Daily Tech Digest by Kannan Subbiah

May 10, 2015

Emotion and Cognition
Ask people today how they think the mind works and odds are good that they will describe a computer. They will talk about accessing memory or they will talk about processing data. They will talk about sending off a request and computing results. Or they will talk about acting on input to produce a specific output. We think of our brains as having a separate processing unit and separate memory. Data is input, stored in memory, and when processed appropriately correct answers should appear. For example, if we understand the operation called multiplication and are given two different numbers such as 7 and 6 we should return a correct result, 42. The concept of short-term memory and long-term memory is also very similar to the computer model of long-term disk drive storage and short-term cache/RAM memory.

Mobile ads take center stage as smartphone becomes leading search tool
Even the latest generation of larger smartphones, or "phablets," including Apple's iPhone 6 Plus and Samsung's Galaxy Note 4, have a lot less screen space than laptops and external monitors, and clicking through multiple pages can be very annoying, so Google started rolling out new mobile-friendly ad formats. When users search for something on their phones, Google increasingly shows a panel, or carousel, of listings from advertisers at or near the top of mobile search results. Users can swipe across to see more listings, and when they click them advertisers pay Google for the traffic.

Chief data officer: Insight into a crucial role for the exabyte age
Both CIOs and CDOs support business needs, whether in enterprise, commerce, or academia. If using performance metrics to manage IT relies upon accurate data, that means the CIO will depend on the CDO to get it right. "The CDO is responsible for working with the business lines to define business rules and roles around data, in addition to aligning the organizational strategy around data," said Casey. "The CIO is responsible for implementing technology architectures, infrastructures, and policies in support of business and data needs." Inside or outside of the public sector, the CDO can also help other executives and managers by bridging internal silos. "The role is complementary to CIO and CTO by helping organizations capitalize on data," said Speyer. "The CDO will rely on the CIO for IT and infrastructure support.

Can big data solve the amnesia of public outrage in Taiwan?
Big data expert Hsieh Bang-yen lamented the collective amnesia of Taiwanese society in a recent opinion piece for China Times. Major news events that affect people's lives and property become wiped from the public consciousness as soon as the media hype dies down and people find the next thing to get upset about, Hsieh wrote. Hsieh said local media, the government and anyone who desires social progress should harness the emergence of big data to reinforce the influence of scandals and high-profile news stories that otherwise get swallowed in the country's news cycle to force the government to implement reforms. We agree with this suggestion but the problem is how to make the best use of big data in this regard.

Enterprise-architectures for the real world
Remember Stafford Beer’s warning about POSIWID – that ‘the purpose of the system is [expressed in] what it does’. If, in designing a system, we fail to understand and work with what’sactually going on, we’ll end up with whatever system happens to emerge from the real real-world context – which, as in that example above, is often pretty much an unmanaged mess. For some (most?) people in our discipline, their ‘enterprise’-architectures may never stray much beyond the nice safe bounds of a data-centre or suchlike – which is fair enough for them, I guess. But for those of us whose enterprises necessarily extend beyond such comfortable constraints, we need architectures that can work with such enterprises as they really are – which can be, uh, quite a bit different than everyday IT-architectures…

The Relationship of Architectures - Part 2
The Enterprise Architecture encompasses the stages of transforming the design structure of the enterprise into detailed executable components. Input to this stage is the result of applying the management disciplines and formatting them in a manner useful to the enterprise architect. This is the ‘construction’ and ‘Execution’ part of bringing an enterprise structure into existence. If there is a specific solution that is used such as a type of technology or software package then the solution architecture idea is used. This approach is typically used when the solution is an IT solution. The enterprise architecture is driven by the use of development, engineering, project management, other disciplines, and tools that lead to a business specific solution.

Information Governance Tips with the Business User in Mind
Unstructured data typically includes Word documents, PowerPoint presentations, PDFs, media text files, emails, audio files and images. ... Further complicating the issue is that this data is often created and saved over a multitude of repositories like ECM systems, shared drives, desktops, cloud environments, etc. According to Rob Hamilton, vice president and digital market leader, Recall, corralling unstructured data is possible, but it cannot occur if IG decision-makers create policies that drastically impact business user workflow. If policies make their job significantly more difficult, they'll find workarounds for managing data that may put the organization at risk. The following suggestions can shrink the amount of unstructured data, help maintain compliance and gain buy-in from those most impacted by IG policies.

Deploying Microservices to AWS at Gilt: Introducing ION-Roller
As the old environment is still available during the rollout and the software is still running, we can safely rollback to the older version of the software at any point. Unused old instances are removed after a configurable period of time. Due to this delay, we can still rollback for a period of time after the rollout has completed. Our goal is to continuously monitor the health of the endpoint, and automatically revert to the old version if issues are detected; we will use Amazon’s CloudWatch alarms to signal that a rollback should be performed. ... ION-Roller supports the concept of canary releases via configuration of the traffic migration process. After a new version is deployed to the initial set of instances, the process stops, allowing for release testing against production traffic. Rollout will continue after a configurable period of time.

Enterprise Architecture: The Key to Unlocking the Value of Convergence
As the number of connected devices and “things” grows, the amount of data produced will increase too. From 2012-2020, the amount of data created is projected to double every 2 years. All this data creates complexity, especially when it comes to transforming that data into valuable information for decision makers. This complexity, along with new business models and strategies, is driving IT transformation. EA can help simplify things and manage the data so that organizations can capture the potential business value of IoE and digitization. Enterprise architects also need to look at business transitions that are occurring. Trends such as globalization, new opportunities for growth and productivity, and increased security and regulatory compliance are all things to consider.

Goldcorp vice president: ‘Simplify your IT strategy’
“Simplifying IT leads to improved performance at the operational level while at the same time reducing costs and risk” – Luis Canepari, vice president of IT at Goldcorp. Gartner’s definition of IT strategy is clear: “IT strategy is about how IT will help the enterprise win … and is an integral part of the business strategy.” Simple. Concise. Meaningful. With technology innovation occurring at a rapid pace, it can be difficult to decide on which vendors and platform architectures will lead to success. Thus, creating a clear and thoughtful IT strategy as the foundation on which to build is essential. ... Team dynamics are important as well explained Canepari, “having a mix of long-serving Goldcorp leaders and new faces allows for new ideas with minimal disruption.”

Quote for the day:

"Forgiveness does not change the past, but it does enlarge the future." -- Paul Boese

May 09, 2015

Can Bitcoin Kill Central Banks?
Central banks are currently the dominant structure nations use to manage their economies. They have monopoly power and are not going to give up that power without a fight. While Bitcoin and other digital currencies have generated significant interest, their adoption rates are miniscule and government support for them is virtually nonexistent. Until and unless governments recognize Bitcoin as legitimate currency, it has little hope of killing off central banks any time soon. That noted, central banks across the globe are watching and studying Bitcoin. Based on the fact that metal coins are expensive to manufacture (often costing more than their face value), it is more likely than not that central banks will one day issue digital currencies of their own.

A Better Way to Build Brain-Inspired Chips
Brain-inspired—or “neuromorphic”- chips have been made before, and IBM is trying to commercialize them. They generally use the same silicon transistors and digital circuits that make up ordinary computer processors. But those digital components are not suited to mimicking synapses, says Dmitri Strukov, an assistant professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who led work on the new memristor chip. Many transistors and digital circuits are needed to represent a single synapse. By contrast, each of the 100 or so synapses on the UCSB chip is represented using only a single memristor. “A [biological] synapse is an analog memory device, and there is really no good way of implementing that in a compact, energy-efficient way with conventional technology,” says Strukov. “Memristors by themselves are an analog memory device; it’s a perfect match.”

Threat Spotlight: Rombertik – Gazing Past the Smoke, Mirrors, and Trapdoors
The process by which Rombertik compromises the target system is a fairly complex with anti-analysis checks in place to prevent static and dynamic analysis. Upon execution, Rombertik will stall and then run through a first set of anti-analysis checks to see if it is running within a sandbox. Once these checks are complete, Rombertik will proceed to decrypt and install itself on the victims computer to maintain persistence. After installation, it will then launch a second copy of itself and overwrite the second copy with the malware’s core functionality. Before Rombertik begins the process of spying on users, Rombertik will perform once last check to ensure it is not being analyzed in memory.

How much can technology actually improve collaboration?
People are the most important aspect of collaboration, digital or otherwise. If they are unwilling -- or as is often the case, simply don't have the skills and resources to enable them -- to collaborate together openly as a team, then you won't seem results, tactically or strategically. This means that virtually all digital communication tools can be used to collaborate -- as it is peoples' activities and decisions within them that make collaboration happen -- and today's major collaboration platforms tend to focus on features that actually enable this teamwork. These features are typically activity streams to encourage sharing, rich user profiles to help put people in the center, search and discovery mechanisms to enable and encourage learning from prior activities, and so on.

Fortnum & Mason selects open source over commercial software
“The concept of doing a product as part of the pitch is not a traditional consulting approach,” said Cain Ullah, CEO of Red Badger. While consultants often rely on previous case studies, Ullah wanted to to get Fortnum & Mason involved. “We wanted to use a new piece of technology – Spree,” he said. To prove it could do the job, the team ran a 48-hour hackathon involving a fully functional multidisciplined, cross-functional project team and invited Fortnum & Mason to see the prototype being developed. “When Red Badger showed us what it had done, we were open to its ideas. From a partner perspective, you want to work with people who have your best interests at heart,” said Zareem-Slade.

Telerik pitches new framework for building Android, iOS, Windows apps
The foundation of the framework is the so-called NativeScript Modules Layer, which translates NativeScript to platform- specific code. Telerik has focused on NativeScript’s user interface, which is one of the biggest challenges when building applications for multiple OSes. With NativeScript, features such as navigation are automatically adapted to work the way users on each OS expect. To help developers get started, Telerik has a dedicated website for NativeScript. Here, developers can find documentation, a showcase of apps built using the framework and a roadmap detailing future upgrades. The plans for developing NativeScript were first made public in June last year, so the company has been working on it for a long time.

The Business Economics And Opportunity Of Open-Source Data Science
The combination of open source software, affordable hardware and reliable high-bandwidth Internet services meant that data storage was no longer an ongoing financial dilemma. The advanced analytics that extracted the value from the data - developed using open source tools - could be updated and modified much more quickly and easily than proprietary software from traditional vendors. The rise of big data was evolutionary, not magical. To be sure, it was a fairly rapid evolution - but it didn’t take place overnight. Many of the advances in big data analytics were written in R, a programming language devised in the late 1990s by two academics in New Zealand. R was developed specifically for statistical analysis, and is consistently ranked the most popular language for data science.

Inside the Internet of Things: The things, and the everything
New, lower-cost technologies and communications tools are making it easier for businesses to stay in contact internally and externally to maximize opportunities and profits. Add to that things like sales/field force automation, fleet management, service/support routing and businesses just need more efficient, more effective communications. People may have a horrible time communicating when they’re sitting across the table from each other; but don’t worry, IoT will make things better. Actually, it’s already underway. IDC estimates that last year, we had over 200 million M2M devices deployed using very slow 2G connections. But the industry plans to speed all that up to 3G/4G connections even if they have to take away some of your cat video streams because we’re talkin’ serious business.

Cisco’s Chambers: A retrospective
One of Cisco’s, and Chambers’, chief failings was a stretch to get into the consumer market. After acquiring Linksys for home routers and Flip for pocket video recorders,Cisco divested these business and product lines for much less than they acquired them for when the potential Cisco initially saw failed to pan out. Apple beat Cisco’s Flip to cloud-based videocam hosting and storage. Linksys hung around for much longer but was ultimately sold off as Cisco honed in on enterprise IT. Cisco’s Eos media and entertainment, and umi consumer telepresence efforts were also killed off. ... “Not everything is going to work out,” says Forrester’s O’Donnell. “Cisco is now facing a big challenge going forward (with initiatives like Internet of Everything and digitization of companies, cities and countries), but it will be faced by Robbins instead of Chambers.”

Identity is key to meeting IoT security challenges, says NetIQ
“Identity is the one thing that is still under the control of the organisation and the individual, and it can help balance the needs of users with the needs of risk managers,” he said. Attacks are inevitable, therefore there is a need to work to mitigate the effects of attacks, and key to this is getting the basics right when it comes to identity and access, said Mount. ... Security needs context, said Mount, which means security and identity can no longer be separate silos within organisations. “The key to delivering context is identity: verifying actors are who they claim to be, seeing how they are using their entitlements, and evaluating whether that use is normal and appropriate,” he said.

Quote for the day:

“To dream by night is to escape your life. To dream by day is to make it happen.” -- Stephen Richards

May 08, 2015

EMC-owned Spanning sounds alarm over enterprise attitude to SaaS backups
“People think that when they go to the cloud and SaaS the provider is going to take care of all their backup and recovery needs, but what the provider does is protect itself from its own errors,” said Erramouspe. “I’m never going to lose data in Google because a server goes down. That’s never going to happen. However, if I accidentally delete that data myself then it’s gone,” he said, describing how the thought process might take place. The situation becomes even more complex when users rely on SaaS services that plug-in to other cloud offerings and the effects of user error can spread even further. “A typical Salesforce customer integrates Salesforce at a data level with at least 10 different apps.

Frank Wang On DJI's Milestones, Miscarried GoPro Partnership & Corporate Espionage
Unlike other Chinese technology giants such as Alibaba and Xiaomi, which grew big mainly by tapping into the enormous consumer market in their home country, DJI derives about 70% of its sales from outside of Asia. It is the first Chinese company to lead a global tech revolution. In three sit-down interviews with FORBES, Wang shared stories of DJI’s early days, his drive as a “perfectionist” and challenges that the company faces ahead. His focus has allowed him to accomplish a childhood dream of creating a flying robot, and he now heads up the largest consumer drone maker in the world.

Why Bitcoin Could Be Much More Than a Currency
One twist, though, is that bitcoins themselves are still inherent to the process: they provide the incentive for people to help make all this happen. Verifying transactions and storing their data in the blockchain earns “miners” newly minted bitcoins. In other words, any service that aims to use the blockchain as a general-purpose database will have to pass a bitcoin (or a fraction of one) around in the process. Or it will have to find some other way to motivate miners to put the information into the ledger. The concept of a blockchain is not limited to Bitcoin, and several other networks have recently emerged as potential alternatives. Indeed, Bitcoin’s blockchain isn’t even necessarily the one that is best equipped to have applications built on top of it. But Bitcoin has gained by far the most traction and has the biggest network, which makes it more resilient than the others, says Monegro.

Google Brings Exascale Bigtable NoSQL To The Masses
As the name suggests, BigTable takes the unstructured data housed in a file system like GFS and makes it look like a giant database table or spreadsheet from the point of view of programmers and applications. BigTable’s successor – and that is not precisely the right word, just like Omega is not precisely the successor to Google’s Borg job scheduling program but is much more of an augmentation of it – is a geographically distributed database called Spanner, and it runs atop of BigTable and a follow-on to GFS called Colossus, which is a geographically distributed file system. BigTable is a key element of Google’s Mesa data warehouse, which is used to ingest and store the telemetry from its AdSense, AdWords, and DoubleClick advertising systems, which have an immense amount of data that they have to ingest.

All hail the next big job, the Chief IoT Officer
One person who sees a potential need for a Chief IoT officer to coordinate connected-product development is Philippe Ameryckx, general manager of remote diagnostics at Abbott Labs, a multi-billion dollar pharmaceuticals and health care products company. IT departments and CIOs "are focusing on the internal informatics, and not what is going on with the customer," said Ameryckx, who was at the ThingWorx conference. The person who acts as the Chief IoT officer "should be in charge of informatics projects that go to the customer," said Ameryckx. The idea of creating a Chief IoT officer is beginning to get attention, but it's unclear whether anyone today holds that title exclusively. More likely, IoT is getting attached to the list of CTO and CIO requirements. But the pressure for a better development model is there.

Behavioral analytics vs. the rogue insider
“It identifies and scores anomalous activity across users, accounts, applications and devices to predict risks associated with insider threats.” This should not be a surprise. Data analytics are being applied to just about every challenge in the workplace, from marketing to efficiency. So it is inevitable that it would be used to counter what has always been the weakest link in the security chain – the human. Americans have also been told for years that personal privacy is essentially dead. Still, some of them may not appreciate just how dead it is, or soon will be, in the workplace. But Nayyar and others note that there should be no expectation of privacy in the workplace when it comes to corporate data. “This technology is simply monitoring activity within a company’s IT systems,” she said. “It does not read emails or personal communications.”

IT Staff Fearful Of Cloud? Try Cloud Whispering
Business leaders see the cloud in very different ways from IT workers. Business leaders see improved speed to market; the ability to rent instead of own, especially as things relate to new ventures that might not be permanent; and the ability to rent infrequently used assets (like those for disaster recovery). And, of course, business leaders read those annoying tech-light biz strategy magazines like all executives do, and they may have an overly inflated sense of what cloud computing can do for their organizations. ... IT pros tend to fall into two different camps. There are those that see the value of public cloud -- think of developers who don't have to wait for weeks to create a new app, or those that don't have to wait for weeks to scale their apps. And then there are those who fear that Death has arrived, and that he rides a pale and cloudy horse.

Linksys brings fastest Wi-Fi router ever to market
Linksys does claim that the EA8500 with its Qualcomm MU | EFX MU-MIMO technology+ chipset can hit a combined 2.53 Gbps Wi-Fi speeds. That breaks down as 1,733 Megabits per second (Mbps) with 5 GHz and 800 Mbps with 2.4 GHz. I've benchmarked more Wi-Fi devices than I can recall, and I think what you'll see in your office will be more like 600 Mbps and 200 Mbps. That's still almost certainly a lot faster than what your current equipment is giving you. The really interesting practical news isn't so much its raw speed. What sets Wave 2 equipment apart is that MU-MIMO can transfer data clients simultaneously. Older Wi-Fi and 802.11n and 802.11ac standard gear can only serve one client at a time.

NSA phone metadata tracking ruled illegal
However, the court did not call for an immediate halt to the collection of US phone metadata, but urged Congress to make a decision on Section 215 that is set to expire on 1 June. The programme has to be re-authorised every three months by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC). The circuit court said the outcome of debate in Congress over the re-authorisation of the controversial section 215 of the Patriot Act “may (or may not) profoundly alter the legal landscape". Members of Congress are set to vote next week on a bill, the USA Freedom Act, that would end the NSA's collection of bulk data, reports the BBC. “We hold that the text of section 215 cannot bear the weight the government asks us to assign to it, and that it does not authorise the telephone metadata programme,” the judgement said.

Your Home Will Be Connected. Here Are Three Options.
Innovation in the connected home environment is flourishing, leading to more intelligent and integrated connected home platforms. Based on the 2014 Gartner consumer survey, 16% of U.S. online households (equivalent to 20 million households) own a connected home device. An additional 4% of survey participants reported owning at least two or more devices. Our three Cool Vendors in the Connected Home illustrate a cross section of innovation in the area of the connected home platforms. Their offerings include devices, apps and services as well as infrastructure components. ... The Wink Hub communicates with devices that do not to speak the same wireless language by translating the different communication protocols — including Bluetooth, Z-Wave and ZigBee.

Quote for the day:

“You have a choice: pursue your dreams, or be hired by someone else to help them fulfill their dreams.” -- Jay Samit

May 07, 2015

CIO-CSO tension makes businesses stronger
"There's a natural tension between these roles because they have what appear to be different priorities, and because in many larger organizations, the CSO role, and security in general, becomes a higher priority," says Justin Cerilli ... It's not so much that the goals of the CIO and the CSO are different, but that the priorities are flipped, says Bhutta. For CIOs, speed of delivery - for new hardware, software and applications - and efficiency are paramount. For CSOs, the concern is with the security of data, information and privacy, says Bhutta. Contention comes into play when the CIO and CSO don't work together to plan and agree on an overall strategy that takes both of their needs and concerns into account, says Robert Orshaw

The dawn of artificial intelligence
Even in the short run, not all the consequences will be positive. Consider, for instance, the power that AI brings to the apparatus of state security, in both autocracies and democracies. The capacity to monitor billions of conversations and to pick out every citizen from the crowd by his voice or her face poses grave threats to liberty. And even when there are broad gains for society, many individuals will lose out from AI. The original “computers” were drudges, often women, who performed endless calculations for their higher-ups. Just as transistors took their place, so AI will probably turf out whole regiments of white-collar workers. Education and training will help and the wealth produced with the aid of AI will be spent on new pursuits that generate new jobs. But workers are doomed to dislocations.

Alibaba: Will it succeed being the AWS of China (and elsewhere)?
The big question is whether Alibaba will be content being the AWS of China. Can it expand into the U.S. market as well as emerging economies? Possibly. In a research note, Forrester Research handicapped the public cloud race. The report was primarily focused on HP's plans in the cloud and noted that private cloud vendors will have to deliver public cloud capabilities to keep enterprises interested. ... The U.S., however, is ahead of the rest of the world when it comes to cloud. There's no reason why Alibaba couldn't be a China cloud juggernaut and then expand to other markets---especially emerging ones. If that formula sounds familiar that's because it is. Lenovo used that playbook well before. There's no reason why Alibaba couldn't run the same plays in the cloud.

Rethinking the Manufacturing Robot
Many manufacturers are eager to explore new manufacturing approaches because the cost of labor is climbing quickly, especially in China. The era in which manufacturers save money by setting up operations in areas of the world where workers are cheap is coming to an end, says Justin Rose, a partner at the Boston Consulting Group and coauthor of a recent report on the potential impact of collaborative robotics. The report found that 60 percent of all direct manufacturing tasks could be plausibly automated or augmented by robotics. The government of Guangdong province in China, where much of the country’s manufacturing takes place, announced last month that it would spend $152 billion to replace human workers with robots.

Having ‘the ear of the CEO’ is key to battling cyberthreats
The potential for hacks and data breaches amounts to "an existential threat to the corporation, and there needs to be someone in charge," Mueller says, "someone who has the ear of the CEO." More than 500 top IT leaders responded to our online survey to help us gauge the state of the One of the most important hires is the CISO," Mueller says. ... "Cyberattackers are leapfrogging traditional defenses," Brown says, noting that the challenge is further compounded by the number of infiltrations and attacks that go undetected. When Symantec begins working with an organization to help respond to a cyber incident, company officials "find several others already in progress," according to Brown. Mueller recalls efforts to increase cybersecurity awareness throughout the workforce during his time at the bureau, at times running counter to the hierarchical culture at the organization.

Data analytics helps auditors gain deep insight
Audit regulators are watching the technological developments in this area with great interest. Martin Baumann, the PCAOB’s chief auditor and director of professional standards, said in a video interview that regulators need to make sure auditing standards facilitate possible improvements in auditing rather than serving as an obstacle to progress in this area. “That’s important for us as standard setters to stay on top of that, such that the technology and potential uses of it in auditing don’t get ahead of where the auditing standards are,” said Baumann, who was sharing his own opinion and not that of the PCAOB or its staff. “We wouldn’t want auditing standards to be an inhibitor that might otherwise allow technological audit achievements to move ahead.”

Awareness lessons from the Sony hack
While it is important to detect messages, it is as important to ensure that employees report potential phishing messages, which is also an aspect of a good security awareness program. Password reuse was also a vulnerability targeted by the North Korean hackers. In a good security awareness program, password reuse would be addressed as part of a Password Security Awareness campaign. The attackers exploited the likelihood of password reuse by not just the average users, but by administrators as well. And if an administrator reuses passwords between his personal and corporate administrative accounts, there are likely other accounts that are similarly vulnerable. So in this case it is clear that you cannot just classify the phishing messages as being due to “stupid users.”

The secret to becoming a 'digital master'? Close the IT/business gap.
Here's an interesting takeaway for CIOs: Shadow IT may provide a workaround for injecting new technology into the business (a must for digital transformation, by the way), but it's a short-term solution at best. Shadow IT perpetuates departmental silos, and if businesses want to make the digital transformation leap, they'll need to knock down those silos and pave the way to better communication. ... The more pressing question for businesses is how to build a better bridge between IT and the business. "I don't think anyone has figured it out completely," Bonnet said. But he pointed to trends like two-speed IT and the rise of the chief digital officer as examples of businesses searching for ways to overcome that hurdle.

Do IT professionals have to abandon technology to progress in their career?
Ultimately technology management focuses on the relationship between the management of technology and innovation, and how these relate to other areas of management, including operations, finance, supply chain and logistics and strategy. This means looking at how existing technologies can work together to enhance an organisation's processes and products or services. It requires a broad perspective on what's available and an understanding of what works best, when, where and why. Technology managers appreciate how technology can be integrated; how the skills they and their team have can be employed to improve business operation and deliver value, both internally and externally, and where and when they need to bring new skills in to do so.

Continuous Quality and the Cloud: How You Should Be Testing Mobile Apps
Continuous Quality is a methodology for embedding quality activities into every step of the SDLC process— from design through build to production— all based on supporting processes, tools and testing lab infrastructure that is customized to support an organization’s specific requirements. A successful Continuous Quality process optimizes time to market, drives faster and more frequent releases and enables minimizing escaped defects to production by managing risk in an automated way as early as possible. The main driver behind the rise of Continuous Quality is the constant need to release high quality mobile apps (Native, Hybrid, etc.) more frequently. ... Embedding all of the quality aspects into each build and delivering constant feedback to the development team gives them early insights into bugs - this is the core value of continuous quality.

Quote for the day:

“Increasingly, management’s role is not to organize work, but to direct passion and purpose.” -- Greg Satell

May 06, 2015

Milken panelists discuss cybersecurity concerns, best practices
There are many relatively inexpensive best practices that firms can deploy to improve their cybersecurity. The most significant is information sharing. This falls in line with the latest efforts from the White House and across various industries to help thwart attacks. Alex Stamos, chief information security officer for Yahoo!, said information sharing is critical because it is “shocking” how often hackers re-use the same methodologies. Suzanne Spaulding, Under Secretary, National Protection and Programs Directorate, U.S. Department of Homeland Security, also weighed in, saying that one silver lining from what she calls the “Year of the Breach” is the increased interest from the private sector in collaborating on solutions.

Crowd Investing: An Emerging Financial Force
Already, crowd investing is redirecting streams of capital and stoking innovation. According to Crowdnetic, a provider of crowdfunding technology and data to financial-services firms, the vast majority of successful raises in the U.S. are under $500,000 — an appropriate level for small business experimentation that in the private equity world would be treated as trivial. Previously, these entrepreneurs typically had to fund their startups with savings, retirement plans, second mortgages, credit cards, and friends and family — a prospect that is tenuous enough to sometimes scuttle their efforts. The Crowdnetic survey found that the top three investment categories, based on the number of projects that have received backing from crowd investors, are hotbeds of new ideas: social media, e-commerce, and apps.

Banks and the New Amazon Bank
So a lot of the banking disruption will really be about how banks adopt Digital & simplify processes for customers.In fact,in the new digital world, banking & creativity may not be oxymorons!Adaptive Path, a design and user experience consultancy has been acquired by Capitol One. And just before that Daniel Makoski, founder of Google’s modular Project Ara phone project joined Capital One. New banks in India have a unique opportunity to embed “digital” in the fabric of how they do business. But banks are complex with structures that don’t allow for speed. In many cases, eBusiness teams own the mobile banking strategy, but few eBusiness teams have an exclusive mandate over their firm’s mobile banking initiatives. This division of responsibility creates silos and adds significant complexity to the coordination and optimization of Digital efforts.

In Praise Of Heuristics – or Saving TOGAF® From Its Friends
Enterprises are complex and, we would argue, even chaotic systems. Change the initial conditions and the behavior may be radically different (a totally different equation). A real scientific method for EA would then necessarily reflect that. It would deliver results, which could continue to adapt along with the enterprise. That requires more than just following a set of rules. There is no “equation”. There may be a number of “equations” to choose from. Some degree of experience, domain knowledge and empathy is required to select the most adaptable of those equations. If the world of software architecture hasn’t yet determined a formula for the perfect agile system, how can we imagine the even more complex EA domain could? Any such method would be a meta-method.

Finnish banking startup Holvi speeds up online identity verification
“Had we not launched a co-operation with GBG, a lot more complexity would have been added in the verification process,” said Luis Calleja Rodriguez, chief compliance officer at Holvi. “This includes individual contracts with local services in numerous local credit agencies or government related databases and its implementation and maintenance.” “Working with GBGroup allows our clients to open an account in under a minute, and they don’t need to provide data or paper-documents; taking out the stress of the traditional banking system.” Holvi (Finnish for a ‘vault) targets its online banking platform at freelancers, micro companies and SMEs. The platform integrates current accounts with business tools such as invoicing, budgeting and financial reporting.

Apple Has Plans for Your DNA
Nudging iPhone owners to submit DNA samples to researchers would thrust Apple’s devices into the center of a widening battle for genetic information. Universities, large technology companies like Google (see “Google Wants to Store Your Genome”), direct-to-consumer labs, and even the U.S. government (see “U.S. to Develop DNA Study of One Million People”) are all trying to amass mega-databases of gene information to uncover clues about the causes of disease (see “Internet of DNA”). In two initial studies planned, Apple isn’t going to directly collect or test DNA itself. That will be done by academic partners. The data would be maintained by scientists in a computing cloud, but certain findings could appear directly on consumers’ iPhones as well. Eventually, it’s even possible consumers might swipe to share “my genes” as easily as they do their location.

Relocation costs now a sticking point for job-hunting security managers
It’s not unusual for employers to ask recruiters to focus on the local candidate pool so they do not have to relocate someone, says Kathy Lavinder, executive director of Security & Investigative Placement Consultants, a retained recruiting firm that finds and places security management and financial investigative personnel. “That’s quite common in the larger metropolitan areas where the local candidate pool is likely to be sufficient,” Lavinder says. “That directive eliminates some strong non-local talent, but that appears to be a price some employers are willing to accept.” Some of Lavinder’s clients have been trying to contain relocations costs when possible. “Some have reduced the number of house-hunting trips to the new location for the potential employee and his or her spouse,” she says.

Digital Era Requires Agile Software Culture
Ultimately, however, all roads need back to software -- and enterprise software development done in-house. "Businesses need to know that modern IT requires a re-discovery of software development," said Pivotal CEO Paul Maritz. "We want to do development with you -- not for you. The goal is all the expertise gets taken back home -- into your business - to give you a modern agile software development culture." The prime example: Tesla, which is developing compelling software and digital experiences -- and not just hardware (cars), said Maritz. He pointed to Pivotal Cloud Foundry as an ideal platform upon which to build those new enterprise apps. Maritz also pointed to the Open Data Platform (ODP) standards group as a way to leverage Hadoop in a binary-compatible way across multiple distributions.

Microsoft bangs the cybersecurity drum with Advanced Threat Analytics
ATA uses a combination of log file analysis, deep packet inspection, and data from Active Directory to detect inappropriate access to corporate networks. Log files can reveal, for example, users logging on at unusual times, from unusual machines, or from unexpected locations. Deep Packet inspection (DPI) can show more obviously malicious behavior, such as attempts to use Pass-the-Hash or other credential-reuse attacks. Anomalous logins and resource accesses are detected with machine learning-based heuristics, with the DPI used to detect the signatures of attacks. This isn't Microsoft's first foray into this space. Last year, before the Aorata acquisition, the company announced similar machine learning-powered heuristics to detect suspicious activity in Azure Active Directory.

The IT X-Factor to Gain Business Agility
So what is the new IT X-factor that can give you the improved business agility you need to stay competitive even as you continue to reduce costs? Converged systems are rapidly gaining acceptance as the way to improve overall business agility, which increases the productivity of IT staff and the quality and speed of services delivered to clients. IDC forecasts the total integrated systems market will grow at compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 19.6% to $17.9 billion in 2018, up from a value of $7.3 billion in 2013. A converged system that is pre-built, workload-optimized and governed by software-defined management software, can now be efficiently delivered as infrastructure services. This sets a new standard for how IT can successfully manage, automate and deploy infrastructure within the data center.

Quote for the day:

“Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.” -- Ralph Waldo Emerson

May 05, 2015

Intel's recipe to make it in mobility
Intel's prospective turnaround in its battle for mobility market share comes about a year after the company announced that it would pump $100 million into its Smart Device Innovation Center in Shenzhen, China. It made the move in part to better compete amid the proliferation of microprocessors made by British rival ARM Holdings that had been flooding into the Chinese market, where ARM chips have become the chips of choice for many smartphone vendors. ARM's ecosystem business model has seen the company grasp the upper hand in the Chinese mobility market, so it is no surprise that for Skaugen, Intel's efforts to ramp up its ecosystem in the country are central to its success.

Cisco CEO Chambers on white boxes, SDN, leadership and the cloud
To me, you don’t have a separate network for a software-defined network and a separate network for your physical network. We learned that with ATM and Ethernet and others. Too expensive, you can’t share the information. We’re going to lead the SDN market but we’re going to brace for what people are after: programmability, lower cost, faster speed. So regarding the announcements about large SDN implementations, what you want to ask about is not how many people did you give it away to for free or off a software license. If you watched when Sony presented last quarter, it already has 300 customers with ACI capability and many of them well into production. Ask VMware how many software-defined NSX implementations they have in volume.

Microsoft Chief Slams Google As Lollipop Hits 10 Percent
"Google ships a big pile of … code, with no commitment to update your device," said Myerson at Microsoft's Ignite conference in Chicago this week. "Google takes no responsibility to update customer devices, leaving end-users and businesses increasingly exposed every day they use an Android device." Myerson might want to look at Microsoft's updating history, however, which is hardly a friendly one. The company debuted Windows Phone 7.0 in late 2010. That was followed by Windows Phone 7.1 and Windows Phone 7.5. Most devices shipped during these early years of the Windows Phone platform were able to update to Win7.5 directly from Microsoft, but some required carrier approval, which was often slow to arrive.

Agile Architecture: Reversibility, Communication and Collaboration
In regards to the agile manifesto’s preference for ‘responding to change over following a plan’ this has also been interpreted as ‘there is no need for a plan’, and accordingly there is no need for architecture within a software system. Fowler cautioned that this is often not true - architectural plans are required, but they must be adaptable and changeable. Within an agile project, the role of architecture can be analogous to city planning. Things are changing all of the time, but plans must be applied to maintain coherence across this process. In this respect, architecture is not necessarily about diagrams, but should be focused on communication of design. Dishman discussed that during project inceptions, the key stakeholders gather, but often there is no architectural representation.

17 JavaScript tools breathing new life into old code
Thanks to the ingenuity of an intrepid few, old code is receiving new life via a variety of JavaScript tools. --- The tools are far from perfect, but they tantalize despite their flaws. Rewriting remains a challenge, as it usually means understanding code that was written when disk space was expensive and comments cost real money. While putting in the effort can yield great benefits and erase some technical debt, we often don't have that luxury. Instead, it might be simpler and faster to fiddle with these cross-compilers, translators, and emulators to modernize old code bases than it would be to collect a big team steeped in dying programming languages to pick through old code and rewrite everything.

Six Tips for Keeping Your Cool in All Seasons
Seasonal changes present opportunities to maximize efficiency or improve control. Depending on the return air temperatures to the computer room air conditioning (CRAC) or air handling (CRAH) units, you could still see significant economization in spring. Reduced compressor loading or run time through economization increases cooling system efficiency from 30-50 percent, depending on application and geographical location. As you likely know, IT systems are critically sensitive to extreme variations in temperature and humidity. Very low humidity can cause static electricity to build up and discharge, which can possibly damage electronic equipment and/or cause data loss. High heat or humidity can cause condensation in the space, leading to failure or shortened equipment life.

EMC open sources ViPR Controller, eyes broader software defined storage footprint
ViPR is the key platform behind EMC's software defined storage strategy. EMC's bet is that Project CoprHD's application programming interfaces will be a vendor-neutral control point for storage automation. The big question is why is EMC taking an open source turn now? Sam Grocott, senior vice president of marketing and product management at EMC's emerging technologies division, said the biggest reason the company is open sourcing its ViPR code is that partners and customers wanted it. ViPR manages both EMC and third party storage arrays and the customer base wanted to accelerate its coverage. EMC has been shipping ViPR for about two years. By the numbers, ViPR manages more third party arrays than EMC's, but the automation and deep integration typically goes to the storage giant's systems.

IoT considerations for CIOs
Ultimately the game is one of competitive advantage, and using IoT to advantage will be a key skill required of CIOs. For CIOs, the biggest challenges will be the quantity, collection, analysis and purposeful utilization of near-real-time or real-time data from numerous heterogeneous sources. Big Data has emerged at just the right time for this. But the harvesting of data from inexpensive sensors -- many of which will fail, be in error, need recalibration in different environments or may not have been activated -- will require intelligent handling of large data volumes. ... Accompanying this are concerns about privacy, security and theft, especially since many of the 'things' entering a business may be from multiple unknown consumer sources.

4 steps to success for a new CIO
The lines of demarcation in companies are blurring. New CIOs must read between the lines – between industries, customers and product developers -- as they move swiftly to learn the business, find their niche and make an impact on the enterprise. Speed – or multiple speeds in the world of IT, given legacy systems and the arrival of digital – is the focus as digital drives the rate of innovation and business leaders’ expectations. But new CIOs are not the sole masters of their enterprise’s technology. As reported in theAccenture 2015 Technology Vision, only 34 percent of executives expect the IT organization to be the main generator of innovation in the next two years, down from 71 percent just two years ago. That compounds the challenges faced by new CIOs who walk into the job fully aware that the average tenure of a CIO tends to be shorter than that of their other C-suite colleagues.

Intelligent People but Bad Choices? Try Using Analytics
System 2 thinking (slow) paints a more pessimistic picture. Consider that of the 30 horses in a position to win the Triple Crown in the last 132 years, only 11 have succeeded. That's about a 40% rate. But it gets worse. Prior to 1950, eight of the nine horses that tried, triumphed. Since 1950, only 3 of 22 have managed the feat, and none have done so since 1978. A success rate of less than 15% is not encouraging. Perhaps I'll Have Another was a really special horse, you may be thinking, a once-in-a-generation speedster. Well, we can quantify that with something call a Beyer Speed Figure, a measure of a horse's performance adjusted for track conditions. All you really need to know for this purpose is that higher speed figures belong to faster horses.

Quote for the day:

"Spectacular achievements are always preceded by unspectacular preparation." -- Roger Staubach

May 04, 2015

Signs Point To A Coming Post-Cloud Era
DevOps today has an impact on how quickly and reliably businesses can develop new software and put it into operation. It seeks to eliminate the divide between software development and data center operations and to ensure that what developers produce will run efficiently in production settings. The main advantages may be improvements in business applications and better revenue as a result. But the purpose of improving technology goes beyond enhancing a narrow revenue stream. The real goal of technological progress is to do things more efficiently and to make possible services that had been impossible before. In the future, DevOps will allow frequent software updates on many other fronts, making Web services a more powerful vehicle for the intelligent use of fresh information, Weaver said. He ticked off several efficiencies that will be routinely pursued in the post-cloud world.

The Hackers’ New Weapons: Routers and Printers
NSFocus also recorded an increase in a technique that can trick devices such as routers and printers into participating in a denial-of-service attack without having to compromise them with malware. Such attacks work by exploiting a communication protocol called SSDP, which many devices use to check in with the company that owns or operates them. The protocol is designed in a way that makes it possible to ask a device to send information to a different server. That feature can be used to stage a denial-of-service attack by directing many devices to repeatedly send information to a server running a particular website. Rishi Agrawal, chief evangelist at NSFocus, says that the tactic is likely to become more common. Staging attacks that way can be easier to use than controlling compromised computers, and the supply of home and office devices that could be used is large and is likely to grow, he says.

How the Orlando airport went fully wireless
The primary purpose of the mobile application is indoor navigation. While the number of APs and beacons may seem like a lot, the public spaces in the airport covers over 3 million square feet over the five terminals. The mobile application allows travelers to quickly find their ticket counter, terminal, gate, a restaurant, baggage claim area, and look up flight information. The application is also the first airport mobile application to feature a "blue dot" experience, similar to what Disney offers, that indicates where a traveler is and provides a turn-by-turn path to the selected destination. In addition to indoor navigation services, the application now allows customers to select other services and find information about them.

Podcast: LeanUX and DevOps: A Match Made In Heaven
Our guest on the podcast this week is Jeff Sussna, Founder of Ingineering.IT. We discuss the parallels between LeanUX and DevOps, identifying how each can benefit from the other’s methodologies. LeanUX uses nimble processes to create a digital experience designed for the end user, while DevOps uses three ways to integrate feedback between development and operations teams. Listen in to learn how to successfully create a digital service offering by incorporating LeanUX and DevOps processes.

R.I.P., Windows Media Center
That decision shouldn't come as a surprise. Media Center, once a signature feature of Windows "premium" editions, has been on life support for years. The team developing Media Center features was broken up in 2009, shortly after delivering the final Media Center code for Windows 7. Microsoft grudgingly offered an extra-cost Windows Media Center Pack add-on for Windows 8, which installed the required codecs and Media Center features to that version, but it was a straight port that included no new functionality. It was introduced with a post that pointedly declared that Media Center was not part of "the future of entertainment." And with the rise of the "cord-cutting" movement, with consumers increasingly turning to streaming services and ditching cable subscriptions, it's hard to fault the economics of Microsoft's decision.

Staying Connected When Working Remote
All the advantages can be turned into disadvantages: no travel time might mean no separation between your leisure/home space and your workspace; no interruptions might mean loneliness and being out of touch; being able to work from anywhere means that work might turn into an addiction or a burden etc The one piece of advice I would give is that you define your ideal scenario – and ideal still means realistic and achievable considering your own circumstances. If you feel like your clients bombard you with emails, set some boundaries. If you feel like you have no control over your schedule, create a timetable and switch off your wifi during periods of rest. If you find yourself stuck in one location, find other places where you can work or take “creative thinking” time off while doing a physical activity.

Take Emotion Out Of Agile Transformation
Where delays and mistakes creep in, our estimates can be far from reality. Or, if teams aren't following processes or rules, we don't take time to figure out why. Kissler compared this "honor reality" work to being a student, in what she calls the need to "go and see" what's really happening. Kissler has gotten pushback on this idea from people who label it micromanagement. "No, it really isn't," she said. "You're going and helping the team; you're connecting to the work they're doing. You're showing that it's important. You're asking questions. You're not telling them what to do; you're actually becoming a student. You're getting connected to their reality." ... "Make the conversation as much about data as possible and not about emotion," Kissler advised. "A lot of the skeptics come around once they see it."

Nine questions for hybrid cloud integration
The good news is your organization has data and applications in several clouds. The bad news is very little of it is integrated. But you're far from alone. While market research firm Infonetics said 74% of the companies it surveyed had a hybrid cloud strategy by the end of 2014, the integration part of that strategy remains murky at best for many companies. We asked integration vendors, analysts and industry experts which nine questions companies should be asked when they're putting a hybrid cloud application integration strategy in place. Here is their collective wisdom:

Advisory boards: The when, why and how
Advisory boards of all companies should ideally be composed of individuals with various forms of experience and expertise. That is, the advisory board, like the board of directors, should be diverse. Frequently, the core of an advisory board will consist of someone with finance skills, perhaps a legal expert and another person who has marketing savvy. These are building blocks that are essential in any business. These diverse skill sets can provide the company with robust guidance and improved consideration of the various aspects of any dilemma or decision. The size of an advisory board, like a board of directors, varies. In both cases, it is more useful to have fewer but highly engaged and committed directors than idlers. Advisory board members should be selected for qualifications first and then for passion, commitment to the business and availability.

How fear and self-preservation are driving a cyber arms race
Hacking isn't new, but the attention paid to it is unprecedented. In 2014, The New York Times devoted more than 700 articles to discussing data breaches, up from 125 the year prior. Verizon, in its annual cybersecurity report released in April, concluded "data breach," had become part of the American public's psyche. In the past year, it's happened to police departments, banks, schools, the Ukrainian military and even some email systems at the US State Department and White House. And now it's terrifying corporate boardrooms. Facing that threat is costly. Companies and governments worldwide are expected to spend $80 billion on hardware and software to protect themselves against cybersecurity attacks this year, up from $74 billion in the last year, according to information technology research firm Gartner.

Quote for the day:

"Winners have simply formed the habit of doing things losers don't like to do." -- Albert Gray

May 03, 2015

Thinking Differently About Risk
The growing problem of cyber threats is also a relatively new and increasingly important component of overall risk for almost every business. In addition to the very real threat of clandestine hackers sneaking past firewalls and stealing vital customer and business data, cyber threats also include more mundane concerns, such as an employee inadvertently releasing proprietary information on the Internet. In the latter case, a bad problem can very quickly be made worse if the information is picked up by social media, where it can spread virally around the world in a matter of days, if not hours. So as always, the benefits of new technologies must be balanced against the new and previously unknown risks that they engender.

Six successful innovators and the lessons we should learn from them
Ask someone to think of an entrenched and immutable industry, and automotive would likely make a list of his or her top ten. With a century of history, entrenched competitors, and a business model that's changed very little, automotive would seem like the last industry a startup with an unconventional product would attempt to enter. However, Elon Musk and Tesla Motors made a bold entrance into this market with an unconventional product and a business model so different that it's faced everything from skepticism to legal challenges. Just because a system, process, competitor, or even a whole industry seems monolithic and immune to change doesn't make it so.

Agile versus Architecture
Planning and Management make the development safer for all though. They makes the development fault tolerant. Say a risk materialises, a key developer moves on, falls sick or... The planning should have have considered that to avoid disaster, at some cost, indeed. Hence, even if the principles sound liberating, an all Agile approach of development is a risk in itself because it may endanger the project. After all, the legacy managed approach is there for this very reason: to provide external visibility, reduce risks and dependencies and render a development as predictable as possible. Without forecasting effort and costs, the project cannot be even sanctioned.

Agile Enterprise Architecture – A Good to Great Evolution
There are substantial benefits when we effectively apply the intentional architecture, provided the iteration is not slowed down. An Agile Architect is a role in an agile team who provides inputs and technical direction based on the Architecture vision to the enterprise and ensures that the design and architecture of an individual application is in conformance with enterprise architecture vision. ... Being Great at anything requires practice. Agile teams needs to use tools and techniques which support constant change e.g. Continuous Integration, testing and refactoring Bottom line “Think long term and act short term “. Understand the agility the business needs, understand what helps you to align to the Enterprise Architecture Vision and choose design wisely!

How to Solve a Difficult Forecasting Problem
Too often, in dealing with our urgent business forecasting problems, we go for the first type of costly and time-consuming solution. Sometimes it may not be obvious that there are alternative approaches. Or sometimes we may have hired an unscrupulous consultant who will (of course) suggest a costly and time-consuming answer. Consider the apparent problem of generating highly granular forecasts, such as by customer/item for a manufacturer, or store/item for a retailer. There can be millions of time series at this most granular level. It may appear that we need to forecast all of them. So we buy terabytes of storage and the fastest processors to be able to model and forecast each of these millions of series.

The Horror of Hybrid Cloud and the real reason why you needed a Chief Digital Officer
Don't get me wrong, there are very strategic CIOs out there but these aren't the problem, in those companies you see adaptation happening already. However if you had found yourself lumbered with a non strategic CIO then these are the people you should have been planning to replace with a more strategic CIO - which after all was the real reason we hired CDOs (Chief Digital Officers). Assuming you didn't do something crass and get lumbered with a non strategic CDO (i.e. constantly waffling on about innovation, disruption and story telling without any clear understanding of the landscape) then now is probably the time to be considering that change. If, however you only hired a CDO because every other company did then heaven help you.

The Truth About Smartphone Apps That Secretly Connect to User Tracking and Ad Sites
The user tracking sites that apps connect to are less pervasive. More than 70 percent of apps do not connect to any user tracking sites. But those that do can be extravagant, some connecting to more than 800 user tracking sites. What’s more many of these are created by organizations that Google has designated with “top developer status.” The worst offender is an app called Eurosport Player which connects to 810 different user tracking sites. A small proportion of the apps even seem designed to connect to suspicious sites connected with malware. Most users of these apps will have little, if any, knowledge of this kind of behavior. So Vigneri and co have developed their own app that monitors the behavior of others on a user’s smartphone and reveals exactly which external sites these apps are attempting to connect to.

DevOps style performance monitoring for .NET
Recently I began looking for an application performance management solution for .NET. My requirements are code level visibility, end to end request tracing, and infrastructure monitoring in a DevOps production setup. DotTrace is clearly the most well-known tool for code level visibility in development setups, but it can’t be used in a 24×7 production setup. DotTrace also doesn’t do typical Ops monitoring. Unfortunately a Google search didn’t return much in terms of a tool comparison for .NET production monitoring. So I decided to do some research on my own. Following is a short list of well-known tools in the APM space that support .NET. My focus is on finding an end-to-end solution and profiler-like visibility into transactions.

Cloud Native Architectures - a Conversation with Matt Stine
... there are a lot of aspects of what we're now calling microservices that sound very similar to SOA when compared to the first several paragraphs of SOA’s Wikipedia page. I think the real difference is in how SOA was monetized by vendors. Their focus was normally on putting everything into this new piece of middleware called an Enterprise Service Bus that was replacing all of the other large pieces of middleware that were no longer in vogue to sell. Not to say that ESB technology is bad; it was the way that we were using it, replacing one big monolithic thing with another monolithic thing; taking all the complexity from here and shoving it into there. None of that was actually required to make a move to a more service-oriented architecture.

Traceability and Modeling of Requirements in Enterprise Architecture
As we can see, functional and nonfunctional requirements are members of both solution and problem space. The idea is that requirements are used as a bridge between the problem and the solution space and in order to cross this bridge we have to move from generic, high abstraction level requirements, to more refined ones. On the one hand the generic requirements describe how the enterprise architect formulates the given architectural problem, and on the other hand the more refined requirements provide the rationalization behind specific design decisions

Quote for the day:

"Failure is a prerequisite for great success. If you want to succeed faster, double your rate of failure." -- Brian Tracy

May 02, 2015

The Swiss Army Knife for Technical Leads
Working as Technical Lead is very exciting; every day you have new challenges, new problems to solve and a great deal of satisfaction. However, sometimes you need some tips in order to improve and empower your teams. There are several techniques to ensure the quality of the products we are working on, but the most important, and powerful at the same time, is, without any doubt, the feedback loops. As you know, working on a new software is more empiric than scientific, which is why we need metrics and small, but incremental, improvements if we want to meet the needs of our users or clients. Feedback loops are a very basic, but powerful methodology designed to help us and our teams to succeed in their daily tasks. With feedback loops, you are sure you'll get the feedback and metrics that will allow you to improve your projects.

Big Data and Advanced Technology Fuel Gamification in the Workplace
Employees find motivation in doing their job when there are checkpoints of measurement in place. Gaming techniques have been incorporated into applications to activate this factor. For example, global cloud-computing company Salesforce.com created the game Badgeville for its CRM product’s employee training and development. In the app, users participate in missions designed around crucial sales processes and behaviors, earning points and badges along the way. The gaming principles integrated in this platform are both a form of engagement for Salesforce employees to adjust habits and an analytics tool that gauges insights of usage by employee.

Federated Security Domains with SAS® and SAML
This paper will introduce the reader to federated identity and give a technical overview of what is perhaps the most important standard in this space, the Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) 2.0 standard. Designed as layers of standards on top of each other, at the outer-most layer are SAML profiles that implement the use cases we are interested in, single sign-on, federated identity, and others. We will discuss the layers that make up the SAML 2.0 standard and look at how SAML distinguishes between the roles of the identity provider and service provider. ... SAML 2.0 is a very flexible standard that supports multiple communication mechanisms known as bindings, and ways of including information about users in the assertions. This unfortunately means that some troubleshooting will probably be required to get things working.

The 10 weirdest job titles in tech
While the IT industry has always been innovative, forward-thinking and, to make a sweeping generalization, populated by folks who are just a little bit odd, the last few years have seen that quirkiness reflected in IT job descriptions. From "Digital Prophet" to "Evangelists," the sky's the limit when it comes to describing roles at IT firms. And while there's some argument about the benefits and drawbacks of off-the-wall titles, there's no question that the trend is here to stay. Here, CIO.com has put together the ten weirdest IT job titles.

‘We Use Machine Learning Algorithms to Save Millions of Dollars’
Understanding the linear or nonlinear relationships between different KPIs to get the best possible insights is the second most important job. Understanding the customers, suppliers based on data and then classification or clustering them is another important job. Here analysts use R and python languages for doing predictive analytics and optimization. ... We try and solve business problems more accurately with help of machine learning. Having solved it and built the confidence of stakeholders, our team has started new projects on prediction, classification, clustering and optimization. All these initiatives have helped our company save millions of dollars with the help of accurate prediction of demands and understanding of complex relationship between different KPIs.

Trends in Information Governance: eDiscovery and Big Data
Organizations have the best chance for success by concentrating on the highest risk and biggest pain points that can benefit from IG. IT’s domain has a big claim, particularly with unstructured data. Unstructured data rates are hitting 75-80% of corporate data, and data growth is increasing 35-50% year-over-year. In the midst of this massive data growth, IT is directly responsible for data lifecycle management, user access, data security, and compliance. They are also frequently involved with eDiscovery collections and big data analysis. These represent big challenges – and IG tools concentrating on unstructured data directly benefit all of these processes. Introducing IG into the data management domain is best done with a combination of technology toolsets and organization priorities that drive policy settings.

Embracing Disruption When Transitioning to the New Style of IT
Startups make innovation look easy. Seemingly out of nowhere, young and vibrant companies emerge to tackle long-standing business challenges. Established organizations, on the other hand, are often bound to rigorous compliance processes, shareholder obligations, and multi-year corporate planning cycles — disruption is seemingly impossible. As the recent survey from HP points out, 75 percent of established firms1 currently lack the qualities of ‘digital disruptors’ within their industries. These organizations recognize a need for innovation but lack the capabilities to develop or execute a formal strategy. But all is far from lost. As companies begin to make sense of their data assets, complex security challenges, and options for scalable infrastructure, there is a window of opportunity for IT executives to build innovative cultures within their organizations.

Bitcoin Entrepreneurs Scramble to Appeal to the Masses
The technology underlying the currency is still in its early days, they argue, and the potential to build compelling products and services on top of it is still being realized. A growing number of startups are scrambling to develop apps they believe will inspire mainstream use of money that isn’t backed by any government. “A billion dollars has been invested in this industry in the past 24 months,” said Barry Silbert, the founder of the financial technology firm SecondMarket and an investor in 48 Bitcoin-focused startups, to an audience at the Inside Bitcoins conference. “We’re just getting started.”

Cisco Services chief talks about the network provider’s big data plans
Really it is about streaming data on the router and let’s assume we are right and there will be 20 billion devices about to be connected or let’s go lower to 10 billion or even five billion it’s still huge amount. They will all have propriety protocols and be able to capture data in that device. That data never goes out or into one silo or not available to others. What is going to happen is they will all talk and if we think we have the biggest data flush today it’s just a start on what digitalization is? In a classic example, look at the way jet engine are produced. A jet engine takes in 1TB per hour of data. So if you have four on a plane and that plane is flying for 12 hours how do you compute that? You need real-time streaming of the analytics and what we do is communication technology to store it.

Companies must teach workers to swim in new oceans of data
Data is the element they all share in common, and it's affecting more than just the executive ranks. In the business world's headlong rush to collect as much data about as many things as possible as quickly as it can, a question has been left for later: How do you turn those massive volumes into practical value? Turns out, "later" is now, and there's a crushing shortage of specialized data scientists. Few companies, meanwhile, even have a plan for bolstering their data talent. At virtually every level of the organization, staffers are being asked to cope with and find meaning in more data than ever before.

Quote for the day:

“True leaders bring out your personal best. They ignite your human potential”.” -- John Paul Warren

May 01, 2015

Apple And IBM Team With Japan Post To Address The Needs Of An Aging Population
Tim Cook called the initiative “groundbreaking,” saying that it is “not only important for Japan, but [also] has global implications. Together, the three of us and all the teams that work so diligently behind us will dramatically improve the lives of millions of people.” He added that the “courage and the boldness and the ambition that Taizo-san and Japan Post are showing by being first in this is incredibly commendable.” For Cook, this Japan Post initiative shows the “enormous potential” of the Apple/IBM partnership, and he also delved into a discussion of Apple broader goals with respect to user health. He brought up the examples of HealthKit and ResearchKit, and added that this program with Japan Post is perfectly in line with the goals of those existing initiatives.

How Globe Testing helps startups make the leap to cloud development
There are also things such as response time. Customers are very impatient. The old rule was that websites shouldn't take more than three seconds to load, but these days it's one second. If it's not instant, you just go and look for a different website. So response time is also something that is very worrying for our customers. ... So being able to test on multiple operating systems and platforms and being able to automate as much as possible is very important for them. They need the tools that are very flexible and that can handle any given protocol. Again, HP Software, with things such as Unified Functional Testing (UFT), can help them.

ITIL: Piece by Piece
When enterprises have a challenge like that, we can immediately start to deconstruct the challenge itself and then deconstruct ITIL, until we have identified the quick win/s, matching solution to issue/s. Bear in mind that it doesn’t mean abandoning all plans to implement a significant portion of ITIL in the long term, it simply means ‘let’s tackle the challenge and improve piece by piece’. We may unearth that in fact the solution lies in simply implementing ITIL’s Change Management process to ensure that authorized changes are prioritized, planned, tested, implemented, documented and reviewed in a controlled manner. Quick win delivered, disruptions to the live environment and services minimized.

6 cloud sourcing archetypes
What does a typical enterprise cloud services buyer look like? It’s a tricky question to answer. Cloud services are everywhere: in the data center, in development teams, in shared services organizations on manufacturing floors. It’s also delivered in many different ways: as software, as infrastructure that behaves like software and as business processes supported by cloud software. Complicating matters further, what one buyer may call cloud another may call a rack of dedicated, virtualized servers, making the line of demarcation between “cloud” and “traditional” very blurry. Regardless how one chooses to define this boundary, cloud is permeating just about every corner of the enterprise, and the buyers that are driving this transformation are as varied as the functions they represent.

IT outsourcing deal values hit 10-year low
After one of the strongest years yet for the IT outsourcing industry, the sluggish tempo of the quarter is unsurprising, according to ISG. Ultimately, 2014 turned into the third best year for the industry in the last decade—driven by a buyers’ market, a rise in contract restructuring, and an increase in mega relationships. But ISG’s analysts say early 2015 slowness is not necessarily a sign of things to come. “IT outsourcing strength in the U.S. bodes well for the full year, and the first quarter dips in Asia Pacific and EMEA also suggest there should be more in the pipe,” says Keppel. “IT outsourcing solutions and client demands are changing rapidly, and as these change, they bring new opportunities for improved capabilities, improved flexibility, and lower costs—a combination we would expect most buyers to find irresistible.”

Why IBM's z13 microprocessor matters to analytics
The z13 delivers many value propositions, including speed, but the one that I think about the most is what it delivers to organizations in terms of analytical capability. As I said above, the mainframe in the modern enterprise has the data, and that feeds analytics. With the ability to have 10TB of memory with large memory frames/pages, the practice of bringing your analytics to the data (rather than copying the data, via ETL, to the analytics) has more relevance than ever before. z13 is designed for cloud, mobile and advanced analytics capabilities, which is a function not only of speed but of design.

How To Install Windows 10 IoT On Your Raspberry Pi 2
Why would you want to do this? Well, as Microsoft notes, “Windows 10 IoT Core is a new Windows 10 edition for low-cost, small-footprint devices that will be available ‘free’ for Makers and commercial device builders.” This means you can easily flash and use a stripped-down version of Windows in your own projects. Interestingly, this version of Windows will be very familiar to users of similar platforms like Arduino and Rasbian. Don’t expect to be playing Far Cry on this thing anytime soon – think of it as more of a universal app platform that connects to simple devices like Arduino-based relays and LEDs. In fact the UI is quite limited unless you program some apps yourself.

‘Security has failed’: Exclusive preview of RSA president's conference keynote
Yoran’s keynote address is aptly titled “Escaping Security’s Dark Ages,” and he extends the analogy in conversation with Fortune. “We need to stop thinking of taller castle walls and deeper moats,” he says. Complex passageways and nifty windows won’t work either—no matter how high one builds or how deep one digs, attackers will still get through. “At the end of the day, even if you use next generation protective measures, focused adversaries with the resources, with the time, with the skill, and that have a defined objective of breaking into your organization are still going to get in,” he says. Not to alarm anyone, but they’re probably already inside, he adds.

Google Apps Marketplace apps: Three things every admin should know
When you add a Google Apps Marketplace app to your Google Apps account, you save people time and increase security. People don't have to remember an additional login--and app access and data are more likely to remain under organizational control. That convenience requires a bit of periodic work by a Google Apps administrator. Here's how to review your Marketplace apps data access settings, check which apps are used, and discover new Marketplace apps to add. When you add a Google Apps Marketplace app to your Google Apps account, you save people time and increase security. People don't have to remember an additional login--and app access and data are more likely to remain under organizational control.

Hack the hackers? The debate rages on
Indeed, on a panel at the recent RSA conference in San Francisco, Rhonda MacLean, founder and CEO of MacLean Risk Partners, declared that most organizations should assume they have been breached. “If a company tells you they haven’t been breached, they don’t know,” she said. To have a meaningful debate on the issue, however, requires some defining of terms. Some experts object to the use of “active defense” as a euphemism for hacking back. Rafal Los, director of solutions research & development at Accuvant, said he believes active defense is a good thing when it means, “the actions a defensive team takes to protect themselves, on their own systems/network and explicitly not hacking back to protect themselves and their assets from attackers.”

Quote for the day:

"Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn." -- Benjamin Franklin