January 31, 2014

How Geospatial Data Can Enrich Your Customer Experience and Drive Revenue
Geospatial analysis offers many possibilities for organisations. It can be used to show social media activity on a map during an environmental crisis. Mapping tweets, posts or blogs to a certain location can help relief workers know where they have to be. For example, during Hurricane Irene, which struck the American East Coast in 2011, many of such tools where used to gain a better picture of the damage that had been done by the hurricane.


The Future of Personal Entertainment, In Your Face
So what makes the Glyph special? Avegant says it’s the headset’s image projection method, which reflects light onto each retina through a series of lenses and tiny mirrors and makes for sharper, easier-to-watch images than using a screen, as many competing products like Oculus Rift do. Its ability to mimic depth certainly makes it particularly good at showing natural-looking 3-D content.


Rise of Open Source Technologies in Middle East
Open source customization is one of the trendiest technologies, these days in order to bring up the imagination and unique ideas into real action. Open source technology is one such software and IT related technology which has changed the course of business and industry over there in Middle East and the biggest nation getting influenced from this is Dubai. Open source consultants Dubai have become the one of the greatest hub around the world today to look for quality assured yet highly pocket friendly open source services.


Why Line of Business Managers Hate IT (and How ITaaS Can Change That)
To this day, in many companies, there is a rift between IT and LoB departments. It starts with physical separation. When they’re not working from home, LoB employees work in cubicles or (more recently) shared open spaces geared toward collaboration. When they’re not working at home, IT employees are likely to dwell in the basement or other windowless location, behind locked doors. Such physical separation leaves little opportunity for spontaneous cross-departmental discussion.


Winning the Talent Game: How Gamification Is Impacting Business and HR
Gamification applications are most effective when they are customized to various industries and their specific needs. For example, some firms leverage their employee base by creating recruitment “ambassadors” and lead generators by conducting gamified events across campuses. This achieves all the benefits of crowdsourcing as well as creates an effective brand for the organization. Gamified new hire programs are personalized, engaging and often convey a creativity within an organization.


What You Really Need to Know about Artificial Intelligence
For those who started their careers in AI and left in disillusionment (Andrew Ng confessed to this, yet jumped back in) or data scientists today, the consensus is often that artificial intelligence is just a new fancy marketing term for good old predictive analytics. They point to the reality of Apple’s Siri to listen and respond to requests as adequate but more often frustrating. Or, IBM Watson’s win on Jeopardy as data loading and brute force programming. Their perspective, real value is the pragmatic logic of the predictive analytics we have.


The Why, How, and Where of moving to the Cloud
Once you have answered the “Why” and “How” of your Cloud journey you will have a fair idea of where the organization is. For any successful journey, it is important to know the starting point and destination in order to develop a path that considers all factors before embarking on the journey. It also helps you in other important decisions that you will need to make along the way to ensure that you have considered all of the factors and are on track with where the organization is heading. Here are a few pointers to ensure that you are on track to taking the organization in the right direction with the transition to the Cloud.


A Virtual Bill of Rights is Needed to Guard Our Data
Chances are that all such attempts to legislate will be superseded as new forms of information gathering and analysis develop. One only has to look at the number of cameras being installed on next-generation cars, or the fears around utilities using smart grids to switch off energy without the home-owner's consent, to appreciate some of the difficulties which lie ahead. The debate becomes even more complex when metadata (data about data, such as phone call records), data aggregation and anonymising are taken into consideration.


Delegated Authority: An Agile Trust Experiment
For my part, just the act of thinking about what is important to me allows me to let go of some areas of responsibility that I might otherwise have gripped tightly. As issues come up, I am constantly thinking about this contract and my role in the decision-making process. For the team, they recognized that this is a living document. They're already thinking about ways to improve or change it. Before this experiment, we had individuals named as technical leads for our different technologies.


Federal IT Procurement Reform Proposed
Obama administration officials argue that efforts to reform federal IT management, through the administration's "Cloud First" initiative and PortfolioStat IT investment review process have already saved billions of dollars and improved the way agencies acquire and manage commodity hardware and software. They also point to efforts, such as the President's Open Data initiatives, that are making government data more transparent and accessible, and meeting with experts to capitalize on IT innovations.



Quote for the day:

"Success is the prize for those who stand true to their ideas!" -- Josh S. Hinds

January 30, 2014

The real measure of Agile success
Another factor spreading Agile practices beyond software development is the movement of millennial generation employees into the work place, said Diana Larsen, a partner at Agile consultancy FutureWorks, in Portland, OR. "They are a lot more comfortable working collaboratively." As a result, many Agile practices come naturally to them. "They want to check in on a daily basis and get feedback early," she said.


Mass e-surveillance project set for launch
The Centre’s highly advanced telecom and Internet surveillance project — the Central Monitoring System (CMS) — is in its final stage of deployment. Yet, there has been no word on the legal and procedural framework under which the country’s security agencies can track phone calls, voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) and e-mails in real time. In seven of the 11 states covered in the first phase, the Centre for Development of Telematics (C-DoT) — a government agency — has already installed the equipment for this massive snooping programme


IBM's suggestions for mid-market cloud security
Since cloud computing is based upon today's complex IT infrastructure it would be very wise to make sure company business and IT decision makers are speaking with one voice and thinking with one mindbefore contracts are signed and the company begins using a cloud computing solution. Decision makers who don't understand this technology should not be making purchasing and implementation decisions without the help of those who do.


IT services firm ITC Infotech on data analytics in retail
One of the biggest challenges that retailers will face in 2014 is the fear of losing their customers, as well as winning new ones, in a very competitive business environment. To address these challenges more and more companies will make aggressive investments in technology to gather intelligence about the buying trends and experiences of their customers. The most exciting area of growth is expected to be the use of data analytics as companies try to understand real time consumer buying patterns and behaviours.


Cyber security quest strong in UK, says Isaca
“It has provided an opportunity for information security professionals to engage with their organisations about the implications of data leaks and how to do proper risk assessments,” he said. It has also raised fresh questions about what the role of chief information security officers (CISOs) should entail, where they should sit in an organisation, and how they should be relevant to an organisation. “One of the interesting things that some UK organisations are already doing is ensuring that the CISO role is not just a senior role, but moving forward from being reactive to being proactive,” said Stroud.


Sync Your Files without Trusting the Cloud
Klinker says Bittorrent Sync shows how popular applications of the Internet can be designed in a way that gives people control of their own data, despite prevailing trends. “Pick any app on the Web today, it could be Twitter, e-mail, search, and it has been developed in a very centralized way—those businesses are built around centralizing information on their servers,” he says. “I’m trying to put more power in the hands of the end user and less in the hands of these companies and other centralizing authorities.”


Data Governance: A Critical Starting Point in Addressing the Challenges of UDI Compliance
Data governance provides a structured approach to managing changes to core, shared business data. Without a governance program in place, the organization runs the risk that the changes initiated during the course of UDI compliance will negatively impact the quality, accuracy, usability or availability of the data used by the rest of the organization. Conversely, a solid governance program can facilitate the data, process and application changes needed to comply with unique device identification. It can also accelerate an existing UDI initiative.


Flash your way to better VMware performance
By consolidating server-side flash into a single shared flash cluster, PernixData FVP leverages many small flash investments into a large I/O improvement. Installation is quick and easy, and it doesn't even require a reboot of the hosts. PernixData FVP comes in SMB and Standard versions. The SMB version is $9,999 for up to four hosts and 100 VMs. The standard edition is $7,500 per host with no restrictions on the number of hosts or virtual machines.


Storage Innovations Bring Unparalleled Capacity Opportunities
Most recently, hard drive manufacturers have turned to helium to help continue to improve storage economics. Until recently, hard drives all had regular, everyday air inside the enclosure. Today, some hard drives are actually filled with helium, which is much lighter than air. As a result, as the disk spins and the heads are dragged through the enclosure, there is much less drag, which can mean better performance.


Software process: Guiding principles in a perfect world
Wilson offered his thoughts on the role of testers in a DevOps-oriented organization. But what emerged from our discussion was a broader, big-picture view of how the software development process should work—or could work if organizations were willing to rethink it and make needed changes. Here are my guiding principles for improving the software development process in 2014, based on ideas shared by Compuware's Wilson.



Quote for the day:

"What gets measured gets done. If you don't measure morale, you wind up taking it for granted." -- Jack Stack

January 29, 2014

VPN bypass vulnerability affects Android Jelly Bean and KitKat
A malicious app can exploit the newly identified Android vulnerability to bypass an active VPN connection and route all data communications from the device to a network address controlled by an attacker, the Ben-Gurion University researchers said Monday in a blog post. "These communications are captured in CLEAR TEXT (no encryption), leaving the information completely exposed. This redirection can take place while leaving the user completely oblivious, believing the data is encrypted and secure."


Crafting a data lifecycle management strategy to control capacity
As with data being classified, ILM also requires storage to be classified. Storage arrays offering specialty features such as fast access or slower access but low cost per-GB, or that offer special data protection services such as mirroring, replication or continuous data protection, can be given their own target classification, thereby providing discrete destinations for data writes and data moves.


When Design Best Practices Become Performance Worst Practices
It conforms to known design and usability best practices, and your testers loved it in the lab. You push the design to your live site and the results are … well, a little disappointing. Not terrible, but your conversion rate hasn’t made the leap you expected. Why? You’ve done everything by the book, but perhaps the book is missing a chapter or two. Chances are, you’ve accidentally made one of three common design mistakes, and these mistakes have affected how your pages load, which ultimately hurts page views, bounce rate, conversions, and pretty much every business metric you care about.


India Ranked 7th in Attacks by Trojans in Banking
The Internet among many things has made our daily activities very convenient, especially when it is percolated to mobile devices. Among other activities consumers now prefer ‘armchair banking’ where banking transactions are carried out easily. However, attackers who are financially motivated, target these online banking services and financial institutions by leveraging advanced Trojans to commit large scale financial fraud.


Leading by Taking a Step Back
We aspire to do more, dream more, learn more, and become more, and for better or worse, the traditional wisdom has been that we need to accomplish more in order to get more. But for many, experience, trial and error says differently. We pile on more projects, goals and objectives and lose sight of the one unifying vision that defines us as a company and as leaders. So how can leaders learn to step back and only move forward by putting one foot in front of the other at a time? How do we avoid becoming task managers and get back to being leaders? When everyone is “leaning in” to get ahead, does it make sense to “lean out” for a change?


Big Data's Opportunity for Information Optimization
Businesses are always looking for ways to grow and to streamline their operations. These two goals can come into conflict because as organizations become larger it becomes more complicated to be agile and efficient. To help them understand and modify their processes, businesses can derive insights from analytics applied to their data. Today that data is available not only in the enterprise and cloud computing environments but also from the Internet. To collect, process and analyze it all is a challenge, one that an increasing number of organizations are meeting through the use of big data technologies.


BYOD and the Internet of Things bring unique challenges for hospital CIOs
Both of these trends offer special security and interoperability challenges for hospitals. Developers are still working on how to merge this data with the various electronic medical records (EMRs) in use, but that’s the easy part. Data security is the more difficult issue. Not only do you need to ensure that unauthorized people do not access the network via any of these devices, you need to ensure security in transmission of the data. Again, this is a scenario that would (or at least should) create a high level of concern for any CIO.


Executives debate need for the CIO title
When it comes to appointing an organization's IT strategy leader, how important is it to dub that person the CIO? In the absence of a CIO title, does the title of IT director carry the same weight? Technology experts debated these questions and more during the recent "CEO/CIO Marriage Proposal" panel at the American Society of Association Executives (ASAE) Technology Conference in Washington, D.C.


Kanban’s service orientation agenda
Service orientation with Kanban starts with viewing the organization through the Kanban “lens” of service delivery, work flow and knowledge discovery. Typically, this begins with the identification of customer needs, expectations and frustrations, matched to the corresponding capabilities and frustrations of internal systems. The tools of the sustainability agenda (visualization, WIP controls, feedback loops, and so on) are then applied with a deliberate end-to-end emphasis, extending to the customer both upstream and downstream.


Get Ready, It's the Year for Big Data Heists
These security breaches were all different but had a common cause: negligence. Although the technology and techniques to protect data, or at least to make life more difficult for hackers, have been around for years, companies and their customers mostly assumed that data theft was something that happened to other people. They need to start getting wise. The U.S. retail attacks are part of a recent trend, reported by the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, in which the hackers (or "adversaries," as the company describes them) target point-of-sale devices in which physical credit cards are swiped.



Quote for the day:

"An inventor is simply a fellow who doesn't take his education too seriously" -- C. Kettering

January 28, 2014

The Internet of Things might not be what you're hoping for
The problem that we now face is that the internet into which IoT is being born is philosophically very different to the internet into which the web was born. The internet of twenty-plus years ago and prior was a place of free love and open standards. It all came from academia where commercial pressures were low. As we moved into the era where internet connectivity onto PCs was the norm -- I usually take this to be related to the introduction of Windows 95 -- what we as a society has done with the internet has had an uneasy relationship with this "free love", uncommercial philosophy.


Measuring the Impact of Social, Economic, and Technological Factors on Cybersecurity
Interestingly, the model found a paradox that stems from the modernization of information and communications technology. While increased Internet access and more mature technological development is correlated with improvement in cybersecurity at the global level, it has the opposite effect among countries with developing economies and lower levels of technological development. For example, as Broadband Penetration increases, Maximizers (countries that are more technologically mature) experience a decrease in malware, while Seeker countries (that are less technologically mature) experience an increase in malware.


Data-driven troubles
"Some time ago the company I work in decided to change one system with another. We wrote the new system and it was time for testing. In general at the first stage the new system must do the same things as the old one. We had a lot of tests for old system, so we decided to reuse these tests. The point was that the same test should be executed for both systems."


How and why to check port 32764 on your router
There are roughly 64,000 ports that are not tested by ShieldsUP. One of them is 32764. On a LAN, testing all 65,535 ports is a more do-able thing. Recently Eloi Vanderbecken did just that on his home network and turned up something interesting. His Linksys WAG 200G router responded to the virtual knock on the front door for port 32,764. The port was open and the router itself (not a computer on his LAN) was processing data sent to it.


Service Complexity And the Perils of Productization
Complexity can be a good thing. But when it comes to servicing customers, it is generally accepted that complexity reduces satisfaction. In other words, the proliferation of products in many service-based organizations prevents them from staying true to who they are—a service company. Service vision becomes clouded and the overall strategy is no longer clear to employees or customers. Modern banks simply have too many products and services for front-line staff to understand and properly explain to a customer.


Cisco aims to be cloud connector in hybrid data centers
Strategically, InterCloud may be the most interesting item for Cisco. If successful, InterCloud puts Cisco in the middle of the network and cloud connections on a software basis. Licensing models are still being worked out. If Cisco can make InterCloud a dominant software defined networking platform it'll have more licensing revenue and the profit margins that go with it. Meanwhile, InterCloud is designed to work with any server or switch, said Gori. Naturally, there will be more features enabled with Cisco's software and hardware combined.


Security testing basics: QA professionals take the lead
Having test professionals assume some responsibility for security testing basics is important for two reasons. First, application security is a growing concern for all software and test organizations as security breaches continue to make headline news. Second, getting testers involved can help solve a problem that plagues most software development organizations today, said Payne. "Where in the application lifecycle does security testing fit?"


Suspected email hackers for hire charged in four countries
Three other U.S. residents were charged with misdemeanor offenses for hiring email hackers from foreign countries. John Ross Jesensky, 30, of Northridge, Calif., is believed to have paid $21,675 to a Chinese website to get e-mail account passwords. Laith Nona, 31, of Troy, Michigan, and Arthur Drake, 55, of Bronx, N.Y., are suspected to have paid $1,081 and $1,011 respectively for similar services. The five defendants are expected to plead guilty in the coming weeks, the U.S. Attorney's Office said.


Big Data Influences More Long-Term Storage
The pursuit of big data has led to an increase of companies keeping older files they would have previously discarded, confirms Scott Gillespie, expert on regulations and compliance and senior VP of business analysis at Quadron Data Solutions. There is a six-year retention requirement of client account data, he explains. Account records, trades, holdings, profile information, goals and objectives and so on fall into this category. There are three reasons these records, which have historically been discarded with regularity, are now starting to stick around.


Agile with Guts - A pragmatic guide to value-driven development
You want to deliver valuable software with iterative delivery. There might be dozens of stakeholders with dozens of definition of value. How do you ensure you are both “building the right thing” and “building the thing right”? Suppose you are increasing your productivity, you might be building the wrong product faster. This book describes how a large organization uses techniques to focus on the right product and to deeply anchor the idea that less output can deliver more outcomes.



Quote for the day:

"The supreme quality for leadership is unquestionable integrity." -- Dwight D. Eisenhower

January 27, 2014

NSA surveillance revelations could lead to data collection policy
What one hopes it won't do is impede innovation. Sure, the data collection we see every day in things like targeted coupons and targeted advertisements can have a rather high creepiness quotient. But there's much good that big data collection can do. Examples abound -- from analyzing Tweets to understand smoking habits to collecting meter data to optimize the grid to improving automation. That's as long as the analytics end of the equations are sound.


The ROI of Data Governance
Many organizations have found success by “thinking globally and acting locally.” Sometimes referred to as guerilla governance, this may not be the fast path, but is likely the pragmatic path to enterprise data governance. This is not a shortcut – there’s no substitute for the broad-based communication, collaboration, coordination, executive sponsorship and investment required to obtain sustainable governance. It’s merely a way to align with the principles and practices of data governance and obtain some small, quick wins cheaply to build the evidence and confidence required to support greater investment.


Would NFC smartphones have helped at Target?
The answer is complicated and political, primarily because there are questions over who is liable for a data breach -- the retailers or the financial institutions and their associated card processing companies such as Visa and MasterCard. It is also expensive to install point-of-sale (POS) terminals in millions of retail locations and at ATMs that can read chips on the newer contactless cards, as well an NFC signal from a smartphone. It also doesn't help that Apple hasn't included NFC chips in its popular iPhones. "Apple's refusal to integrate NFC functionality is a blatant roadblock, there's no other way to put it,"


Hands-on with Knoppix Linux 7.2.0: A well-established and very stable Linux distribution
Over the years, Knoppix has evolved and expanded. In about 2005 a Live DVD version was added, with loads of additional applications, utilities and packages included. Rather than drop the Live CD version, however, both formats have been maintained since then, with the CD version as a "small/fast/easy" alternative, and the DVD version as an "everything including the kitchen sink" alternative. My first use of Knoppix came at SANS training classes, where they were using the Live CD version as a convenient way for course participants to gain access to Linux tools.


Wipro's CEO maps out a future for IT Services firms
The world continues to change rapidly for Indian IT Services firms. Here’s a recent interview with Wipro CEO T.K. Kurien with all the usual stuff about firms in transition, the trauma of effecting change and other such things. However, embedded in there are three observations that give us a glimpse into a brave new world for software services firms.


How Xerox Evolved From Copier Company To Creative Powerhouse
There’s one other thing that’s crucial to getting the best, most innovative work out of Xerox employees. “Having fun is one of the principles I always talk with new hires about,” says Vandebroek. “Unless you have fun, you can’t truly bring your intellect, your skills, and your deep knowledge to push the boundaries of the unknown, to invent and create.” She goes on: “Being innovative to me is being both creative and entrepreneurial. And you can’t be creative and entrepreneurial unless you truly bring your heart to work, and have fun at work. Having fun is really essential. You need to have fun every day.”


As security woes bedevil IT, guess who’ll shoulder more of the load?
So what’s the solution? One increasingly prevalent view is that end-users be enlisted to the cause, first by educating them about safe practices, about corporate security policies and regulations (and the penalties for breaking them) and finally by enforcing those policies. Let’s face it, if you are a knowledge worker, you need to collaborate with others, sometimes contractors, partners outside the firewall — and should have a good idea of who is to be trusted with documents and work product.


Myths and Misconceptions about Transaction Isolation Levels
In every discussed Isolation Level so far, you are also always able to get so-called Phantom Records – records that can appear and disappear in your result set. If you want to get rid of these phantom records, you have to use the Isolation Level Serializable, which is the most restrictive one. In Serializable SQL Server uses a so-called Key Range Locking to eliminate phantom records: you are locking complete ranges of data, so that no other concurrent transactions can insert other records to prevent phantom records.


Fiberlink president talks IBM MobileFirst plans, EMM consolidation
Candidly, what we were not good at was global marketing and global sales. We did not have the scale and we did not spend the money. We could, but we chose not to go that route to just try to buy market share. Over the course of the last couple of years, we continued to get close to IBM in terms of packaging some of their stuff for the laptop side, but also uniquely developing the whole mobile side of the house. It was becoming more and more obvious to us that the market in mobile management still has not found vendor loyalty…


Interview with Ole Jepsen on Leadership in Agile
Good leaders create an environment where self-organizing teams can thrive and create great products and services to delight their customers: that is what Ole Jepsen explained in this interview. At the XP Days Benelux conference he talked about truly leading people and the subtle but important differences between taking and giving control. InfoQ interviewed Ole on leadership in agile, self organizing teams and focusing on people



Quote for the day:

"You can't improve and still be the same" -- John C. Maxwell