or delayed time to market. When evaluating information technology (especially for new solutions), make sure to compare specs to specs, technical capabilities to capabilities, and implementation expertise to expertise.

Big data key to bringing hyperlocal weather forecasts to Georgia farmers
Reckford is confident that hyperlocal forecasts enabled by big data analytics and sophisticated modeling technologies will one day yield similar benefits. Weather forecast models in the U.S. typically have a horizontal resolution of 12 kilometers, meaning they are based on data gathered from grid points spaced 12 kilometers apart. By building weather models with a 1.5 kilometer resolution, the Flint River Partnership project is looking to provide farmers in the area with much more granular weather information. That would lead to more informed decisions regarding irrigation, seeding, harvesting and fertilizer application, Reckford said.

Guess what? CIOs are back (if they were ever really gone)
With all the talk of chief marketing officers (CMOs) taking over IT budgets, it’s interesting to see a countervailing argument. Case in point: Clorox CIO Ralph Loura was promoted to senior vice president and ensconced on the company’s executive committee, according to The Wall Street Journal’s CIO Journal (reg required). Over the past few years, as bring your own device or BYOD mania swept through big companies, there was pushback among end-users who often viewed IT and CIOs as barriers between them and their favorite devices and apps. That’s why CMOs and other line-of-business managers started using their own budgets to do what needed doing.

Public Cloud Market Ready for 'Hypergrowth' Period
"You need to update your forecast to keep up with reality," said Andrew Bartels, an analyst with Forrester. "Now we have a new set of numbers to work with. One of the key trends behind this is that the cloud is starting to shift from a complement to a replacement for existing technology." Breaking down the public cloud market into segments, Forrester predicts that the global public cloud platform services will hit $44 billion by 2020, the cloud business services should reach $14 billion and the cloud applications, or software-as-a-service (SaaS) market, will hit $131 billion.

The smartphone era is finally getting the productivity software it needs
It has taken a while for the software that helps people get work done to catch up with the fact that many people are increasingly working on tablets and phones. Now new apps are making it easier to create and edit documents on the go. Meanwhile, cloud-based file storage services, including Box, Dropbox, Google Drive, and Microsoft’s OneDrive—which have plunged in cost and soared in usage—help keep the results in sync even as multiple users work on the same file simultaneously. Some cloud services do this by separating what look to users like unified files into separate entries—paragraphs, words, even individual characters—in easily manipulated databases.

Exclusive Interview: David Stringfellow, Chief Economist, State Utah Auditor
Two good benchmarks to separate the leaders from the laggards in the government sector are 1) the extent to which data is made available to both the public and data community in useful ways and 2) whether a government employs the right human capital in executive positions with both subject matter expertise and fluency in data use. Examples, include websites that open up the government checkbook to inspection. A good GUI is useful to a curious citizen, but of at least equal import is the ability of power data users to download the same data in bulk for true analytics. Governments will need Chief Data Scientists to marshal the resources to truly leverage the value of the data governments maintain to drive more efficiency.

Wearables and fashion: Blending the two will be a key to success
The connection between fashion and tech wearables is getting stronger as manufacturers recognize that people want to not only wear something that works well, but looks good, too. Face it. Putting on a wearable makes a statement, whether it's to tell someone that you are into health and fitness, or that you're a techie and you want instant access to texts and emails. "We're at the very beginning of wearables. People are finally waking up to the fact if you're going to be on someone's body, you have to at least be not unfashionable. With Shine, we were trying to be not unfashionable," said Sonny Vu, founder of Misfit Wearables, which developed the stylish Misfit Shine fitness tracking device.

5 Big Data Ted Talks Everyone Needs to See [VIDEOS]
It's a changing space out there, where what you like on Facebook can tell a marketer your inner-most desires, where the speed of algorithms concerns us more than the speed of light, where monuments and memorials are built to honor the humanity in us all -- from a data standpoint. So, yes...big data may indeed be a buzzword, but it's influence on our business models, our lives and even on the grography of our planet is only beginning. These five Ted Talks get to the heart of the massive shift in perception when it comes to utilizing data, from the security to the oddities and everything in between. It's time to learn up about the data revolution, and begin to understand your data rights.

Australia’s Federal Privacy Act Gives Watchdog Teeth
So it's perhaps surprising that legislation has often failed to keep up with technological developments. Laws designed to cover the accidental loss of a few paper documents from a musty government warehouse are hardly suited to an era in which millions of individuals’ highly personal details can be mislaid on a USB drive the size of a thumbnail. The UK government demonstrated that when it lost the personal details of 25 million people on two non-encrypted CDs in 2007. Many other examples exist, all around the world. In fact the list of major organisations that haven't lost customer data seems to get shorter by the week.

Cloud-savvy Bluetooth 4.1 to reach devices by year end
It is technically possible for Bluetooth devices to send data to a cloud service today, but only through hub devices with a full OS and supporting drivers or special routers running a software stack. Bluetooth 4.1 will go into "dumb" equipment such as routers or set-top boxes, which can receive Bluetooth data and redirect it to cloud services via a basic software layer in the gateway equipment. The gateways don't need a full OS the way smartphones and tablets do, with an app in the wearable device specifying the cloud service to receive the Bluetooth data.

Quote for the day:

The visionary starts with a clean sheet of paper, and re-imagines the world.” -- Malcolm Gladwell

April 25, 2014

The background on Apple's '103-degree data center'
What wasn't explained is that Jackson and the reporter were walking down a hot aisle, and feeling the fan exhaust. The experience might have been different if they had walked down the cold aisle, where the rack fronts face the aisle. Apple isn't disclosing details about its Maiden data center operations, except at the 30,000 foot level, so it's unknown exactly what temperatures it's operating at. But it is possible to estimate a range.

Mobile data collection platform ices Blue Bell's transaction drops
"We have around 1,500 different vehicles running out on the road each and every day," Jim Kruse, Blue Bell's board secretary and controller, said during a presentation at the Collaborate 14 conference in Las Vegas. "No one else touches our product except for us." Prior to 2012, the company's mobile data collection software was Gemini from ClearOrbit -- now called Take Supply Chain. But Blue Bell was having problems. Kruse said transactions would sometimes go kaput if an employee in the ice cream production facility or distribution center lost mobile connectivity in the middle of a transaction.

So Long IT Specialist, Hello Full-Stack Engineer
An engineer by training, Reed saw an opportunity to apply the new product introduction (NPI) process developed at GE a couple of decades ago to the world of IT development. Years ago, a GE engineer might split his or her time between supporting a plant, providing customer service, and developing a new product. With NPI, we turned that on its ear and said you're going to focus only on this new product," explains Reed. "You take people with different areas of expertise and you give them one focus." That's what Reed did with IT. "We take folks that might do five different things in the course of the day and focus them on one task -- with the added twist being that you can't be someone who just writes code," says Reed.

Shadow IT: Far Bigger, Less Manageable And More Important Than You Think
Even when lines of business initiate technology purchases, it is increasingly including IT. So for the CIO worried about Shadow IT and the developers that foster it, don't. Even with the rise of DevOps, those developers more often than not are happy to collaborate with IT in the ongoing maintenance of applications; they simply don't want to be blocked from starting on such projects. CIOs that encourage developers to use open source and the cloud position themselves to assume control as soon as developers move onto the next business-changing application. It may not be the kind of control they want, but it's the reality of the modern enterprise.

Thoughts on SDN Consumability
The OpenDaylight Project recently found that 76% of network engineers want “open source SDN” (the, um, open definition of “open source SDN” may account for some of that exuberance)…from commercial suppliers. That doesn’t necessarily mean, of course, that incumbent networking suppliers should necessarily assume they automatically get to keep most of their business if and when the networking world goes all-SDN-all-the-time. The market is open for anyone—or combinations of interests—who can meet the following “Open SDN” requirements, according to the ODP survey:

ArchiMate® Q&A with Phil Beauvoir
Well, firstly Archi is a tool for modeling Enterprise Architecture using the ArchiMate language and notation, but what really makes it stand out from the other tools is its accessibility and the fact that it is free, open source and cross-platform. It can do a lot of, if not all of, the things that the bigger tools provide without any financial or other commitment. However, free is not much use if there’s no quality. One thing I’ve always strived for in developing Archi is to ensure that even if it only does a few things compared with the bigger tools, it does those things well.

Treating Enterprise Software like Game Design
The “MDA” acronym stands for “Mechanics, Dynamics and Aesthetics”. Mechanics refers to the algorithms and data structures that drive the game, such as how running characters animate or the arc of a character’s jump. Dynamics refers to the run-time interaction between the mechanics and the player, such as the pressing this button to jump or showing the character’s health as a bar at the top left of the screen. Aesthetics refers to how the player enjoys the game and what the player gets out of the game. Aesthetics is often the hardest to describe to non-gamers. Some games may offer multiplayer where players enjoy the social and competitive aspects, like the an online game of “Call of Duty” or “Doom”.

Showing empathy in your leadership
“Empathy isn’t a weakness, but fundamental to good management,” said Kristen Leverone, senior vice president for Lee Hecht Harrison’s Global Talent Development Practice. “It means being able to understand and relate to others’ feelings. After all, if a supervisor or manager can’t tune into the feelings of employees, it’s going to be very difficult to motivate or engage them. The survey seems to have struck a chord, and the findings should raise concerns for management.” What is empathy? It’s an understanding of someone else’s world, and showing the person that you understand.

The Hidden Business Benefits of Regulation
In Friedman’s free-market world, there would be no upper limit to the amount courts could award injured parties, and no restrictions on class-action suits or on lawyers working on contingency. Since the prospect of costly litigation is as unpalatable to most corporate leaders today as regulation, they want to have it both ways: deregulation and limits on litigation. But that implies that all businesses will self-regulate, which is a lofty goal. In fact, until greed and sin vanish from this earth, businesses might just as well curse the darkness as to demand such total self-regulation.

Project portfolio management best practices in the SOA landscape
One of the project portfolio management best practices is to get control and definition of work categorization, said Tim Madewell, senior VP of professional services at San Francisco-based PPM tool vendor Innotas. This involves organizing information about projects and ongoing SOA infrastructure into categories -- including large, capital-intensive projects -- and budgeting support and maintenance to keep the lights on. A well-defined portfolio management process can also include other risks, like compliance, regulatory issues, and anything that will require IT.

Quote for the day:

Morale is the core of any team's unity. If you don't believe in each other it's harder to believe in where you are going. -- +Shawn Upchurch