November 25, 2014

'Less' is more to malware authors targeting Linux users
Less does not allow file editing, which is a job for file editors like the widely used vi, but has the benefit of displaying data on the fly without needing to load an entire file into memory. This is useful when dealing with large files. Less is frequently used to view text files, but on many Linux distributions, including Ubuntu and CentOS, it supports many more file types including archives, images and PDF. That's because, on these systems, less is extended through a script called lesspipe that relies on different third-party tools to process files with various extensions.


Web services vs. cloud services: Are they the same?
The short answer is, "no," they are not the same. However, they are increasingly dependent on each other if users want the full speed and ease of use effect that such services offer. Technically, organizations can have a Web service without a cloud service or vice versa, but one gets greater business efficiency when the services are combined. Web services are the tools that allow users to interact with software over the Internet.Cloud services are the servers that store the data, security and other infrastructure pieces needed to allow Web services to provide unique value as Web-accessible applications.


The Art Of Being Consistently Less Wrong
The key concept to focus on is not to be exact but to be LESS WRONG. The only way you can be less wrong is to learn. The only way to learn is to do. In my opinion letting go of the concept of correctness in agile and embracing the desire to be less wrong can help a team change what they normally consider to be a painful, drawn out meeting into a quick, focused and collaborative discussion. Get past the estimation and get back to delivering features. So, how do we learn to be consistently less wrong? Here are a few things to consider:


Thwarting Attackers with Threat Intelligence
Intelligence and understanding are crucial to any defensive strategy. Cybersecurity teams are trying to learn more about malicious actors, including why and how they are attacking. This is where the extended network provides unexpected value, delivering a depth of intelligence that cannot be attained anywhere else in the computing environment. Much like in counterterrorism, intelligence is key to stopping attacks before they happen. Just as terrorists sometimes inflict damage disproportionate to their resources, such can be the case in cyberspace. Relatively small adversaries with limited means can inflict significant damage on larger foes. In these situations, intelligence is one of the most important assets for addressing threats.


Global Standards and Publications
In the current environment, with constant changes and almost infinite ways of accessing information and communicating, it is essential to make communication as clear as possible and ensure the quality of information. Van Haren Publishing makes general Best Practices available to provide quality, practically validated information worldwide. The use of standards and frameworks gives everyone the same language thus minimalizing the chance of errors due to unclear communication. Best Practices regarding these standards and frameworks provide you with information summarizing years of experience by the best in the industry.


Corporate IT's Darwinian Challenge
Corporate IT organizations in general are still viewed as the people who slow down business opportunity and change and say "no" far more than "yes." Too many corporate IT organizations haven't evolved along with their ecosystem and, in my opinion, much of the necessary change starts with an evolution in thinking and purpose. For me, the following points are the required foundation to stop the gradual erosion, and ultimate extinction, of the corporate IT organization as we know it today.


Mobile Medical Apps: A Market on the Move
Smartphone technology is promising for use in remote patient monitoring for several reasons. David Pettigrew, Sagentia’s Vice President of Connected Health, sums up the advantages: “Benefits to medical-device manufacturers include cost savings through not having to develop a completely new device, leveraging existing platforms while adding more sophisticated sensing and data capabilities, and using an interface that consumers know and understand and is already part of their everyday life.” The result: Devices are far more likely to be adopted and used correctly.


The branded bug: Meet the people who name vulnerabilities
If the bug is dangerous enough, it gets a name. Heartbleed's branding changed the way we talk about security, but did giving a bug a logo make it frivolous... or is this the evolution of infosec? Criminals, such as bank robbers, are often named because there are too many to keep track of. Just as killers and gangsters end up in history marked and defined by where they murdered (the "Trailside Killer") or having a characteristic ("Baby Face" Nelson), the same goes for critical bugs and zero days. Stephen Ward, Senior Director at iSIGHT Partners (iSIGHT reported the "Sandworm" Microsoft zero-day), explained to ZDNet, "Researchers will often use unique characteristics discovered in malware or in command and control to give a team or a particular exploit a name.


Network security needs big data
Big data will change most of the product categories in the field of computer network security, including network monitoring, the authentication and authorization of users, identity management, fraud detection, and systems of governance, risk and compliance. Big data will also change the nature of the security controls, such as conventional firewalls, anti-malware and data loss prevention. In coming years, the tools of data analysis will evolve further to enable a number of advanced predictive capabilities and automated controls in real time.


7 Tools Tuned for Agile Development Success
The iterative alternative to fully mapped-out waterfall processes has become widely accepted in recent years, bringing with it software tools designed to help agile practitioners hone their processes, collaborate efficiently, and monitor progress. Companies like Atlassian, Axosoft, Microsoft, and others have been filling the niche for agile project management. Since we first rounded up agile project management tools in 2013, these tools have seen noteworthy improvements. Here's another look at the more effective agile-oriented project management tools and what's been improved in them in the past year.



Quote for the day:

"How you measure the performance of your managers directly affects the way they act." -- Gustave Flaubert

November 24, 2014

The Salesforce Platform: The Return of the Citizen Programmer
The last time this happened was in the 90’s, when Microsoft created Visual Basic. Legions of citizen programmers created large numbers of custom applications and solutions. Kids used VB, Grandparents used VB. Even managers used VB. Most of the code they wrote was awful, full of global variables, goto statements, and not a hint of object oriented programming, even after it was supported by the language. But it was fast and it was easy, and even the most elitist senior programmers were often forced to use VB because it was so incredibly productive compared to anything else.


The business rationale for cloud workspaces
Desktop virtualization technologies offer enterprise IT a new opportunity to deliver lower-cost, yet more responsive, end-user computing services across a larger range of endpoints. ... This makes them a high-risk investment. Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) offers a significant opportunity to realize the benefits of desktop virtualization through cloud-hosted desktops consumed as a service without the high upfront capital cost, and at a considerably lower risk, by leveraging a service provider’s domain expertise in creating and managing a high-performance virtual desktop infrastructure.


Open Cloud Alliance Formed to Answer Germany’s Data Privacy Concerns
“The European and US market is different,” said Laguna. “European companies are much more conscious and careful and more wary of big U.S. cloud providers. The big proprietary silos are very anti-competitive, very monolithic, and channel-unfriendly.” One example of how Germany and the U.S. view privacy differently is email. In Germany, it is considered extremely weird for an employer to have access to an employee’s email. In the U.S., sometimes you communicate with superiors by keeping a draft saved in your box. Data privacy concerns are born out of a history that saw the Gestapo, and later the Ministry of State security Stasi, encouraging spying on neighbors when the country was split, explains Laguna.


Android 5.0 Lollipop embraces the enterprise
Google took longer. Prior to the new version 5.0 (Lollipop), Android included precious little specifically to assist enterprises in their needs. Lollipop is a clear change in direction, addressing many of the most important enterprise needs. Finally, Google has included EMM/MDM APIs to allow a standard approach to the management and security of Android mobile devices. No longer will EMM vendors like MobileIron have to make different versions for the devices of different OEMs. Google has also moved to harden the base operating system, strengthen data security by default, improve the security update process and authentication and much more. There are thousands of new APIs, many of which help enterprises.


The five principles every corporate director should embody
NACD and ISA published a report titled the “Cyber-Risk Oversight” where they propose five key principles for boards in approaching cyber-risk ... The IIA and ISACA have built upon these five principles to provide well thought out implementation guidance in a publication titled “Cybersecurity: What the Board of Directors Needs to Ask” Here is how they recommend boards move out in turning the five principles above into action plans ... IIA and ISACA also suggest six questions any board should consider to prepare for discussions with management and audit


Symantec identifies sophisticated, stealthy 'Regin' malware
Regin is a back-door-type Trojan, "customizable with an extensive range of capabilities depending on the target," Symantec said, adding that "it provides its controllers with a powerful framework for mass surveillance." Its development probably took months "if not years" and "its authors have gone to great lengths to cover its tracks." Its first incarnation was used to spy on a number of organizations from 2008 to 2011 when it was "abruptly withdrawn," with a new version showing up last year, Symantec said. Nearly half of the Regin infections that have been identified involve private individuals and small businesses, with attacks on the telecommunication sector apparently aimed at gaining access to calls routed through that infrastructure.


IBM Courts DevOps With Dedicated Bluemix
DevOps has been a favorite mode of operation for startups and web companies that seek to change their production software frequently. Facebook and Amazon.com are noted for their ability to push dozens or hundreds of software updates a day. Robinson said competitive enterprises are beginning to adopt the same process. Among other things, Dedicated Bluemix will make available a Cloudant high-performance database-as-a-service; a data-caching service to make Bluemix applications speedier and more responsive; and the runtime environments in different languages so developers may launch applications in the language of their choice, Robinson said.


Tuning Java Servers
One mistake engineers often make is profiling the CPU without first determining whether it is truly a CPU bound use case. Although CPU utilization shown by top command is low, machine may be busy doing IO (e.g. reading disk, writing to network). Load average is a much better metric for determining whether the machine is loaded. Load average represents the number of processes waiting in the OS scheduler queue. Unlike CPU, load average will increase when any resource is limited (e.g. CPU, network, disk, memory etc.). Please refer to the blog “Understanding Linux Load Average” for more details.


DeitY Releases its Latest Draft IoT Policy
Focus is on developing IoT products precisely to our needs in the sphere of agriculture, health, water quality, transportation, security, automobile, automated metering and monitoring of utilities, waste management and many others. Structure of the IoT Policy has been planned to be implemented through a multi-pillar approach. It will have five vertical pillars (Demonstration Centres, Capacity Building & Incubation, R&D (Research and Development) and Incentives and Engagements, Human Resource Development) and 2 horizontal supports (Standardisation & Organisational structure).


Clearing up muddied waters in the 'Data Lakes'
Several companies have even designed products and services around the concept. Less pleasing is that since 2010 it's been gradually redefined, then subsequently refuted based on these new definitions. But hey, this kind of thing happens in any modern, digital debate and at least it indicates there's a healthy interest in the subject matter. However, as one who spends most waking hours conceiving new information architectures to solve modern data problems, I thought it was time to revive the original Data Lake definition and explain its original role and relevance.



Quote for the day:

"Management is nothing more than motivating other people." -- Lee Iacocca

November 23, 2014

Performance Impact of an IO-Intensive Application
The bottleneck of an IO-intensive app is usually when the system flushes the dirty pages to disk, not during the journaling step. The throughput of flushing is limited by the device bandwidth. A typical 15K RPM could reach a bandwidth of 120MB/sec in the best case of sequential access, in case of random IO the actual bandwidth is even less. To better illustrate, assuming the system uses the default Redhat Linux flush policy of 30 seconds, and the application writes at a rate of 20 MB/sec. After 30 seconds, the system would have accumulated 600 MB of dirty data to flush to disk. In Linux, the flushing is done by the pdflush daemon.


Tuning Large Scale Java Platforms
The session covers various GC tuning techniques, in particular focusing on tuning large scale JVM deployments and showing how to optimally size a platform for enhanced memory consumption. It also presents Pivotal Application Fabric reference architecture where a comprehensive performance study was done. ... Emad Benjamin is Principal Technocrat and CTO Ambassador at VMware. Jamie O'Meara is a Platform Architect and software engineer for Pivotal.



Aligning ITSM with Business Objectives
This discussion will focus on the need for the Business to understand what IT can do for them, things like: enter new markets, create new services, provide new solutions or industry shifts. Then we will look at why IT and in particular the importance of the CIO to be embedded within the business and understand it’s business goals and objectives to ensure both “lights on” and “strategic direction incorporating innovation”. The ITIL Service Strategy book will be used as part of our guide. So come and hear how to start aligning IT service management with the Business objectives.


How to align talent management with business strategies
Through informed alignment of talent management strategy with business strategy, organisations can identify the capabilities that are really needed (thus providing a realistic business case for the development investment). Strengthening this business case raises another challenge: developing effective criteria for selecting the right candidates for development and thereby using available resources as effectively as possible to support the maximisation of potential. This effective long-term thinking can override short-term pressure from shareholders, who are often reluctant to invest in talent management.


Why Isn’t My Strategy Working? It’s Broken That’s Why
Declare “WHY” you are in business and then build a culture to support your “WHY.” Share it in a way that defines the experience your customers, staff and partners will have every time. ... After you have declared your “WHY” and everyone is busting with passion about the vision, the brand and being part of the culture, it is time to monetize that dream. Level II determines if customers, partners and investors will join you by saying yes. ... With Level II in place, everyone is clear about the strategy to monetize the “WHY,” and now the next step is to deploy the revenue strategy complete with a “True North,” a Revenue RoadMap and aligned metrics. Deployment must be both aligned to the “WHY” and the revenue strategy.


Microsoft Strategy Vice President Teper: 'Minecraft is a development tool'
"Minecraft is a development tool" Teper told attendees of the UBS Global Technology Conference in Sausalito, Calif., last week. "People build worlds out of it. If we can get eight-year-old girls and boys building worlds and getting inspired by creating content digitally, as they grow up they'll want to create in PowerPoint, or Visual Studio. And in addition to being one of the few gaming franchises that doesn't have to be freemium, Minecraft can actually charge money. It turns out it's a great business with lots of upside." The full transcript of Teper's remarks from November 19 is worth a read.


Six Steps for Developing a Governance Model for Strategic Portfolio Management (Part 1)
In today’s business environment, we have to make decisions quickly to take advantage of such things as market-moving news and events, client requirements, new technology and other factors. In order to do all of this, you need a streamlined, customized approach that works with, and not fights against, your culture and best interests. At the heart of all of this, controlling and driving this process forward is the Governance Model. That’s why I call it the engine room. Without it, portfolio management can’t happen in any structured, purposeful way. So, whether you’re just getting started in portfolio management, or you need to re-think your approach, the Governance Model is where you start.


360 Degree Embedded Analytics: Inside Apps, Inside Processes
These technologies will sit close to Business Intelligence (BI), data integration tools and online analytical processing (OLAP) services – plus we will also focus here on data mining and ‘extract, transform, load’ (ETL) functionalities. In terms of facilitating technologies, let us also remember that Hadoop serves as a central processing hub here where ‘analytics-ready’ data sets can be blended, refined, automatically-modeled and then automatically published directly to analytical databases (like HP Vertica for example) for deeper usage. If this is analytics embedded into the application, then what of analytics embedded into the business processes.


How to Improve Teamwork in Your Agile Team
Presenting this pyramid to the team could be the second exercise. Based on my experience, most of the team members will identify at least one problem from the pyramid. Visualizing this will make them think a bit about the status quo situation while realizing that much is required to be done in order to have a great team. I think one hour should be enough to familiarise the team with the pyramid and to answer all their questions. Since the base of the pyramid forms from an Absence of Trust, I will focus on an exercise for improving this specific aspect. My team tried this exercise some weeks ago. Clearly, we had problems in the team and lack of trust was one of them.


Conversation Patterns for Software Professionals.
Years of experience in the industry have shown us that the best way to get concrete and detailed knowledge from the business is to structure it. Structuring can be defined as organizing the acquired knowledge according to predetermined criteria, for example: functional requirements, non-functional requirements, domain-specific rules, architecture and implementation limitations. Such an ordered collection of information is a checklist for those who collect it and it helps them answer the following questions - What do I already know? What else do I need to know? What do I have to specify?



Quote for the day:

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

November 22, 2014

How to Improve IT Governance Maturity
Understand the operating style of organization. Who holds the decision making power, Is it with the CEO, Board, CFO, PE Investors or someone else. Know what view each of the CXO roles has on organization priorities and the role they consider IT has in the organization. The IT dollars are enterprise resource and are finite, and they must be leveraged to the benefit of the enterprise. IT governance's purpose is to facilitate all business units in competing for the dollars based on benefit to the enterprise. There is no reason the executive team shouldn't be completely aware of where and how IT assets are being deployed. The CIO is probably the last person to be setting IT priorities and when you take this approach,


4 Solutions To Build Apps For The Connected Car
Opportunities and choices abound for any consumer, company or entrepreneur attempting to connect the car. An in-vehicle dashboard can contain applications pre-installed in the unit or your smartphone app can connect via Bluetooth and offer content in the car. The applications world is moving to the car with consumers pleading at the chance to connect to the Internet in their vehicles. If you are interested in the connected car, there are four main types of development for in-car connectivity


Cisco crashes the enterprise mobile party with new collaboration app
Project Squared also complements Cisco's collaboration and UC (unified communications) product stack by extending it to mobile devices. Cisco already offers voice communications, video conferencing, IP telephony, IM and Web meetings via a variety of hardware devices and cloud and on-premise software for desktops, small and medium-size meeting rooms, and large conference rooms. "Cisco is filling in a gap in their portfolio, the use case for small, agile teams that want robust mobile apps but don't need more complex services and tools like WebEx or dedicated hardware endpoints for every bit of work, even if they have them," Gartner's Preset said.


Wozniak still aims to simplify: Now, all of enterprise storage
The company’s software separates the control of data from the gear where it’s stored. All storage capacity, from cloud to server-based flash, becomes part of a single global data space that can be allocated as needed for high performance or high capacity, Smith said. That virtual space can span block, object and file storage systems, keeping specific transport protocols such as Fibre Channel in place but treating all data as files. Instead of using a new protocol, Primary Data’s software is based on the widely used NFS (Network File System). The software consists of a Data Director, which holds metadata about the contents of storage and policies for each application, and a hypervisor in the application server that carries out changes.


The Programmer's Price
Rock-star developers are, not surprisingly, very different from actual rock stars. Solomon told me, “Generally speaking, the egos are the opposite.” Programmers tend to undersell themselves. (One potential client described himself as “pretty fast”; it later emerged that he’d won a speed-coding competition in India.) Solomon surmised that this has to do with the nature of feedback in the two professions. If you put a product in Apple’s app store, your interaction with customers consists mostly of anonymous griping. Meanwhile, he said, “even a low-level musician is onstage playing to fifty people, and after that show they have ten people who come up and tell them, ‘Dude, your song saved my life!’ ”


Bank CEOs Fear Data-Driven Decisions
One challenge is that getting an analytics practice up and running requires coordination and buy-in from multiple groups, points out Deva Annamalai, a banking technologist in Salt Lake City. "In today's scenario, most banks have an existing enterprise data warehouse, a finance and analytics reporting group, and IT wanting to do this. The ownership and roles around who is responsible for customer analytics becomes a little muddled. Organizations are starting to realize this overlap and some are even dedicating chief data officers (a relatively new C-suite title) to solve this problem."


Microsoft warns that Kerberos bug allows hackers to compromise entire networks
“This security update is rated Critical for all supported editions of Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Server 2012, and Windows Server 2012 R2. The update is also being provided on a defense-in-depth basis for all supported editions of Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8, and Windows 8.1.” If you’re a system administrator and you haven’t already applied the patch, you should do so immediately.If your domain has already been compromised – and Microsoft has said that it was ‘aware of limited, targeted attacks that attempt to exploit this vulnerability’ – then the only remedial action is a complete rebuild of the domain.


Web API Thoughts 1 of 3 - Data Streaming
The target is to reach services to various platforms using HTTP technology, which is supported by many end user applications, browsers, mobile devices, other services. ASP.NET Web API is a request-response message exchange pattern, in which a client can request certain information from a server and a server responses the request to the client. The response can be expected synchronously or asynchronously. When you think about a web service usually several things pop up in your mind. Personally I'll point out these three basic key points regardless of the service implementation.


Interview: 'Government is the best digital startup in London'
“I think government is the best digital startup in London,” he says from behind his glowing Apple MacBook. “We really do have multi-functional teams, and when we talk about agile we really mean it. And we’re really serious about user research and understanding what the user needs are.” Shetler has dabbled in startup companies himself, creating two startups in London, the place he now calls home. His career also spans financial services, including working for the Republic National Bank of New York and companies such as Oracle, Microsoft and Swift – the financial transaction messaging company.


Gartner's four steps on how to better manage public APIs
APIs, a set of regulations that enables one program to interact with another, are in high demand among business and IT users alike for a whole host of reasons, Olliffe said. APIs offer accessibility, ease of use, platform independence and an attractive cost structure. Moreover, APIs are an operational expenditure, which means developers, architects and even the business can bring new capabilities into the enterprise without "a big approval from the CIO," he said. But along with this new API abundance come new complications. ... Startups go bust, companies decide to change directions, and a public Web API could easily disappear.



Quote for the day:

"A business of high principle attracts high-caliber people more easily, thereby gaining a basic competitive and profit edge."-- Marvin Bower

November 21, 2014

7 great MOOCs for techies -- all free, starting soon!
Big data, open source software, security -- these are some of the IT skills most in demand today and for the near future. Fortunately, free classes, in the form of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), are available to help you keep pace with these and many other IT-oriented subjects. Offered by top universities as well as online education platforms (often in partnership), IT MOOCs can help you keep your skills sharp and resume updated. ... If you don't find what you want here, browse the lists of other courses offered by these institutions, or check our last MOOC roundup for ideas. Then log on and start learning.


Retired CIOs: 5 Rewarding Second Acts
Is there life after information technology leadership? You bet. While some "retired" CIOs immediately dive back into the industry as consultants to those currently serving as CIOs, others decide it's time to do something completely different. InformationWeek specifically went looking for people who had an interesting "Second Act" story to tell. Of our five examples, one is embarking on a career of voiceover work and acting after years of using funny voices to amuse his colleagues. Another is working almost as hard as a volunteer civic leader as he did in his former profession (but without the stress of worrying about the next system outage). Several are actively trying to relax but are still active as volunteers.


Smartphone Encryption – What Does it Mean to You?
As forensic experts we truly understand the probative value of the data and metadata contained on smartphones. These devices are routinely imaged, preserved and analyzed as part of the discovery process in cases where communications are directly or indirectly related to the underlying issues. The data and metadata automatically stored on smartphones can include entire email chains, geographical locations, contacts, logs of who was texted or called, and a host of other information depending on what apps were installed and used (see “Alternative Keyboard apps: Too risky for your smartphone?”).


Digital Transformation and IT: The CIO´s balancing act
We live in times of accelerated change. Smart and innovative challengers leapfrog industry borders and disrupt business models, selling digital services into former physical product markets and leaving established market leaders perplexed and behind. The digital Darwinism predicts that not the strongest (market leaders), but those companies that are able to adopt change the fastest, will survive. And as an example - the arrival of the smartphone taught us that torch producers and camera producers, for example, ended up between a rock and a hard place. Their business model was disrupted from outside the niche. Smartphones disrupted several other businesses and will keep doing so – financial credit card organizations are next in line.


Are Telepathy Experiments Stunts, or Science?
In a paper published last week in the journal PLOS One, neuroscientists and computer engineers at the University of Washington in Seattle described a brain-to-brain interface they built that lets two people coöperatively play a simple video game. Earlier this year, a company in Barcelona called Starlab described transmitting short words like “ciao,” encoded as binary digits, between the brains of individuals on different continents. Both studies used a similar setup: the sender of the message wore an EEG (electroencephalography) cap that captured electrical signals generated by his cortex while he thought about moving his hands or feet.


Smart guns: Can tech bring transparency to law enforcement?
Technology like Yardarm's could be beneficial in creating change without changing federal or state regulations. The company was founded just five months after the Sandy Hook shooting. ... "We're not a bunch of gun guys figuring out how to put tech in guns," Schaff said. "We're a bunch of tech guys trying to figure out how to put tech in guns." The team received a lot of messages from interested organizations like private security firms, police forces, and foreign governments, who wanted more information -- more data -- to use as evidence, and more ways to monitor the safety of officers out in the field.


Lost Devices Cause 68 Percent of Health Care Data Breaches
A recent study by Bitglass shows just how much damage the insider threat can cause. In its 2014 Healthcare Breach Report, Bitglass discovered that 68 percent of the data breaches in the health care industry since 2010 were caused by lost or stolen devices. The survey results nearly mirror a study conducted by theCalifornia Attorney General’s Office, which found that 70 percent of compromised health records were the result of a lost or stolen device. This is not to say that cybercriminals aren’t doing any damage. Almost a quarter of breaches in the health care industry are caused by hackers infiltrating the network.


Is your Java application hostile to JIT Compilation?
The key point about JIT compilation is that Hotspot automatically monitors which methods are being executed by the interpreter. Once a method has been called often enough it is marked for compilation into machine code. These "hot methods" are compiled by a JVM thread in the background. Until this compilation finishes, the JVM keeps running - using the original interpreted version of the method. Only once the method is fully compiled does Hotspot patch the method dispatch table to point to the new form. Hotspot has a large number of different optimization techniques for JIT compilation - but one of the most important for our purposes is inlining.


Healthcare Interoperability: Who's The Tortoise?
"It's very easy to point fingers at folks. People underestimate how challenging this work is," Sawyer told InformationWeek. "I think the vendors are being cautious before spending lots of research and development money before a standard is more clearly defined." Some EHR systems, like Epic, were designed long before cloud and APIs, executives said. Others leveraged newer technologies like cloud and APIs from the start. But clinicians and patients want them all to exchange files with one another -- just like financial firms, which enable consumers to withdraw funds from any ATM, regardless of bank. Or like Amazon, which lets consumers browse and order items from stores -- both Amazon and other sellers -- via one platform.


CIOs make progress, but still get no respect
Fair or not, the body of research described here is compelling. For this reason, every CIO should consider the possibility that some of their peers and management share views presented by the data. The solution is spending more time with business departments and leaders, learning nuances of their needs and goals. As CIO, delegate the technology to staff while you focus on solving business problems around the company.



Quote for the day:

"Experience is not the best teacher; evaluated experience is the best teacher." -- John Maxwell