Daily Tech Digest by Kannan Subbiah

November 22, 2015

2015 State of Analytics - 20 Key Business Findings

High-performing companies are 2X more likely than underperformers to at least half of their employee base uses analytics tools. In my experience, training and empowerment of all employees is key to scale, as long as right tools and business processes are in place to be inclusive of all employees. Often organizations will limit the visibility into analytics and access to tools to only management and business analysts, and by doing so, limit the insight and full potential of the entire organizations. The importance of systems integration, data quality, data consolidation and customization and mobility are key to democratization of insights. Here's why an analytics platform is key to success.

FBI info security chief discusses taking risks with cloud, big data

"Accepting a risk doesn't mean it's going to happen," Hart said. "It means if the thing happens, you accepted the risk and will take the steps to mitigate that risk." As CSIO for the FBI, Hart said she is responsible for managing everything from governance to operational security in protecting the FBI's cloud infrastructure against internal and external threats. "I'm not packing heat," Hart quipped, clarifying she is not an FBI agent in the field. Hart offered a few insights into the FBI's cloud infrastructure, noting everything done by federal agencies must be compliant with the FedRamp cloud framework. "The cloud is all about big data and being able to aggregate data, which are amazing things," Hart said. "But when the sword cuts, it cuts both ways."

Qylur System Uses Big Data to Improve Levi's Stadium Security

Lisa Dolev, CEO of Qylur Intelligent Systems, explained that her company's technologies fit into the industrial Internet of things (IIoT) space, with machines that are able to learn from each other and evolve in their decision-making capabilities to help stay ahead of threats. "For the Qylatron Entry Experience Solution, what we're doing is combining the aspects of greeting a person based on the entry ticket and doing security scanning," Dolev told eWEEK. The Qylatron is a self-service machine comprising multiple pods that can be used for screening bags and other items (pictured). It has a number of different sensors that use machine learning to come to automated decisions, according to Dolev. The automated decisions are intended to stop things defined by the system's administrators as being dangerous or even just items that are prohibited by the venue.

Making Good on the Promise of Big Data in Health Care

Bates does not blame interoperability issues for the healthcare industry's slow adoption of predictive analytics. "You can do a great deal with just your own data," he says. Rather, the problem has to do with personnel. "Healthcare organizations don't have groups with the right training to understand how to use data to reduce costs and improve care," he says. "If they do, the groups are relatively small and completely consumed with meeting external requirements, such as reporting quality data. They just don't have the bandwidth." Another problem is that up-to-date analytics software and tool kits—especially those that take a more "self-serve" approach to data—have not been available until recently.

Advantages of network virtualization impress, but hurdles remain

From a logical perspective, virtual switches provide much of the same functionality as the traditional top-of-rack switches. Today, for example, it's not uncommon to see a virtual switch with several virtual LANs. A handful of VMs communicating with each other via a virtual switch is a basic example of network virtualization. Inter-VLAN traffic, meanwhile, is provided via a trunk between a virtual switch and the physical network. The traffic traverses the physical port of the host server. Essentially, the physical server port serves as an uplink port of the virtual switch. If two VMs residing on the same physical host --but on separate VLANs - needed to communicate, the traffic is routed to the physical network. At that point, a firewall could be used to filter traffic between the two hosts.

Strategies for a next-generation security architecture

Increasingly you're going to be liable for committing any vulnerability and as we've seen, if you're a senior executive, you may have to take the fall for the hack. And that puts a lot of pressure on companies to really rethink how they're doing security. So, really to sum up the answer, it's the [problems] of the perimeter-less architecture; the emergence of a professional threat economy; and the impact of getting hacked both from a personal career limiting perspective, as well as from a regulatory compliance perspective. One of the other big things that you're seeing evolve in addition to the professional threat economy is now you've got people who built all the pieces, and there's almost an inverse correlation between the mental effort that's required and the criminality of certain things.

Discovering Alpha Through Automation

Consistently discovering alpha is the holy grail of investment management, and is an arena populated by two primary schools of thought. The first consists of active managers who proactively try to uncover investment opportunities that can generate higher returns, and the other consists of passive managers who believe markets are efficient and invest in a diversified portfolio of securities mirroring the market. While there is growing acceptance even amongst die-hard efficient market finance theorists that financial markets are not efficient to the level originally hypothesized, active managers have not consistently outperformed their passive counterparts in many asset classes in recent times. However, can investment managers systematically uncover pockets of market inefficiencies using Big Data analytics?

The open-data revolution has not lived up to expectations

The thorniest problem for open data now is privacy. Governments rushing to release individual-level data such as tax, medical or education records are “walking into a massive minefield”, warns Martin Tisne of the Omidyar Network, a philanthropic outfit. Such data are among the most valuable: they can boost, for example, precision medicine, which tailors each patient’s treatment. But a privacy scandal can cause a backlash against all open data. A public outcry recently forced Britain’s National Health Service to rethink plans for making anonymised patient-level data available for reuse. Open-data activists have joined forces with bureaucrats and entrepreneurs to sort out all these problems. Their solutions are starting to work, and growing amounts of data are being put to good use.

Key Lessons Learned from Transition to NoSQL at an Online Gaming Website

Erlang concurrency is designed around the actor model and encourages an elegant style of programming where problems are modelled by many isolated processes (actors) that communicate through immutable message passing. Each process has its own heap and by default is very lightweight (512 bytes) making it practical to spin up many hundreds of thousands of processes on commodity type servers. These individual processes are scheduled by a virtual machine over all available processor cores in a soft real time manner making sure that each process gets a fair share of processing time. The fact that each Erlang process has its own heap means that it can crash independently without corrupting shared memory.

Containers Will Penetrate Large Cloud Platforms

Amazon, Microsoft, Google and other leading cloud providers are already adopting container technologies. We are also seeing the same approach among OS, hardware and application developers. For example, Intel too is supporting containerization with its Cloud Integrity Technology 3.0. It is therefore quite obvious that support for containers will continue to grow in the coming years and we are likely to see more deployment in this ecosystem. An increasing number of micro-service applications will be built on containers. In fact, experts predict that most cloud platforms will either switch to a new container stack or at least start supporting containers by 2017.

Quote for the day:

"Technology is just a tool. In terms of getting the kids working together and motivating them, the teacher is most important." -- Bill Gates

November 21, 2015

How to tackle change management in an era of automation

“Automation will advance us away from managing, monitoring and building to brokering,” Oehrlich says. However, CIOs must help manage the transition customers, employees, vendors, and partners to new automation technologies. This requires experts who know how to apply automation and technology to achieve business outcomes. “That is the biggest challenge with the workforce the CIO has today, as many folks in their jobs don't have these skills.” Such work is challenging as technology becomes increasingly integral to the business strategy. A CIO working for a major retailer has traditionally worried about aligning point-of-sale and transactional systems, and improving store operations, but not about “serving the customer when they come in the front door,” Chui says.

You Can’t Engage Employees by Copying How Other Companies Do It

High commitment companies work hard to sustain their culture—they realize that protecting it is as much of a challenge as building it in the first place. Several types of practices help to keep a company and its many leaders on the journey. Employee engagement surveys can help assess alignment of leaders’ multiple business or geographic units with company purpose and values. As CEO of Campbell Soup between 2000 and 2010, Doug Conant employed quarterly engagement surveys to assess and develop high commitment in the company’s multiple business and operating units. Hewlett Packard’s senior management employed skip-level meetings to hear the truth from lower levels.

How Hybrid Cloud Strategy Can Prevent Cloud Chaos

In most cases, organizations and employees fail to realize what they are getting into. In fact, many overlook the fact that as SaaS providers offer more applications and integrations, it increases the likelihood they are merging the organization's internal data with data from one or more of those applications. Most issues develop at this stage but usually come into light too late, after the application has been deployed. We have heard many horror stories caused by data merging, violating the organizations’ security and governance policies, and making them vulnerable to hacking and security threats. It is therefore essential to have a proper strategy to manage your hybrid or multi-cloud environment.

The Machine-Vision Algorithm for Analyzing Children’s Drawings

The results show both the power and the limitations of this kind of science. The most impressive result is a clear demonstration that the complexity of a drawing changes as children get older. “We observe that children tend to draw more complex scenes as they grow older,” say Konyushkova and co. “However, after some age (approximately 13 years old), they start drawing simple and abstract scenes again.” This is consistent with the consensus among child psychologists. But the analysis of the role of religion is more problematic. One idea among researchers is that children tend to draw pictures of gods above the midline of piece of paper. They say this is because children think gods are somehow unworldly.

Businesses struggling to transition to digital era

“Startups and established corporations can leverage individual strengths and explore acceleration opportunities through collaboration. In the past, IT has been an enabler of business, but in the future IT will be part of business” said Kilger. Ernst & Young predicts that all businesses will soon need chief digital officers to explain what it means to become a truly digital enterprise. “IT will have to manage the whole technology stack, including software, connectivity layer, cloud, apps in the cloud and technologies enabling the internet of things [IoT],” said Kilger. This, in turn, will create the need for companies to have access to data scientists to enable them to understand and benefit from all the data they are generating and collecting.

A Framework in C# for Fingerprint Verification

We implemented the fingerprint verification algorithms proposed by Tico and Kuosmanen, Jiang and Yau, Medina-Pérez et al. , and Qi et al. It is important to highlight that, despite the algorithm of Qi et al. is a combination of a minutiae matching algorithm with an orientation based algorithm, we implemented only the minutiae matching algorithm. We also implemented the feature extraction algorithms proposed by Ratha et al. and the orientation image extractor proposed by Sherlock et al. This framework allows you to include new fingerprint matching algorithms as well as new feature extraction algorithms with minimum effort and without recompiling the framework. One of the goals that we kept in mind while developing this framework was to achieve class interfaces as simple as possible. This way, adding new algorithms is pretty straightforward.

Startup Humanyze's 'people analytics' wants to transform your workplace

"It's like a Fitbit for your career," he explained. "When you set up your dashboard, you tell us what you want to achieve." Someone who wants to be the company's best salesperson, for example, can use the technology to benchmark their own performance against that of the current top performers without ever knowing who those people are. Alternatively, someone who wants to become a manager can set up a dashboard that uncovers what he or she needs to do in terms of behaviors to achieve that goal. No matter which department is using Humanyze's Sociometric Badge at any given time, IT plays a central role, Waber said. "As companies become able to culturally assimilate this kind of approach, IT can go beyond just supporting it and help to supercharge it," Waber said.

vArmour Unveils Industry-Wide Pathway to a New Security Architecture

The pathway to Multi-Cloud Security Architecture will help IT and security leaders develop their short and long-term strategy to secure their entire cloud infrastructure. Organizations have invested heavily in traditional perimeter security, but this is only the start — now, organizations will need to move controls closer to assets, creating an intelligent system over time that is dynamic, efficient and autonomic. “There is a pressing need for this type of multi-cloud security architecture, as security and IT teams are in the process of learning what to do or how to do it,” said Jon Oltsik, principal analyst at ESG. “vArmour has a vision and growing experience that can help organizations think differently about security architecture in this new heterogeneous cloud world, and a provide a pathway to get there.”

Cloud security requires shared responsibility model

To create a successful shared responsibility model, enterprises need visibility into their cloud provider's security controls, Patel said. And IT organizations can gain that visibility in a number of ways. For example, they can review independent assessments of their cloud provider's security model, such as attestations from the CSA's Security, Trust and Assurance Registry (STAR). They may also want to check that their provider holds certain cloud security certifications, such as ISO 27001. But because they only reflect the state of a provider's security environment during a given period of time, certifications shouldn't be the only way an enterprise assesses a potential provider, according to Patel.

A day in the life of a cloud architect

There is always an inertia to change in enterprises. One of the pitfalls in enterprises is that trying to treat OpenStack as traditional Mode 1 virtualization platform. It is always good to have a discovery of requirements and use cases and identify the use cases for OpenStack. More often than not, I have seen that enterprises want to adopt OpenStack because it's the shiny new thing in the industry. Every platform has its place and you cannot do away with legacy. In this day and age of bi-modal IT, it is important to understand the requirements for Mode 2 IT. OpenStack is a great platform for innovative Mode 2 environments, where the ask for enterprises is to rapidly deliver products and solutions adopting the principles of DevOps, which require infrastructure to be treated as code.

Quote for the day:

"Being powerful is like being a lady. If you have to tell people you are, you aren't." -- Margaret Thatcher

November 20, 2015

How DIY Could Help User Adoption of Big Data

What could we do to create a breakthrough? Could the DIY movement be brought to the Big Data & Analytics area? It has certainly worked in some other areas. For instance, the 3D printing business. Of course, 3D printing had already been invented and was in existence, but the start of the DIY 3D printing race really made it possible for this business to flourish. It’s funny to notice that it was spurred by the possibilities from crowd-funding, making it possible for the first DIY 3D print companies to start building their business. A great documentary call ‘Print the Legend’ is available on Netflix, in case you are interested to know more. The same goes for Internet of Things (IoT). One could argue that IoT is no longer a new thing, but to many it is still a starting business.

More Efficient I/Os Through Read/Write Optimization

Morin first took a few moments to speak about V-Locity, what the company describes as "I/O Reduction Software." The product appears to aggregate I/O from Windows and virtual machine (VM) software from VMware and Microsoft and then optimize storage reads and writes. The product does this by gathering up small I/O requests and making the system read and write larger amounts of data in a single I/O. It also more intelligently places data, rather than using the first available space. ... By optimizing writes to be written in a more contiguous fashion, the size of an I/O consistently increases. In other words, instead of writing four 4Kb blocks of a 16Kb file, V-locity enables the system to write a single 16Kb write, requiring a single I/O operation.

Developers First Line of Defense When Adopting DevOps

The DevOps movement essentially stems from the agile development movement. "Agile is working," Randell said. "Three quarters of [development] teams are doing some kind of agile. It comes down to the focus on delivering to the users. It's not a one size fits all situation." Development teams are now the first line of defense for effective and smooth-running apps, Randell added. The move to DevOps has changed the app testing process. Testing now becomes embedded into the development teams as part of the process. By iterating frequently and delivering rapidly, apps are tested and debugged on a more continual basis. "It really does turn DevOps into a machine," Jones said, noting even Microsoft no longer has a QA department which has led to the delivery of new code to fix bugs faster.

What Makes Joy,Inc Work? Part 3 – High-Tech Anthropology

Putting the ultimate user of the product front and centre results in a focus on making products people want to use, and High Tech Anthropology® (HTA) is considered to be the key to how they achieve this. HTA is an approach to user needs identification, requirements elicitation and product design that draws elements from a variety of existing disciplines and adds some Menlo-specific tools and approaches. As with the other Menlonian practices, it sits atop the solid foundation of the Menlo culture – collaboration, trust, respect and teamwork are baked in from the beginning. Without this solid foundation the practices would not work. The underlying culture is the secret sauce of Menlo Innovation’s success.

8 more years of leap-second problems loom; governments punt decision to 2023

The recommended way of dealing with the leap second is to stop the clock for a second, but on a computer, that's not practical: The computer and its clock will keep running and have to be jumped back, with the same second seemingly occurring twice -- a chance for high-frequency stock traders in Asia and California to make -- or lose -- a fortune. Software, then, must deal with the consequences of that repeated second, or find a way to fake it, perhaps by gradually adjusting the clock over the last few minutes of the day. But the sheer variety of clever ways to handle the extra second is part of the problem, as systems using different methods drift slowly out of sync with one another before slowly realigning once again.

Delving into an enterprise IoT initiative? Read this first

Monsanto's enterprise IoT strategy started as a way to reduce inefficiencies in its supply chain, such as preventing seed loss. Seeds that experience heat stress, for example, are unlikely to germinate. By outfitting the semi-trucks that transport seed from fields to processing facilities with sensors that measure temperature and geolocation, Monsanto's IT department was able to build a virtual window into the transportation environment. Doing so gave the business an advantage: "Now, with IoT, if our grain gets heat stressed, we can dynamically route it to cooling centers or route it to the front of a receiving line to get the grain processed," said Fred Hillebrandt, infrastructure architect at the agro-chemical and technology company in St. Louis.

Mastering the Finer Points of Big Data Success

What many companies are experiencing is a gap between their investments in the underlying technologies of Big Data, and the anticipated benefits. The macro trends across many industries around challenged sales growth, margins, and consumer loyalty reflect this reality. The gap looks a bit differently between companies at the bleeding edge of adoption and those just beginning their journeys. Yet there is one thing in common between the two: wide-ranging views on what Big Data represents in terms of value creation and how it fits within the organization. CEOs and their leadership teams have enough to worry about and focus on, without getting into the weeds of Big Data technologies.

Why Apple keeps its distance from enterprise IT (and why it works)

Blau cites BlackBerry as an example. "Even though [BlackBerry] still seemingly has fairly decent enterprise support today, it's not enough," says Blau. "You have to have that whole ecosystem." Angela Yochem, CIO of logistics and transportation company BPD International, says third-party partnerships are almost always a good thing for enterprise vendors. "These partnerships allow enterprise customers to benefit from innovations and support structures well outside of a single vendor capability." Apple is similar to Google in this regard. Both companies focus on what they do best, instead of "customizing elaborate support models and relationship management teams for major customers," Yochem says. "Consumers and enterprise customers alike are becoming more comfortable with this sort of constrained model."

Larry Wall's programmer virtues and 'vices'

The lazy man figured out ways to eliminate wasteful movements, conserve energy and still get the job done. "If necessity is the mother of invention, then maybe laziness is the mother of innovation," he said. One of the ways CIOs can encourage laziness? Brian encouraged CIOs to embrace the DRY principle -- Don't Repeat Yourself. Automate what you can so that employees can devote time to the most important problems. ... "Impatience leads to better tools," Brian said. "We get impatient with the tools we have, so we build a better one, and it solves the problem in a better way." That's also why impatience benefits from laziness and hubris, characteristics that can ensure the business doesn't take on too much technical debt.

Investigating Data Scientists, their Skills and Team Makeup

Understanding data is about extracting insights from the data to answer questions that will help executives drive their business forward. Do we invest in products or services to improve customer loyalty? Would we get greater ROI by hiring more staff or invest in new equipment? Getting insights from data is no simple task, often requiring data science experts with a variety of different skills. Many pundits have offered their take on what it takes to be a successful data scientist. Required skills include expertise in business, technology and statistics. In an interesting study published by O'Reilly, researchers (Harlan D. Harris, Sean Patrick Murphy and Marck Vaisman) surveyed several hundred practitioners, asking them about their proficiency in 22 different data skills.

Quote for the day:

"Opportunity always involves some risk. You can?t steal second base & keep your foot on first!" ~ Joseph Helle

November 19, 2015

Power To The People: Stop Thinking Of Them As Users

Users are people. Treat them like people. The makers of apps and operating systems, media and television tend to forget this principle. Why? Because to truly acknowledge that users are people and not just big numbers on a spreadsheet is to acknowledge that people are individuals with vast diversity of cultures, needs, opinions wants, hopes and fears. The uniqueness of people is a messy business and individuals don’t scale. ... The term user was distinguished the actor—end user—of the software from the people that created, often known as developers. The user was synonymous with the word “operator.” User specifically meant a human. Systems where the primary actors were other machines or pieces of software do not classify the other operators as users.

Forget Big Data, use "Little Data" instead

To help reconnect with other humans, rather than treat customers as a data point in the Big data pile, we should add a personal touch via "little data", which is personal, specific information. "I wouldn't be surprised if $1bn is wasted on Big Data this year," he said, adding: "Little Data often makes the most magic. Big Data is about a pattern… but Little Data is about a person." While he admitted Big Data has huge potential -- he pointed to medical research as an example -- but said companies shouldn't ignore personal information they have on customers. "Creating magic for customers often costs nothing," he said. "It's the Little Data, and Little Data is almost free." He pointed to BA, which sent him a personalised email asking why he always books one-way trips rather than returns -- it's because of his work travel.

Why AI could destroy more jobs than it creates, and how to save them

Brynjolfsson identifies various astonishing technologies lining up to encroach on human labour. Take Rethink Robotics' Baxter, a robotic humanoid torso complete with arms, claw-like grips and a head with an LCD face. Baxter is designed to replace factory line workers employed in repetitive but as-yet-unautomated tasks, such as inserting large components into circuit boards. Baxter can be trained to carry out new jobs far more simply than its robotic predecessors, primarily by taking its arm and guiding it to where it needs to pick up and drop items. His 'hands' can be swapped out for suctions cups or different grippers to allow him to take on different tasks.

In The Cloud, The Big Get Bigger

As cloud computing moved into the mainstream, some smaller cloud providers and wanna-be suppliers were acquired. In May, EMC bought Virtustream; ActiveState sold its PaaS system, Stackato, to HP in July; HP also bought Amazon API look-alike Eucalyptus Systems in September 2014. OpenStack vendor Piston Cloud Computing was acquired by Cisco in January; GoGrid was purchased by Datapipe the same month. The consolidation continues apace, with the table stakes growing each month for what it takes to become a global cloud provider. "The consolidation and shakeout will accelerate in 2016, which will force many current providers to refocus on a narrower field, retreat from cloud or exit," Forrester said.

Is Microsoft Azure PCI DSS Compliane?

Not allowing users to change logging entries is one thing. Maintaining log file integrity is a completely different thing. If there is failure here for a QSA and/or Microsoft to misunderstand a simple PCI DSS control like this, what else is wrong? Have the compensating controls been understood correctly? So. Is Microsoft Azure PCI DSS Compliant? Some of it might be, some of it definitely isn’t (according to the data above), and to date I haven’t been able to find any formal documentation that assures me, a seasoned Qualified Security Assessor, that any of the services you can buy from Azure have been correctly validated. If you decide to host your CDE or parts of it in Azure, do so at your own risk.

The Entrepreneur’s Guide To Surviving A Tech Bubble

We’re in a cycle — I don’t believe in the questions about the bubble. I think cycles come and get a little overheated. It’s more like a deflation: How much air comes out of the balloon versus the balloon actually popping? While the market is never in equilibrium, the public and private markets have different variables driving their valuations. Once companies go public, there is a change in how people value them. Pre-IPO, they are judged by their potential and then post, they are judged by their performance. Unfortunately, the performance of those companies don’t always back up their valuations. Today, public markets are demanding sustainable business models before allowing companies to go public, while in the past companies often went public without the need to prove their model out.

Dell Pushing Advanced Scale to the Enterprise

If supercomputers are the spearhead of advanced computing, the slowdown in Moore’s Law has flattened the spear tip just as the enterprise’s need for advanced computing has grown. Result: Some of the grandeur has slipped from the TOP500 and making the list is not the badge of glory it once was. Ganthier said, “It’s kind of starting to run its course because standing up [in the TOP500] is just a beauty contest.” The real action, Dell is betting, is putting HPC to work. He said Dell wouldn’t walk away from the TOP500 – there were 13 Dells on the list this year – but it wasn’t a priority. In implementing this strategy, Turkel said Dell wants to replicate in the HPC sphere what the company did to the PC market starting in the late 1980s and later on with X86 servers – ease and broaden market acceptance of technology.

The Amazing Ways Shell Uses Analytics to Drive Business Success

Of course, we’ve long been conscious of the fact that we could eventually use up all of the non-renewable oil and gas buried under the earth – perhaps sooner than we think. While this is an environmental concern to us all, it’s a financial one to companies like Shell. Dwindling reserves mean the cost of getting at what is available goes up, as they are forced to look deeper underground in ever more remote locations. One alternative is offered by the growing hope that “unconventional resources”, such as shale gas and tight oil will fill the gap. These resources, trapped in shale and sandstone, now supply 20% of the gas used in the USA and their use is expanding rapidly around the globe.

Blockchain Revolution Butts Head With Creaky Banking Pay Systems

“The payments leg is some of the real difficulty here,” he said in an interview. The services that move cash between financial firms and their customers “are all running lagged systems and none of them communicate efficiently,” he said. “We need everyone else to catch up to us.” ItBit is one of dozens of new companies seeking to use blockchain technology to revolutionize back-office functions for markets ranging from commodities to loans to bonds. Wall Street firms see the technology as a way to reduce costs and increase efficiency as they face stricter regulatory requirements following the 2008 financial crisis. While trading in stocks or derivatives is done in milliseconds, the verification and settlement of those transactions still take days.

Why Privacy Advocates Warn the Cybersecurity Bill Is a Mistake

"The first problem with CISA is that it has very weak front-end privacy protection," said Robyn Greene, policy counsel, New America's Open Technology Institute, a Washington think tank. "There's a low requirement for companies to remove unnecessary personally identifiable information from the information they want to share with the government." Under CISA, companies would only be required to remove PII if they know it is not directly related to a threat. The institute's position is that PII should be removed before sharing unless it is necessary to identify or protect against a threat. "Your personal information is personal and shouldn't be shared with the government or other companies unnecessarily," Greene said.

Quote for the day:

"Hard work spotlights the character of people: Some turn up their sleeves, some turn up their noses, and some don't turn up at all." -- Sam Ewing,

November 18, 2015

Thread – An Open Standard Protocol for Home Automation

The Thread architecture is built from ground up keeping device to device communication in mind. Since devices are creating a mesh, one particular malfunctioning device (called host) cannot bring the entire Thread network down. This is very similar to how the internet is made resilient – remember that it was designed to keep up communication while parts of it are failing. Moving to a mesh network topology makes home networks internet-grade. Thread is built on 6LowPAN (Low power Wireless Personal Area Networks) which lets IPv6 packets to be sent and received over wireless networks. This allows even small devices to be connected to the internet and thus actually create the Internet of Things.

AI technology: Is the genie (or genius) out of the bottle?

Needless to say, the early pioneers (as is typical) were a bit overly optimistic, although, in the bigger picture, perhaps not that much. The 1970s brought government funding cuts and the field went from the "Peak of Inflated Expectations" to the "Trough of Disillusionment," to use the modern vernacular of the Gartner Hype Cycle. During the 1980s, commercial success was achieved through the development of expert systems that enhanced knowledge and analytics capabilities, and the market grew to over $1 billion -- the "Slope of Enlightenment," literally and figuratively. Enthusiasm for AI was rekindled.

More women on tech boards, but industry lags

"A diverse board makeup improves employee morale and productivity and sends a message to employees throughout the organization that a company is committed to the advancement of women and minorities. At the same time, it enhances a company’s reputation and attractiveness at a time when many investors are increasingly using a variety of nonfinancial metrics, such as board diversity, as criteria in investment decision-making," Chiang wrote. The tech industry is wrestling with a chronic lack of diversity from the highest corporate ranks to the rank and file. New efforts are targeting the shortage of women at the top of the tech industry. Boardlist, for example, is a database that privately held companies can search to find female candidates to fill open board seats.

Decoding DevOps: a Management Primer

The good news is most organizations are willing to share their own best practices; the bad news is that most development teams are already understaffed and as a result, there is very little time for admins to think about, build, test, optimize and implement all the changes that are required to successfully move to a DevOps process. That includes not only taking the time to learn about the process, but also deciding how to realign existing processes and skills to fit a new DevOps model. One should not underestimate the required change in culture to adopt the new mindset, either. For most organizations and IT decision makers, these challenges are likely off-putting and intimidating.

New, Better Way to Search for Technology

The scout can strategically search for offerings to minimize the evaluation effort without eliminating the unknown unknowns. Rather than using typical Internet searches that don’t find everything, federated search explores sources simultaneously in real time. While only a small percentage of the web’s technical content is crawled and available via Google, Deep Web searches uncover and expose the desired information. Federated search automatically pulls data from multiple sites — such as patent, publication, expertise, and invention databases — to find the content hidden below the surface. Without it, users have to manually enter submission forms for each individual search site which is very time consuming.

Amazon: An Evil Empire dawns on the Internet of Things

Amazon has hardly been open to allowing 3rd parties access to the Prime APIs for playing music -- for example, SONOS cannot play Amazon Prime Music content. iOS and Android can do it, but in this case, Amazon controls the app in question, and Prime exists outside of both Apple and Google's in-app purchasing rules, as it is a yearly subscription purchased directly from Amazon. What we're seeing here is the beginnings of an Internet of Things Evil Empire. An empire that wants to control not just the content you consume, and what cloud infrastructure you use, but also the devices you are allowed to buy that consume that content and use that infrastructure. One could make the argument that Apple with iOS does the exact same thing. But at its core, Apple is a devices company that has a brick and mortar retail presence, that just so happens to have a content cloud.

The Right Way to Scale Agile: Scaling Value Delivery over Process

One of the key tenets of the Agile Manifesto is "individuals and interactions over processes and tools". Another critical piece of the Manifesto states that to be agile, software professionals or organizations should focus on "responding to change over following a plan". With any piece of writing, interpretations may vary, but it's pretty rational to take these tenets as meaning organizations need to lead with people, deliver value, and collaborate instead of following a closely prescribed scaled agile process. It sounds easy enough, but really changing the way you work is easier said than done. When you design your workflow process, you should remember that how you do something is just means to an end and it’s the underlying reasons that are important.

Security Trends That Will Impact Your Data In 2016

As expected, technology forecasts and predictions for 2016 continue to come into Information Management at a brisk pace now, with the latest concerning data protection and cybersecurity. Haiyan Song, senior vice president, security markets, at Splunk, offered Information Management her thoughts this week on what will be the top security trends that data professionals and cybersecurity managers need to be aware of. Splunk is a market-leading platform that powers operational intelligence. ... Song notes that cyber-attacks have historically caused little physical damage, but “the proliferation of IoT will cause more disruption and actual physical damage versus just hardware and software disruption,” she says.

What the JPMorgan Chase Breach Teaches Us

"We simply are not doing enough to protect data," Easttom says during this interview with Information Security Media Group. "Having data sitting on a server unencrypted is an egregious omission in the security posture. ... Unfortunately, there are lots of companies, not just banks - healthcare, hospitals, all sorts of organizations - that have, frankly, too low of a security posture." Organizations have to get ahead of regulatory mandates and make cybersecurity part of their overall corporate strategy, with understanding and buy-in from the top, he says. "Organizations don't have to wait for regulation," Easttom says. "They need to start bringing security to the forefront of all their conversations ... and those conversations need to be at the highest level."

5 Ways to Create a Culture of Analytics Within Your Company

Leading companies don’t make decisions based on their gut, they use data to drive answers. Once you can understand and dissect the data presented, you can use the numbers for more than just simple performance tracking. The 2015 State of Analytics survey reveals that high-performing teams are 4.6x more likely to say they’ve moved beyond using data to keep score and onto using data to drive business decisions. The most popular ways businesses use data today are for ‘driving operational efficiencies’ (37%), ‘facilitating growth’ (37%), ‘optimizing operational processes’ (35%) and ‘Improving existing products, services and features’ (35%). When planning the success and growth of your business, make sure your company is making smart decisions based on real data insights.

Quote for the day:

"You cannot swim for new horizons until you have courage to lose sight of the shore." -- William Faulkner,

November 17, 2015

A Manual for the Data-Driven Finance Chief

The quicker CFOs can uncover insights, the quicker they can make insight-driven decisions and take actions that can improve the company’s performance. But while technology is getting faster (and cheaper), some companies are struggling to move their organizations at an equivalent pace. One of the best ways to overcome this challenge is by implementing an agile analytics operating model. With greater analytics agility, a CFO can help his or her company transform into an insight-powered enterprise that can defend, differentiate, and disrupt in its market. ... Talent in financial organizations today is primarily skilled in the areas of financial management and planning. With the opportunity that data insights can offer a business, CFOs could look to transform this talent pool into a digital workforce.

Enterprise security for our mobile-first, cloud-first world

Extending Microsoft’s security commitment to customers, we also announced the Microsoft Enterprise Cybersecurity Group (ECG). This dedicated group of worldwide security experts delivers security solutions, expertise and services that empower organizations to modernize their IT platforms, securely move to the cloud and keep data safe. ECG offers security assessments, provides ongoing monitoring and threat detection, and incident response capabilities. ECG helps customers take advantage of Microsoft’s best-in-class security and privacy technologies to optimize their investments and confidently advance their security postures.

Tor Project Claims FBI Paid Carnegie Mellon $1 Million To Deanonymize Tor Users

A few weeks before the big Black Hat Conference in 2014, it was announced that a planned presentation from two Carnegie Mellon University researchers (Michael McCord and Alexander Volynkin), entitled "You Don't Have to be the NSA to Break Tor: Deanonymizing Users on a Budget" was pulled from the program, leading to lots and lots of speculation about what happened. Soon after this, the Tor Project announced it had discovered a group of relays that appeared to trying to deanonymize Tor users who were operating Tor hidden services. A few months after this, the FBI and Europol suddenly took down a bunch of darknet sites and arrested people accused of running them (calling it "Operation Onymous") -- including arresting a guy named Blake Benthall for running Silk Road 2.0.

Why the CIA wanting encryption backdoors is a failure of leadership

Wired's Kim Zetter, who wrote a strong rebuttal of the anti-encryption brigade's controlled and often contradictory rhetoric, pointed to vague comments made by incumbent CIA director John Brennan, who said on Monday: "There are a lot of technological capabilities that are available right now that make it exceptionally difficult, both technically as well as legally, for intelligence and security services to have the insight they need to uncover it. I do think this is a time for particularly Europe, as well as here in the United States, for us to take a look and see whether or not there have been some inadvertent or intentional gaps that have been created in the ability of intelligence and security services to protect the people that they are asked to serve."

Everything as a Service (XaaS) Case Studies in the New IoT Economy

With wide acceptance and large-scale adoption of cloud solutions, the race is on to innovate new products and services at all levels. Each year, hundreds of innovative companies will quickly bring services and applications to market, delivered on established cloud platforms. The cloud facilitates rapid development by making it possible to integrate technologies easily across a platform. There’s no need to reinvent the wheel for all types of functionality needed to support a new service delivery. Instead, businesses are able to concentrate on developing disruptive technology to meet a specific business or industry need, while partnering with other cloud companies to handle things on the backend, such as billing, accounting, order management, or customer relations.

Electromagnetic Pulse weapons could knock enterprises offline

The effect would be that the enterprise would be immediately shutdown and become inoperable. “Anything to do with circuit boards and electronic technology would be blown out unless it is hardened,” says Fleming. Hardened electronics require features such as heavy wiring and additional capacitors to withstand the EMPs and absorb the energy enough to at least come back up after the attack. Since to date EMP attacks have been highly unlikely, such expensive electronics hardening is extremely uncommon even though the impact of an EMP attack would be severe. The nation’s defenses are secure. NORAD has taken preventive measures to protect its technology.

FTC Scrutinizes Cross-Device Tracking, Possible Privacy Issues

Modern online tracking techniques make the browser cookie look "pretty wonderful," said Joseph Lorenzo Hall, chief technologist and director of the Internet Architecture Project at the Center for Democracy & Technology, at a Federal Trade Commission workshop on cross-device tracking. Hall pointed to audio beacons as an example of an advertising technology that makes past privacy debates about cookies seem quaint by comparison. Audio beacons play ultrasonic sounds when an ad appears on a smartphone, computer, or TV, to communicate that event covertly to nearby devices running software designed to listen for such signals. They represent the ad industry's latest attempt to develop reliable ways to track people online.

Effective cyber risk management: An integrated approach

Even though ‘getting hacked’ may seem inevitable, by taking an integrated approach to risk management, cybersecurity risk can be effectively managed. The risk process must be ongoing and iterative, and not a one-time, infrequent, or ‘check the-box’ activity. Not only must the right stakeholders be engaged at the right levels within an organization, but the right automated tools and processes must also be in place to support risk decision-making and monitoring. It’s important to note that accountability does not lie with just one person (e.g. the chief information officer (CIO) or chief information security officer (CISO)); only an integrated approach to risk management will ensure that a company’s cybersecurity risk is managed effectively.”

How to create successful business intelligence – A supply chain approach to Big Data

From a technology standpoint, in order to deliver BI that can quickly adapt to the changing needs of the business a new approach to how data is delivered is required. A new concept that is gaining traction in the business world is viewing data delivery as akin to a supply chain. Currently this is not how most data is accessed and delivered. At the moment, data architectures tend to be hierarchical and facilitated by process. In order to accelerate data delivery, a linear approach is required, essentially the creation of a data and insights supply chain to the business. Current business intelligence systems are most often used to report on the historical state of the business as opposed to being used for demand planning.

Preparing IT systems and organizations for the Internet of Things

The transition from a traditional enterprise IT architecture to one optimized for the Internet of Things will not be easy. Elements of companies’ current technology stacks may need to be redesigned so they can support billions of interdependent processing events per year from millions of products, devices, and applications. Because networked devices are always on, companies must be able to react to customer and system requests in real time; agile software development and delivery will therefore become a critical competency. Seamless connectivity will also become a must-have, as will collaboration across IT and business units, which have traditionally been siloed. Moreover, companies must be able to securely and efficiently collect, analyze, and store the data emerging from these refined IT architectures.

Quote for the day:

"Action is not about talking. It's about how you are listened to." -- Bob Dunham

November 16, 2015

Encryption is not the enemy: A 21st century response to terror

Any time a back door or a pre-built vulnerability is left in a system (let's say, like our phone operating systems), it weakens everyone's safety. Sure, it might give some governments a temporary advantage, but it's far more likely that hackers and terrorists themselves will use these vulnerabilities to further cause damage to citizens or, at the very least, steal their personal and financial data. And lest any policy-makers reading this think, "Well, it'll be safe because we'll safeguard the keys," let me point out the elephant in the room: the United States Office of Personnel Management (OPM) was systematically penetrated and deflowered to such a complete and damaging degree that the actual fingerprints of U.S. government officials with high-level security clearances were exfiltrated with the alacrity of water entering a submarine with a screen door.

Inside Mark Zukerberg's Bold Plan for the Future of Facebook

"There are different ways to do innovation," he says, drawing a stark contrast without ever mentioning Page, Google, or Alphabet. "You can plant a lot of seeds, not be committed to any particular one of them, but just see what grows. And this really isn’t how we’ve approached this. We go mission-first, then focus on the pieces we need and go deep on them, and be committed to them." Facebook’s mission is "to give everyone in the world the power to share and make the world more open and connected," as Zuckerberg says, explaining that he is now spending a third of his time overseeing these future initiatives. "These things can’t fail. We need to get them to work in order to achieve the mission."

Apple says the iPad Pro is built for business

Business and creative functions such as graphics design and photo and video editing aren’t exactly foreign to Apple’s tablet, but new accessories, apps and the additional data the iPad Pro’s larger screen accommodates, enable you to accomplish more of the work you’re likely to be conducting on computers today. The iPad Pro is a bridge into a new way of operating, says an Apple spokesman. The company tells CIO.com its goal is to give you tools that cause you to rethink how a touch-enabled environment might apply to you and the way you work. The device won’t meet the needs of all businesses and their respective employees’ preferences, of course, but the company says advancements in the iPad Pro will give workers a new opportunity to reflect on what they use for work and whether the new iPad is a fit for their work life.

8 Biggest Cloud Mistakes Companies Make

According to a recent report by Harvard Business Review and Verizon, 84% of the IT and business executives polled said their use of cloud had increased in the past year, with 39% reporting it increased significantly. Another 40% said the cloud had increased their revenue, and 36% said it had increased their profit margin. These figures are sure to rise as more businesses discover the benefits of moving to the cloud, including lower capital and operating costs for data centers and improved application performance and resiliency. In addition, cloud usage is expanding to the nuts and bolts of IT operations, instead of an experimental thing. While initial cloud implementations focused on areas such as application development and sales force automation, more organizations now are exploring cloud for core business systems like supply-chain management and industry-specific services, such as financial applications or transportation management.

Analytics for Innovation: Why You Need to Read the External Signals

The market is moving faster than ever: consumer preferences are more dynamic, the rate of global innovation and technological development is incessant, and our current information methods can’t keep up with it. New players are threatening the status quo: Apple makes watches, Apparel companies are building wearable sensors, technology companies are building automobiles. Colliding worlds mean that traditional approaches to establishing market leadership and maintaining competitive advantage just aren’t working. ... Keurig got to the right product requirements eventually that hit on the major points – but now they are waiting on this in delay mode. Intelligence from external signals, up front, could have helped them avoid catastrophe in the first place, and more quickly bring them to the next opportunity that would address what consumers wanted.

Fact or Fiction? Reversing your PIN can call the police in an emergency

This urban legend is over a decade old and consistently makes it’s rounds on the Internet. Surprisingly, a lot of social media users care so much about this topic that they continually share this old tale with their friends, urging them to READ IT RIGHT AWAY! As it goes with all urban legends, there is a grain of truth in this myth. The idea of ’emergency code’ for ATMs had been hatched some time ago and is obviously where the myth originated. ... While it might save the victim’s money on the card, the method cannot take into account the behavior of the criminal. For example what if the enraged criminal hurts or kills the victim? Does this make the cost too high a price to pay? After all, the police might also not be on time to prevent the crime, so what’s the point then?

Create a data security culture to keep data safe

Sadly, there have been so many projects and deadlines that the organisation has given up keeping track of how every last piece of radioactive material is handled. Surely to track it all would be impossible anyway? In either case, most of the “legacy” is kept in a huge man-made lake outside. Nobody really knows what is in there. Those who do flag the hazards and suggest protections are routinely ignored or worse. Enter your “comprehensive enterprise programme”. You’ve bought checklists with hundreds of predefined handling policies from outside experts. You’ve created a small team of dedicated personnel to audit and track every action for every employee on-site.

The Role of Specifications in Agile

That shared understanding and empathy for the target customer unlocks hidden bandwidth for product owners. They can focus on higher-level requirements and leave implementation details to the development team, who is fully equipped to do so – again, because of that shared understanding. ... User stories are the form that specifications take. Each user story is created in advance and placed in a backlog, but only the small set of the very next stories are flesh out in detail. Then, the level of detail is very high. Designs are included at this stage, and so are detailed descriptions of fine grained behavior like validation, individual errors messages, etc. Though the PM owns the user story, the team itself generates the detail through a processes called grooming.

Cyberspies inject victim profiling and tracking scripts in strategic websites

"We believe that the computer profiling data gathered by the WITCHCOVEN script, combined with the evercookie that persistently identifies a unique user, can -- when combined with basic browser data available from HTTP logs -- be used by cyber threat actors to identify users of interest, and narrowly target those individuals with exploits specifically tailored to vulnerabilities in their computer system," the FireEye researchers said in their report. The company has not detected any follow-up exploitation attempts against its customers so far, but this could be because the attackers use a highly targeted approach to victim selection. The subsequent exploits could be embedded in malicious documents attached to email spear phishing messages and not necessarily be served through a browser.

How to Build A Culture Primed to Perform

Here’s the kicker though: not all “whys” are created equal, and too often, cultures are designed to motivate using the destructive “whys.” Our answer is not only elegantly simple, but also empirically powerful. Using our total motivation framework, we’ve measured the motives of over 20,000 people at more than 50 major institutions. We’ve observed an incredibly strong relationship between their culture and performance metrics like sales and customer experience. In one study, employees with high levels of total motivation (or ToMo for short) generated 38% more in revenues than their low ToMo counterparts. Culture is an entirely quantifiable and engineerable asset—and the most important one. ToMo gives leaders the tools to unlock the highest levels of performance in their people and company.

Quote for the day:

"Bring the best of your authentic self to every opportunity." -- Brian Jantsch

November 15, 2015

Sick of apps, mice and menus? Finland's Solu might have an answer

It involves an all-you-can-eat software subscription and near unlimited storage. It is also blending Mozilla's HTML5-led approach with Firefox OS -- which it hoped to draw web developers to its open mobile platform -- and the path trodden by BlackBerry and Jolla, which developed their own OSes but equipped them to run Android apps. "We have a revenue-sharing model for our subscription a bit like Spotify, which is whenever people use your applications we pass on that subscription to the developers. This means that developers get money even by accident -- for example by users collaborating," Lawson said.

A Lifelong Learner’s Path from Library Science to Data Science

Kurt recognized that the entry level to math and software “is really boring, really difficult, and doesn’t have a lot of reward,” but he believes that: “one of the most dangerous things is the ingrained sense that I don’t know math, and can’t. The irony is when you look at the upper level advanced stuff in math, the skills needed are related to creative skills. The danger then becomes that the barriers of the tech industry keep the wrong people out. Poking at what’s happening and trying to find something more interesting about it fits both the mathematical and the creative mindset.”

OPNFV Won’t Be a Product

As to why OPNFV was even formed when there were already so many open source groups, Sen said NFV “brings stuff from all the other open source efforts. When we started, we thought we were building one platform, but it’s really a framework where you have a lot of choices.” Chris Wright, chief technologist with Red Hat, said network users’ expectations are being set by Internet companies where orders are self-service and immediate. “Tomorrow’s network is software-centric, with apps that scale out on-demand,” he said. However, network environments are much more complex than many of these Internet companies that have raised the bar.

CIOs receive low marks on IT reform report card

"This scorecard is not intended to be a juridical, prescriptive exercise. It should not be considered a scarlet letter on the back of a federal agency," says Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.). "It is," he says, "an initial assessment, a point-in-time snapshot, much like the quarterly report card one might get from the university or at a school. The intent isn't to punish or stigmatize -- it is in fact to exhort and urge agencies to seize this opportunity and use the scorecard as a management tool to better guide decision making and investments within the agency." "To me the real measure will be six months or a year from now, did we really move the needle on these things?" says U.S. CIO Tony Scott.

Strong data security is not optional

A truly game-changing ruling in Remijas v. Neiman Marcus has made it easier for consumers to sue companies after breaches involving their personal data. Historically, even when sensitive information such as credit card numbers, birth dates, government ID numbers and medical records have been accessed, it’s been hard for consumers to sue companies over the breach. Companies have typically been able to avoid these lawsuits by invoking a Supreme Court case,Clapper v. Amnesty International. The case, which was about phone records and national security, required a showing of a risk of “imminent” and “concrete” injury in order to have standing to bring suit.

How social media can help employees perform better.

When someone connects with people who share similar perspectives and relationships to their own, those new connections typically don’t offer new insights or alternative viewpoints that person couldn’t have accessed before. The natural tendency to be drawn to people similar to yourself can create an “echo chamber,” which can lead to network structures that are detrimental to individual and organizational performance. Enterprise social networking platforms may be better able to offer features that counteract or overcome of our typical social tendencies. Social networking platforms can provide features that allow users to overcome these inherent limitations in our natural networking tendencies, allowing people to develop and maintain networks more beneficial to an organization’s purpose and to their own performance.

7 Key Risks All Businesses Should Manage (But Often Don’t)

Risk is inherent in doing business. The best way to fail is never to take any risks. But there are two kinds of risks: the kind you take consciously to move your company forward, and the kind that sneak up on you and pounce when you’re not looking. The latter are the kind companies must actively manage to avoid being wiped out. When it comes to managing risks, many companies prepare for natural disasters, fire, or maybe theft prevention (even though many small ones don’t even do that), but I think there are bigger risks companies of all sizes should manage. If you have a plan for what to do in case of physical emergency, you should also plan for ...

Claimed Breakthrough Slays Classic Computing Problem; Encryption Could Be Next

Computer scientists measure the difficulty of a problem by looking at how much the computational resources an algorithm needs to solve it grow as the size of the initial problem is increased. Graph isomorphism is considered extremely difficult because the best known algorithm needs roughly exponentially more resources as the size of the graphs it was working on increases. That algorithm was published in 1983 by Babai with Eugene Luks of the University of Oregon. Babai claims that his new algorithm experiences a much less punishingly steep increase in resources as the graphs it is working on get larger, giving graph isomorphism a major difficulty downgrade.

A New Architecture for Information Systems

Just as we can describe a new system, we can also assume a new architecture. Today’s systems architects deliver a crucial business function—carefully planning the relationships between nodes that include networked devices, software, services, and data in the context of business activities. The artifact from these activities typically takes the form of areference architecture. As such, information architecture activities relate equally to the concepts, contexts, language, and intents that foster UX planning, or architecture, activities that articulate a strategy and roadmap for digital user engagement. As businesses and technologists embrace digital transformation and digital experience as vital strategic paradigms, they must mature their digital initiatives by extending their notion of the system to include the thoughtful consideration of information architecture and customers’ digital experience.

Google Cloud gains security for Docker containers

From a security standpoint, though, it's a challenge to tell whether the containers have any vulnerabilities or if there are issues with how the application is being developed. ... Twistlock's Container Security Suite scans the applications both in image registries and in runtime to detect vulnerabilities present in the Linux distribution, application frameworks, and custom-developed application code. It also has activity monitoring and smart profiling capabilities to detect misconfigurations and malicious activities and to take appropriate action, such as blocking the containers from launching and killing misbehaving containers dynamically. The suite can also apply enterprise access control policies to the container environment.

Quote for the day:

"Be clear about your goal but be flexible about the process of achieving it." -- Brian Tracy

November 14, 2015

How Cloud Computing Changes Storage Tiering

New challenges in controlling data traversing the data center and the cloud have emerged. How do we handle replication? How do we ensure data integrity? How do we optimally utilize storage space within our cloud model? The challenge is translating the storage-efficiency technology that’s already been created for the data center — things like deduplication, thin provisioning, and data tiering — for the cloud. ... cloud computing adds an extra tier. “Cloud introduces another storage tier which, for example, allows for moving data to an off-premise location for archival, backups, or the elimination of off-site infrastructure for disaster recovery,” he said. “This, when combined with virtual DR data center, can create a very robust cloud-ready data tier.”

3 Tips for Managing a Boss You Don't Even Like

“You don’t have to love your boss but you need to be able to work well with them. One of the main reasons employees leave their job is because of their boss. A troubled relationship with your boss can negatively affect your morale, your productivity, your happiness, and of course, your career. A positive relationship can improve your morale, productivity and happiness which could lead to more career success in the form of promotions, raises and higher self-esteem.” Everyone can contribute to the workplace happiness, which means that much too often, no-one does.

Big Data and Social Listening

The purposes behind social listening are simple: To extract unsolicited opinion, to gather real world case studies, and to examine sentiment about products and services. For example, a company that makes smartwatches wants to know what its competition has done correctly, where the flaws are in its products, and how consumers feel that the products could be improved upon. The company wants to gather opinions, ratings, reviews, and sentiments about competitor’s smartwatches before investing time and money into a product that has no advantages over current offerings. To gather this information manually would put the company out of the proper release cycle and perhaps make the product obsolete by the time it debuts.

Service design thinking

This move towards service design thinking is not even necessarily an adjunct of the digital movement - better service design need not involve technology at all, but instead brings a long-absent focus on the users of public services and their needs in place of the internal imperatives of the providing organisations. Pioneering initiatives from the "The Public Office" in 2007 to the joint seminar series on "Innovating Through Design in Public Services"hosted by the London School of Economics Public Policy Group and the Design Council in 2010-11 highlighted some of the art of the possible. At last, some of that thinking finally seems to be entering the mainstream.

You Don’t Have to Choose Between ‘Big Data’ and ‘IoT’

With the technologies that are at our disposal today, we can attempt way more than we were able to in the past. In fact, we now can uncover problems that we didn’t know we had. The key is to examine each process that makes a difference to the business and ask questions that challenge the status quo – it is important to imagine new ways of doing current tasks and to ponder the possibility of doing things we always wished we could do but didn’t have a way of doing. To those out there who are trying to decide where to spend their IT budget, don’t get trapped in the mindset that you have to consider a “big data” or an “IoT” initiative. Make the call solely on the merits of the problem at hand and make a commitment to using the most capable technology platform out there.

Agile, DevOps and Cloud, 1 + 1 + 1 can equal more than 3

Where agile breaks the barriers in development, DevOps (development and operations) integrates operations. It industrializes the process of creating software and gets it into production. Webopedia defines DevOps X as a phrase in enterprise software development used to mean a type of agile relationship between development and IT operations. The goal of DevOps is to change and improve the relationship by advocating better communication and collaboration between the two business units. ... Cloud enables the developer to provision his development environment at the touch of a button. When he logs on, he’s provided with a number of development environment options. He chooses the one most applicable for the job and has it provisioned quickly. His advantage is that he doesn’t need to construct his development environment any further.

The seven people you need on your data team

You’ve been asked to start a data team to extract valuable customer insights from your product usage, improve your company’s marketing effectiveness, or make your boss look all “data-savvy” (hopefully not just the last one of these). And even better, you’ve been given carte blanche to go hire the best people! But now the panic sets in – who do you hire? Here’s a handy guide to the seven people you absolutely have to have on your data team. ... The one I have in mind is a team that takes raw data from various sources and turns it into valuable insights that can be shared broadly across the organization. This team needs to understand both the technologies used to manage data, and the meaning of the data – a pretty challenging remit, and one that needs a pretty well-balanced team to execute.

Building a Recommendation Engine with Spark ML on Amazon EMR using Zeppelin

Spark is commonly used for iterative machine learning algorithms at scale. Furthermore, Spark includes a library with common machine learning algorithms, MLlib, which can be easily leveraged in a Spark application. For an example, see the "Large-Scale Machine Learning with Spark on Amazon EMR" post on the AWS Big Data Blog. Spark succeeds where traditional MapReduce approach fails, making it easy to develop and execute iterative algorithms. Many ML algorithms are based on iterative optimization, which makes Spark a great platform for implementing them. Other open-source alternatives for building ML models are either relatively slow, such as Mahout using Hadoop MapReduce, or limited in their scale, such as Weka or R.

Microsoft open sources Distributed Machine Learning Toolkit

The toolkit, available now on GitHub, is designed for distributed machine learning -- using multiple computers in parallel to solve a complex problem. It contains a parameter server-based programing framework, which makes machine learning tasks on big data highly scalable, efficient and flexible. It also contains two distributed machine learning algorithms, which can be used to train the fastest and largest topic model and the largest word-embedding model in the world. The toolkit offers rich and easy-to-use APIs to reduce the barrier of distributed machine learning, so researchers and developers can focus on core machine learning tasks like data, model and training.

The Biggest Misconception About Information Security

Technologies are used to protect information and ensure its confidentiality, integrity and availability. But according to a recent survey by the Ponemon Institute on “Risk & Innovation in Cybersecurity Investments,” 90% of respondents said their organization invested in a technology that was ultimately discontinued or scrapped before or soon after deployment. In other words, these technology investments become “shelfware” which means they sit on the shelf instead of being properly implemented or utilized. There are a variety of reasons to explain this shelfware phenomenon but they predominantly boil down to people and process issues. Some organizations lack the resources to properly staff and support their technologies, a problem that many are able to solve through the use of Managed Security Services.

Quote for the day:

"Strength comes from overcoming adversity, not avoiding it." -- Gordon Tredgold