Daily Tech Digest - May 01, 2019

What Has Fintech Done, To Make Itself Feel Proud?

“What we are able to do as a fintech company is to offer better accessibility to financial products for this group of hardworking individuals, who are currently marginalized, particularly when it comes to accessing the lending system.” But what could the fintech industry do more of to prevent this financial worry in the first place. Boden points out the importance of “simplicity, accessibility and the user experience, keeping up the ‘mission to explain’. “As long as we continue to demystify subjects which can often intimidate people such as pensions and investments, we will be fighting the good fight on financial inclusion. What the fintech industry must not lose sight of is its ability to listen to customers and adapt to meet their needs. This is an area where traditional financial services companies struggle to compete.” Sarkar also discusses how impactful financial education can be, “while highlighting the unique position employers have to support improved financial wellbeing of their workforce. For instance, our research uncovered that 77 percent of people trust their employer when it comes to information about their personal finances, and also trust their employer to keep that information confidential.

How to Automatically Determine the Number of Clusters in your Data - and more

Determining the number of clusters when performing unsupervised clustering is a tricky problem. Many data sets don't exhibit well separated clusters, and two human beings asked to visually tell the number of clusters by looking at a chart, are likely to provide two different answers. Sometimes clusters overlap with each other, and large clusters contain sub-clusters, making a decision not easy. ... A number of empirical approaches have been used to determine the number of clusters in a data set. They usually fit into two categories: Model fitting techniques: an example is using a mixture model to fit with your data, and determine the optimum number of components; or use density estimation techniques, and test for the number of modes...; and Visual techniques: for instance, the silhouette or elbow rule (very popular.) In both cases, you need a criterion to determine the optimum number of clusters. In the case of the elbow rule, one typically uses the percentage of unexplained variance.

Fintech lobby spending targets cryptocurrency taxation

While the Securities and Exchange Commission has released some guidance on when it would consider a digital token a security, the nascent industry has complained that the SEC’s most recent comments have muddied the already murky matter. That’s why the fintech industry is lobbying hard for a bill from Ohio Republican Rep. Warren Davidson to exempt digital tokens from securities regulations, said Kristin Smith of the Blockchain Association. “That’s probably been our biggest focus,” she said. “And it will continue to be our biggest focus for the next couple of months.” Tax issues are another priority, Smith said. Because cryptocurrencies can alternately be considered currencies, securities, futures contracts or something else, their tax treatment is a complicated question that the industry hopes can be simplified soon. The IRS has issued scant guidance on how to tax digital coins, said Jerry Brito, executive director at Coin Center. Brito is hoping a pair of cryptocurrency tax bills introduced last year can advance this year.

Plandek co-CEO: 5 areas for Agile team self-improvement

Agile, is, after all, a relative term and fairly meaningless unless qualified. So do you know how agile your development is? One-way to embed the culture change required to answer that key question is through self-improvement (SI) processes underpinned by the right agility metrics. Agile is already closely linked to SI — let’s remember that the Agile Manifesto states: “At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behaviour accordingly.” In other words, Agile is about continuous, team-driven SI. The fact that retrospectives is among the top five Agile techniques underscores SI’s importance (source: State of Agile report). Nevertheless, SI efforts regularly fail due to inadequate leadership and follow-through. Teams either don’t have the right tools to collect the data or that they set the wrong metrics. The latter can be especially problematic when Agile development projects are scaling.

The story of smart data

You may have a series of sensors connected to a patient, where you’re monitoring their vital statistics which, in turn, may alert healthcare professionals or physicians as to their ongoing remote treatment and care. Indeed, smart data has many stories to tell, but we may not necessarily be privy to its journey. Moreover, in the evolution of smart objects or things, we may need the support of “smart agents” – autonomous entities that have been empowered to make decisions for us. However, in our current design doctrine human interaction is still needed. ... Of course, we’ve also empowered our smart agents to learn – a true cause and effect paradigm, in turn, slowly diminishing the need for human intervention and, again, realizing a truer definition of “machine learning.” Agents will also use blockchain technology to provide a ledger – an historical reference to what they have learned and might know for future situations – yes, predictive analytics is another reality. Our smart data is a diverse collection of values that offer many insights into the various journeys undertaken by our smart agents.

How a Google Street View image of your house predicts your risk of a car accident

It turns out that a policyholder’s residence is a surprisingly good predictor of the likelihood that he or she will make a claim. “We found that features visible on a picture of a house can be predictive of car accident risk, independently from classically used variables such as age or zip code,” say Kidziński and Kita-Wojciechowska. When these factors are added to the insurer’s state-of-the-art risk model, they improve its predictive power by 2%. To put that in perspective, the insurer’s model is better than a null model by only 8% and is based on a much larger data set that includes variables such as age, sex, and claim history. So the Google Street View technique has the potential to significantly improve the prediction. And the current work is merely a proof of principle. The researchers say its accuracy could be improved using larger data sets and better data analysis. The researchers’ approach raises a number of important questions about how personal data should be used. Policyholders in Poland might be startled to learn that their home addresses had been fed into Google Street View to obtain and analyze an image of their residence.

How machine learning could change science

There are several projects underway to cure, understand, or otherwise ameliorate the symptoms of different cancers - three of which in the DOE specifically use machine learning, as well as a broader machine learning cancer research program known as CANDLE. "In this case, the DOE and [NIH's] National Cancer Institute are looking at the behavior of Ras proteins on a lipid membrane - the Ras oncogenic gene is responsible for almost half of colorectal cancer, a third of lung cancers.” Found on your cell membranes, the Ras protein is what “begins a signalling cascade that eventually tells some cell in your body to divide,” Streitz said. “So when you're going to grow a new skin cell, or hair is going to grow, this protein takes a signal and says, ‘Okay, go ahead and grow and another cell.’” In normal life, that activity is triggered, and the signal is sent just once. But when there’s a genetic mutation, the signal gets stuck. “And now it says, grow, grow, grow, grow, again, just keep growing. And these are the very, very fast growing cancers like pancreatic cancer, for which there's currently no cure, but it's fundamentally a failure in your growth mechanism.”

Done Right, Cloud Native Culture Means Happier Java Developers

“What is ahead-of-time compilation? It’s pre-computation of application code using closed-world static analysis. That’s a fancy way of saying ‘do more at compilation time and less at runtime,’” Rocher said in his keynote at Code Rome. Micronaut moves dependency injection, aspect-oriented programming, configuration management, and bean introspection from the runtime part to the build-time part so that fast-launching services don’t eat up memory. But Rocher wasn’t done with optimizing. He whipped out a demo of GraalVM, “the new universal Java Virtual Machine from Oracle that converts Java to native machine code using AOT.” Not only does it work well with Micronaut, it also features a language framework called Truffle that allows languages to interoperate, so “a Java app can call a JavaScript app without any overhead.” In his demo of Micronaut on GraalVM, startup time was just 20 milliseconds and memory consumption was18MB. “For a Java app, that is quite remarkable,” he said.

2 Million IoT Devices Vulnerable to Complete Takeover

It’s hardly the first security issue in security and surveillance cameras, which hold sensitive data and video footage ripe for the taking for hackers. In July, IoT camera maker Swann patched a flaw in its connected cameras that would allow a remote attacker to access their video feeds. And in September up to 800,000 IP-based closed-circuit television cameras were vulnerable to a zero-day vulnerability that could have allowed hackers to access surveillance cameras, spy on and manipulate video feeds, or plant malware. “Security cameras continue to be the oxymoron of the 21st century,” Joe Lea, vice president of product at Armis, in an email. “This is a perfect storm of a security exposure for an IoT device – no authentication, no encryption, near impossible upgrade path. We have to stop enabling connectivity over security – this is a defining moment in how we see lack of security for devices and lack of response.” In a comment to Threatpost, Marrapese said that vendors have a big part to play when it comes to doing more to secure their connected devices.

Creating Meaningful Diversity of Thought in the Cybersecurity Workforce

We have been discovering the value of diversity of thought through programs such as IBM’s new collar initiative and the San Diego Cyber Center of Excellence (CCOE)’s Internship and Apprenticeship Programs. IBM’s initiative and the CCOE’s program rethink recruiting to pull workers into cybersecurity from adjacent disciplines, not just adjacent fields. Toward the end of my stay at Intuit, I participated in a pilot program that brought innovation catalyst training to leaders outside of product development. Innovation catalysts teach the use of design thinking to deliver what the customer truly wants in a product. While learning the techniques I would later use to coach my teams and tease out well-designed services — services that would delight our internal customers — I was struck by an observation: People of different job disciplines didn’t just solve problems in different ways, they brought different values and valued different outcomes.

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Quote for the day:

"Your first and foremost job as a leader is to take charge of your own energy and then help to orchestrate the energy of those around you." -- Peter F. Drucker

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Daily Tech Digest - April 30, 2019

Microsoft tells IT admins to nix 'obsolete' password reset practice

Two years ago, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), an arm of the U.S. Department of Commerce, made similar arguments as it downgraded regular password replacement. "Verifiers SHOULD NOT require memorized secrets to be changed arbitrarily (e.g., periodically)," NIST said in a FAQ that accompanied the June 2017 version of SP 800-63, "Digital Identity Guidelines," using the term "memorized secrets" in place of "passwords." Then, the institute had explained why mandated password changes were a bad idea this way: "Users tend to choose weaker memorized secrets when they know that they will have to change them in the near future. When those changes do occur, they often select a secret that is similar to their old memorized secret by applying a set of common transformations such as increasing a number in the password." Both the NIST and Microsoft urged organizations to require password resets when there is evidence that the passwords had been stolen or otherwise compromised. And if they haven't been touched? "If a password is never stolen, there's no need to expire it," Microsoft's Margosis said.

4 tips for agile testing in a waterfall world

Begin with the understanding that agile is not about Scrum or Kanban processes in and of themselves; it is a set of values. Even in a non-agile environment, you can apply agile values to daily work. Beyond that, when working in an organization that is undergoing an agile transformation, you as an agile practitioner can introduce specific best practices to help the agile transformation go more smoothly. Finally, when you're working in a truly waterfall environment, adapt your process with an understanding that groups will be resistant to Scrum processes for the sake of Scrum. Instead, bring the advantages of agile to the team by making agile values relevant to the team. Think about the principles of agile and how to achieve them within current organizational processes, or how you might tweak current processes to meet those principles. Here are four tips garnered from what I've found to be successful when adapting agile principles to waterfall environments.

Venerable Cisco Catalyst 6000 switches ousted by new Catalyst 9600

The 9600 series runs Cisco’s IOS XE software which now runs across all Catalyst 9000 family members. The software brings with it support for other key products such as Cisco’s DNA Center which controls automation capabilities, assurance setting, fabric provisioning and policy-based segmentation for enterprise networks. What that means is that with one user interface, DNA Center, customers can automate, set policy, provide security and gain assurance across the entire wired and wireless network fabric, Gupta said. “The 9600 is a big deal for Cisco and customers as it brings together the campus core and lets users establish standards access and usage policies across their wired and wireless environments,” said Brandon Butler, a senior research analyst with IDC. “It was important that Cisco add a powerful switch to handle the increasing amounts of traffic wireless and cloud applications are bringing to the network.” ... The software also supports hot patching which provides fixes for critical bugs and security vulnerabilities between regular maintenance releases. This support lets customers add patches without having to wait for the next maintenance release, Cisco says.

Everything done in enterprise information management should drive ROI

The goal here will always be to have the minimal amount of "stuff" doing the maximum amount of "value added things" at the "least cost." This has been a compelling argument for the big data and AI crowd in recent years, but the expense of these solutions in infrastructure, specialized skills and poor implementation has in many ways tainted the message of how to achieve return on investment in the EIM and data insights marketplace... the perception to the business is that sorting data is expensive and needs huge justification. This creates a very challenging environment for enterprise information management innovators committed to the less is more paradigm to business value...so such innovations need to get better at making their case stand out to business leaders... or the money munching will continue unabated and businesses will have no choice but to spend tens of millions of dollars on questionable results.

Seven use cases of IoT for sustainability

A key piece of a smart grid infrastructure, smart meters gather real-time energy data, as well as water and gas data. Rather than waiting for monthly manual readings, businesses and homes with smart meters get real-time data that enables them to make smarter decisions about their energy, water and gas consumption and to modify habits to save money and reduce their carbon footprint. Utility companies also benefit, as systems can be remotely monitored, allowing for better response to problems and efficient maintenance. ... In agricultural scenarios, be it on a farm or an orchard or a building's or resident's lawn, smart irrigation systems monitor soil saturation to prevent over- and under-watering. Water sensors are also instrumental in monitoring water quality, a critical task after floods, hurricanes and other natural disasters to ensure wastewater and chemicals have not tainted potable water supplies. Likewise, IoT sensors embedded into water management infrastructures can monitor local weather forecasts and control drainage to minimize flooding, stormwater runoff or property damage.

On The Future of Tesla and Full Self Driving Cars

The key to moving fast for carmakers is based on making complex trade-offs between backward compatibility and future optionality. And Tesla is the only one who have already demonstrated they can do that masterfully. Tesla is amassing massive amounts of learning from training real world data in shadow mode today. It’s at a scale that makes simulation data obviously weak in comparison. Do you want to ride in a car that has been trained in a simulated environment when there is no steering wheel, or one that learned in the real world? Let’s be honest: It’s hard to tell whether Tesla will emerge the winner in this market. That’s a complex calculus and the industry they play in today is a massively difficult one to succeed in. There are a few ways of looking at this. One is how can they possibly succeed? But another is how can anyone else succeed too? Others don’t have cars on the road and are relying on some future technology that may or may not see the light of day (solid state LiDAR), and will most certainly be obsolete by the time it does.

Intel's Interconnected Future: Combining Chiplets, EMIB, and Foveros

Intel has also uses full interposers in its FPGA products, using it as an easier and quicker way to connect its large FPGA dies to high bandwidth memory. Intel has stated that while large interposers are a catch-all situation, the company believes that EMIB designs are a lot cheaper than large interposers, and provide better signal integrity to allow for higher bandwidth. In discussions with Intel, it was stated that large interposers likely work best for powerful chips that could take advantage of active networking, however HBM is overkill on an interposer, and best used via EMIB. Akin to an interposer-like technology, Foveros is a silicon stacking technique that allows different chips to be connected by TSVs (through silicon vias, a via being a vertical chip-to-chip connection), such that Intel can manufacture the IO, the cores, and the onboard LLC/DRAM as separate dies and connect them together. In this instance, Intel considers the IO die, the die at the bottom of the stack, as a sort of ‘active interposer’, that can deal with routing data between the dies on top.

Huawei's Role in 5G Networks: A Matter of Trust

Security experts are questioning whether restricting high-risk vendors to nonsensitive parts of the network might be a viable security strategy - and whether one nation's choices might have security repercussions for allies. The U.S. has been spearheading a push to ban Chinese telecommunications equipment manufacturing giants, including Huawei, from allies' 5G networks entirely, with one National Security Agency official saying it doesn't want to put a "loaded gun" in Beijing's hands. So far, Australia, New Zealand and Japan have agreed with the U.S. position and barred Chinese telecommunications gear from at least part of their 5G network rollouts. ... On Tuesday, news leaked that the U.K.'s National Security Council voted to allow Huawei to supply equipment for some "noncore" parts of the U.K.'s 5G network, such as antennas, although the government wasn't yet prepared to publicly make that declaration.

How to use Google Drive for collaboration

Many people think of Google Drive as a cloud storage and sync service, and it is that — but it also encompasses a suite of online office apps that are comparable with Microsoft Office. Google Docs (the word processor), Google Sheets (the spreadsheet app) and Google Slides (the presentation app) can import, export, or natively edit Microsoft Office files, and you can use them to work together with colleagues on a document, spreadsheet or presentation, in real time if you wish. With a Google Account, individuals get free use of Docs, Sheets and Slides and up to 15GB of free Google Drive storage. Those who need more storage can upgrade to a Google One plan starting at $2 per month. Businesses can opt for Drive Enterprise, which also includes Docs, Sheets and Slides, as well as business-friendly features including shared drives, enterprise-grade security, and integration with third-party tools like Slack and Salesforce. Drive Enterprise costs $8 per active user per month, plus $.04 per GB used.

Robots extend the scope of IoT applications

Robots like humans improve their motor skills with practice. Robots need a test bed where their instructions can be tested and debugged. Simulated test beds are better than physical ones as it is impossible to create a physical representation of every environment where the robot might operate. Isaac Sim is a virtual robotics laboratory and a high-fidelity 3D world simulator. Developers train and test their robots in a detailed, realistic simulation reducing the costs and development time. Robots improve as their decision models are revised to cover new situations that they encounter. Robots operate based on models they were programmed with, but they also send details of unexpected situations back to the cloud for review. This enables developers to refine the robot’s decision-making model to deal with the new conditions. The amount of feedback increases as more robots are deployed, increasing the speed at which all the robots collectively get “smarter.” NVIDIA Nano based robots can report new conditions they encounter to AWS IoT Greengrass modeling platform which lets them act locally on the data they generate, while still using the cloud for management, analytics, and storage.

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Quote for the day:

"Being responsible sometimes means pissing people off." -- Colin Powell

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Daily Tech Digest - April 29, 2019

10 Ways Technology is Transforming Warehouses

Sustainability is a hot-button topic these days, and this focus is changing nearly every industry in the world. Technology can help companies reduce energy consumption, cut down on product waste and lessen emissions while aligning with federal and local rules and regulations. Replacing traditional fluorescent lighting with LED alternatives can reduce power usage while saving the facility money. Smart warehouse designs rely on monitors to regulate power usage, becoming more energy efficient over time by preventing power ghosts from drawing energy when they’re not in use. Technology is helping warehouses become more sustainable, both in house and in their dealings with other facilities. Handheld devices, such as barcode scanners, have always been a part of the logistics and distribution industry, but recent advances have helped these devices become more efficient and useful than ever before. Warehouses that still rely on manual counts and physical paperwork should consider transitioning to digital inventories and handheld devices equipped with RFID scanners and GPS to increase efficiency and reduce theft and inventory loss.

How to write a good data governance policy

I find that getting principles agreed is a lot easier than asking a group pf people what they want included in a data governance policy. Plus the conversation around the principles will give you a really good idea about what they want covered in their policy. Once you've drafted and circulated those principles for feedback, you should be able to make amendments and agree a list of principles. With the principles agreed drafting your policy in accordance is fairly straightforward. However, don't make the mistake of believing that once it is drafted that everyone will immediately approve it because they already agreed the principles. Seeing the detail in black and white often gives rise to more questions, suggestions or changes from your key stakeholders At this point, I really have to emphasize that for data governance to be successful, you need the senior stakeholders engaged. So the answer is not to tell them they're wrong, or to railroad them into accepting what you want to have in the data governance policy.

Small business cybersecurity: The case for MSSPs

Clearly, the industry favors using AI and automated tools, which requires qualified personnel—something small businesses often lack. The good news is most MSSPs enhance their managed approach by using automated-security technology. This likely gives MSSPs the edge with small-business owners according to Canner. "By hiring a managed security provider, your enterprise could save money in the long term. Not only will you save on the costs of finding, hiring, and training new cybersecurity personnel, your enterprise can also reduce the number of cybersecurity members on staff." Venkatesh Sundar, founder and CMO at the MSSP Indusface, in this Trak.in article suggests that small businesses with web applications (most nowadays) may especially benefit from MSSPs that employ Managed Web Application Firewalls (MWAFs) as the first line of defense against malicious actors. "A MWAF ... supports custom and complex rules based on the needs of your business," writes Sundar. "An intelligent, managed WAF gives decision-making power to you or the security analyst to either block, flag or challenge requests."

Froid and the relational database query quandry with Dr. Karthik Ramachandra

If you look at relational databases today, the primary way to interact with the database is through this language called SQL, or structured query language, which falls under this declarative paradigm of programming, which basically says the user needs to tell the system what they need in this declarative high-level language, and the system figures out an efficient way to do what the user has asked. So that’s sort of one main paradigm, or the primary way we interact with databases today. That comes with the advantage that, you know, the users can stay at a higher level of abstraction, not having to go to the detailed implementation of how things are done. And it also allows the system to optimize and come up with efficient algorithms to solve the query or the question that the user is trying to ask. That is one paradigm, and on the other side, we have this imperative program style which is a slightly lower level of abstraction in the sense you are basically telling the system how to go about doing what you want it to do. And, as a result, you’re sort of binding the system to implement it in the way you are telling it to do.

Forget about artificial intelligence, extended intelligence is the future

While one of the key drivers of science is to elegantly explain the complex and increase our ability to understand, we must also remember what Albert Einstein said: “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.” We need to embrace the unknowability – the irreducibility – of the real world that artists, biologists and those who work in the messy world of liberal arts and humanities are familiar and comfortable with. ... In order to effectively respond to the significant scientific challenges of our times, I believe we must respect the many interconnected, complex, self-adaptive systems across scales and dimensions that cannot be fully known by or separated from observer and designer. In other words, we are all participants in multiple evolutionary systems with different fitness landscapes at different scales, from our microbes to our individual identities to society and our species. Individuals themselves are systems composed of systems of systems, such as the cells in our bodies that behave more like system-level designers than we do.

These are the industries most likely to be taken over by robots

Workers in industry sectors like food service and manufacturing spend much of their time doing physical tasks in a predictable environment, and so are susceptible to automation. Meanwhile, industries like education and health care involve much more interpersonal work and application of deep expertise, competencies which current robots and software lack. McKinsey pointed out that their analysis focused on what tasks could potentially be automated using current technology, which doesn't necessarily mean that these jobs actually will end up being more heavily done by robots and software. Other economic and social concerns, like the cost of labor relative to new investment in advanced machines and the public's willingness to have robots do things like serve them food, are likely to be big factors in whether or not various jobs and tasks actually do become automated, according to the report.

The growing demand for managed detection and response (MDR)

According to ESG research, 82% of cybersecurity professionals agree that improving threat detection and response (i.e. mean-time to detect (MTTD), mean-time to respond (MTTR), etc.) is a high priority at their organization. Furthermore, 77% of cybersecurity professionals surveyed say business managers are pressuring the cybersecurity team to improve threat detection and response. So, what’s the problem? Threat detection and response ain’t easy. In fact, 76% of those surveyed claim that threat detection and response is either much more difficult or somewhat more difficult than it was two years ago. Why? Cybersecurity professionals point to issues such as an upsurge in the volume and sophistication of threats, an increasing cybersecurity workload, and a growing attack surface. Oh, and let’s not forget the impact of the cybersecurity skills shortage. Many firms lack the right staff and skills to make a significant dent in this area. Rather than deploying yet another point tool or muddle through, many CISOs are turning to third-party service providers for help, making managed detection and response (MDR) one of the fastest-growing segments in the cybersecurity market.

How cloud services can empower the future of work

More often than not, businesses are stuck with legacy applications and tools. As a result, employees rely on email and word processing for business communication. They depend on shared network drives and content management systems to store, organize, secure and access files. Users connect first to one application and then another to schedule appointments, develop plans, allocate resources, track results, make payments, update images and accomplish a whole host of business activities that are integral parts of their everyday jobs. Today's employees work in an application-centric -- not a task-centric -- environment.  Cloud-powered connectivity promises to transform the future of work. Modest additions to existing personal productivity tools and enterprise applications can go a long way toward modernizing the workplace. Employees and workgroups can focus on their immediate tasks at hand, save time and enhance productivity.

Why wearables, health records and clinical trials need a blockchain injection

"Patients can become owners of data and, with their consent, share data with practitioners and allow them to sell anonymous data to buyers," said Mehta, who took part in the blockchain-and-healthcare panel. By enabling patients to add their own details around lifestyle – what they eat, how much they exercise and sleep, a personal health record would offer physicians greater personal insights for more targeted clinical decision making. In order to securely record, share and crunch vast amounts of sensitive data coming from external sources such as wearable medical devices and fitness trackers, a standardized database with artificial intelligence capabilities is needed. ... Blockchain uses hashing, the creation of a unique digital signature for each encrypted block of data added to an electronic distributed ledger. The hashes map back to encrypted patient data as it's added sequentially to a blockchain ledger – and because it's immutable, it creates an audit trail for government oversight. Smart contracts – self-executing business automation apps – can also be used atop blockchain to automatically ingest and process new data.

Millennials, changing meeting priorities drive huddle room trends

Huddle rooms equipped with conferencing technology enable small meetings to happen without taking up an entire boardroom. Nearly 65% of people believe that at least half of huddle rooms within an organization need video conferencing tools, according to a Cisco-sponsored report from market research firm Dimensional Research. "We've been talking about getting video conferencing out of boardrooms and out to the masses for a while now," said David Maldow, founder of market research firm Let's Do Video. "Huddle rooms make video technology accessible to everyone." Meeting culture has become far less formal and scheduled. Teams now are focusing on increased productivity, requiring spaces that they can access quickly for impromptu meetings or last-minute brainstorming sessions. Unlike boardrooms, which are typically designed for larger-scale planned meetings, the trend for huddle rooms and ad hoc spaces is to design them to fit into smaller team workflows. According to the Dimensional Research study, 55% of respondents said that meetings held in huddle rooms helped increase productivity.

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Quote for the day:

"Uncertainty is not an indication of poor leadership; it underscores the need for leadership." -- Andy Stanley

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Daily Tech Digest - April 28, 2019

It’s all about people: Dispelling the five myths of process automation

In a memorable scene from the movie “The Founder” about the origin of McDonald’s, the McDonald brothers plot the layout of their restaurant in a life-sized mockup drawn in chalk on a parking lot. This example of process optimization was certainly “lean,” but it involved no software whatsoever. Today, in contrast, optimizing business processes almost always means automating them – at least in part. And when we say automation, we mean with software. Just what software, however, is an open question, as today’s frothy software marketplace has spawned several contenders. From the business process automation or BPA of the last decade to today’s robotic process automation or RPA to the latest entrant, digital process automation or DPA, information technology decision makers have a plethora of options to choose from. Be warned: This is a clear-cut case of caveat emptor. With the help of the big IT analyst firms, the providers in these overlapping categories have stirred up massive confusion. Let’s clear up the biggest misconceptions.

Confronting the risks of artificial intelligence

Because AI is a relatively new force in business, few leaders have had the opportunity to hone their intuition about the full scope of societal, organizational, and individual risks, or to develop a working knowledge of their associated drivers, which range from the data fed into AI systems to the operation of algorithmic models and the interactions between humans and machines. As a result, executives often overlook potential perils or overestimate an organization’s risk-mitigation capabilities. It’s also common for leaders to lump in AI risks with others owned by specialists in the IT and analytics organizations. Leaders hoping to avoid, or at least mitigate, unintended consequences need both to build their pattern-recognition skills with respect to AI risks and to engage the entire organization so that it is ready to embrace the power and the responsibility associated with AI. The level of effort required to identify and control for all key risks dramatically exceeds prevailing norms in most organizations. Making real progress demands a multidisciplinary approach involving leaders in the C-suite and across the company; experts in areas ranging from legal and risk to IT, security, and analytics; and managers who can ensure vigilance at the front lines.

How the UK’s cybersecurity and privacy watchdogs deal with incidents

In a joint session at the NCSC's CYBERUK 19 conference in Glasgow, the NCSC and the ICO outlined how the two organisations work together and create a better understanding for cyberattack victims who need to contact them with the aim of making it easier to deal with the right one at the right time. "It's important organisations understand what to expect if they suffer a cybersecurity breach. The NCSC has an important role to play in keeping UK organisation safe online, while our role reflects the impact cyber incidents have on the people whose personal data is lost, stolen or compromised," said ICO deputy commissioner for operations, James Dipple-Johnstone. "Organisations need to be clear on the legal requirements when to report these breaches to the ICO, and the potential implications, including sizeable fines, if these requirements aren't followed." In the event of a cyberattack, the NCSC will engage directly with victims to understand the nature of the incident and provide free and confidential advice to help mitigate its impact in the immediate aftermath.

5 Ways AI Is Already Being Used to Transform Business Operations

As machine learning and AI tools are allowed to digest bigger troves of data, an endless swarm of insights is being made available. Many of them can be used to improve existing operations, but there’s more, too. Some of that information can be used to identify and explore all-new opportunities. For example, data related to a particular product might reveal how customers are using the item, particularly in ways that were not originally intended. Extracted insights might also reveal desirable features and functions, which price points are most desirable, or even which additional products and services can be delivered to augment the experience. It’s about a whole lot more than just conventional business operations, however. AI technologies are being deployed in new ways, too. iCertis, for example, is leveraging AI to build smarter static contracts. More specifically, its AI solutions are designed to overcome enterprise contract management challenges through the power of enhanced data capabilities.

Statistically speaking, here’s how your SaaS company can succeed

The good news is that although there are higher expectations, the quality of customer engagement becomes stronger because you have a wealth of data to personalize experiences and customer interactions. And because there are more interaction points with your customers, you can make more informed decisions on how to drive loyalty and where to find more of those loyal customers to drive overall lifetime value. The upfront spend that subscription businesses invest to acquire customers is paid back over time. In order for subscription business to sustainably grow, it’s essential to increase that lifetime value. And over the lifetime of the customer, you’re paying back that customer acquisition cost until you reach ‘economic loyalty,’ earning back a multiple return on the cost of acquiring and serving your customers. “That’s the ability to optimize how you monetize through pricing and plan structures,” Clark explains. “Price optimization is one of the few ways where you can increase revenue, increasing lifetime value from your subscribers without also correspondingly increasing your cost of acquisition or your cost of goods and services.”

Uncovering the hidden talent on your staff

Tech companies have led the way in fostering creativity by using an agile approach. Teams break projects down into sprints, focusing intensely on solving one specific problem at a time in a short, set period. This can lead to quick, outside-the-box thinking and risk-taking, and gives staff the ability to pivot to new ideas as short-term findings become clear. And, as with hackathons, these methods can be adapted to work in any industry. Experimenting with an agile approach — and not just in your IT department — can reveal which individuals on your staff have the right mind-set for innovation and are most likely to be able to learn and adapt with your company’s needs.... Another way to find the innovators hiding in plain sight at your company is to create teams tasked specifically with coming up with new ideas. This responsibility isn’t in most employees’ job descriptions, so they might not be prioritizing it. But you can create formal innovation programs, or even tie a pilot to an existing project, to give employees the time and space they need to show what they’re capable of.

Bringing cloud services to the edge

What cloud users haven’t been able to overcome are the physical limitations imposed by centralized infrastructure, particularly the delays imposed by transporting data hundreds or thousands of miles between an application user and the application infrastructure provider. While these seemed minute when people were already accustomed to waiting seconds on database transactions in a Web form, they become significant in an era of 5G wireless connectivity delivering streaming media and interactive multiplayer games. The speed of light quickens for no one, not even Einstein, meaning that data cannot travel 1,000 miles faster than about 5ms; add in the latency of the network equipment along the way and the round-trip time, even to the nearest regional cloud location becomes noticeable, if not intolerable for many applications. The curse of latency is a primary argument for edge computing, but it’s not the only one as companies have long known the benefits of offloading popular content and workloads to geographically distributed locations closer to users.

6 Design Principles for Artificial Intelligence in Digital Business

CIOs can make the most of artificial intelligence by applying it to strategic digital business objectives. Artificial intelligence (AI) can augment or automate decisions and tasks today performed by humans, making it indispensable for digital business transformation. With AI, organizations can reduce labor costs, generate new business models, and improve processes or customer service. However, most AI technologies remain immature. “To overcome this hurdle, CIOs must ensure that applications intended to serve a strategic business purpose, such as increasing revenue or scaling services, are designed for strategic plans,” says Jorge Lopez, Distinguished Vice President Analyst, Gartner. Lopez outlines six design principles that will help CIOs and organizations evaluate all proposed AI applications with strategic intent — that is, applications intended to help achieve business results, not just operational improvements. Applications do not have to follow all six principles; however, designs that show two or fewer principles should be reconsidered.

Three out of five IT workers share sensitive information by email

The report shows that the current digital landscape within the companies surveyed is not meeting the needs of employees. And compared to last year, some problems are even getting worse. Over a quarter (28 percent) use instant messaging to share sensitive or private information, creating a major security risk for enterprises. Two thirds of tech workers (66 percent) use use non-approved communication apps because they are less likely to be monitored or tracked. Secure methods that track user access and support the use of watermarks are rarely used. Unsanctioned apps and software, referred to as shadow IT, can lead to information being shared on unsecured systems, and cause communication to be fractured and siloed in the enterprise. These communication challenges go beyond security risks — the report also highlighted restrictions in knowledge-sharing. Almost three-quarters (72 percent) of IT professionals said that they work remotely at least one time per week. Over two thirds (68 percent) say remote work presents challenges that could be solved by better technology solutions, and a digitally centric work culture.

Continuous architecture combats dictatorial EA practices

To encourage an Agile enterprise architecture, software teams must devise a method to get bottom-up input and enforce consistency. Apply tenets of continuous integration and continuous delivery all the way to planning and architecture. With a dynamic roadmap, an organization can change its planning from an annual endeavor to a practically nonstop effort. Lufthansa Systems, a software and IT service provider for the airline industry under parent company Lufthansa, devised a layered approach to push customer demand into product architecture planning. Now, the company can continuously update and improve products, said George Lewe, who manages the company's roster of Atlassian tools that underpin the multi-team collaboration. "We get much more input from the customers -- really cool ideas," Lewe said. "Some requests might not fit into our product strategy or, for technical reasons, it's not possible, but we can look at all of them." Lufthansa Systems moved its support agents, product managers and software developers onto Atlassian Jira, a project tracking tool, with a tiered concept.

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Quote for the day:

"Be willing to make decisions. That's the most important quality in a good leader." -- General George S. Patton, Jr.

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Daily Tech Digest - April 27, 2019

Google Sensorvault Database Draws Congressional Scrutiny

In a letter to Google CEO Sundar Pichai, the Democratic and Republican leaders of the House Energy and Commerce Committee have posed 10 questions about Sensorvault and what information Google has collected about users over the past decade. The committee's leaders want to know what Google does with all this data, who can access it and whether consumers are protected in cases of mistaken identification that may result from police investigations. Because Google uses geolocation data to sell targeted advertising to consumers, Sensorvault is also raising questions about privacy and the personal information that companies collect. "The potential ramifications for consumer privacy are far reaching and concerning when examining the purposes for the Sensorvault database and how precise location information could be shared with third parties," according to the letter. "We would like to know the purposes for which Google maintains the Sensorvault database and the extent to which Google shares precise location information from this database with third parties."

Designing Bulletproof Code

There is no doubt about the benefits good coding practices bring, such as clean code, easy maintaining, and a fluent API. However, do best practices help with data integrity? This discussion came up, mainly, with new storage technologies, such as the NoSQL database, that do not have native validation that the developer usually faces when working to SQL schema. A good topic that covers clean code is whose objects expose behavior and hide data, which differs from structured programming. The goal of this post is to explain the benefits of using a rich model against the anemic model to get data integrity and bulletproof code. As mentioned above, an ethical code design also has an advantage in performance, once it saves requests to a database that has schema to check the validation. Thus, the code is agnostic of a database so that it will work in any database. However, to follow these principles, it requires both good OOP concepts and the business rules to make also a ubiquitous language.

AI Is Destroying Traditional Business Thinking

The trend is absolutely clear, and the economics behind it indicate that this isn’t just a short-term trend. Today’s AI and platform-driven economics have a clear advantage over the economies of scale of the prior age, just as the industrial age was faster, better and cheaper in creating value than the agricultural economy. In fact, the sheer market dominance of platform and AI powered organizations are fast becoming a threat to competitive capitalism, so much so that President Donald Trump—long known for advocating for more coal mining--finally agreed that AI needs to be a pillar of his economic policy to keep pace with China’s commitment to this reality. The shifts in technology capabilities and capital allocation are taking a bite out of the building blocks that made the industrial revolution so powerful and resolute. However, the time has come for every company to move beyond the old thinking, acting, measuring and investing that underpins yesterday’s economies. The health of the global market depends on updating our underlying measurement systems, business models, and technologies. It’s time to overhaul our business and management approaches to reflect today’s realities.

Test Automation: Prevention or Cure?

At first, the automation helped a lot as we could now quickly and reliably run through simple scenarios and get the fast feedback we wanted. But as time went on, and after the first initial set of bugs were caught, it started to find less and less issues unless we actually encoded the automated test cases to look for them. We also noticed issues were still getting through because for some scenarios we just couldn’t automate; for example, anything related to usability had to be tested manually. So we ended up with a hybrid solution where the automation would run some of the key scenarios quickly e.g. letting the team know they hadn’t broken anything obvious and exploratory testing for any new functionality, which in turn could be automated if suitable. As such, it is difficult to test; we were prone to making mistakes while attempting to test it or it simply took too long to do manually. An unexpected benefit indirectly linked to our automation journey was that as we started to release faster, it created a stronger focus on what we were trying to achieve.

Cybersecurity: This free tool lets you test your hacker defences

The tool, known as Exercise in a Box, has been tested by government, small businesses and the emergency services and aims to help organisations in the public sector and beyond to prepare and to defend against hacking threats. "This new free, online tool will be critical in toughening the cyber defences of small businesses, local government, and other public and private sector organisations," said Cabinet Office Minister David Lidington, who revealed the tool in a speech in Glasgow, Scotland at CYBERUK 19, the NCSC's cybersecurity conference. ... Exercise in a Box provides a number of scenarios based on common threats to the UK that organisations can practice in a safe environment. It comes with two different areas of exercise – technical simulation and table-top discussion. It's hoped that this tool will provide a stepping stone towards the world of cyber exercises. "The NCSC considers exercising to be one of the most cost-effective ways an organisation can test how it responds to cyber incidents," said Ciaran Martin, CEO of the NCSC.

Who hires the CDO — or does the chief data officer hire themselves?

In some circumstances, those working in the data domain, or even other C-level executives will put themselves forward as potential CDOs. As it is still a relatively new role, this means candidates are either making a case for themselves when a CDO position has opened up, or are making the case for the company to invest in a CDO position and put themselves forward for this position. For PATH, a global not-for-profit health equity organisation, the CDO position was something that was thought-up in a conversation between the CEO and the CDO-to be. “It was a discussion with the CEO which wasn’t a difficult one – he was also reading the same Gartner reports that I was reading and recognising that as an organisation we really needed to treat our data as an asset and recognised that we had no one at an institutional level championing that effort,” says PATH CDO Jeff Bernson. This meant that Bernson’s role had to be reframed into what is now known as a chief data officer role – meaning he would put more of a focus on data.

Fine line between AI becoming a buzzword and working in healthcare explored

Dr Mark Davies, IBM Watson’s chief medical officer for Europe, said the healthcare sector was “behind the curve” in using AI but we need to use it “appropriately” for it to work. He told Digital Health News the sector needed to overcome certain barriers before it can take full advantage of the benefits of AI. “Number one is access to data. AI is best when it is fed with large amounts of good quality, contemporaneous data,” he said. “We all know that getting access to good quality data globally can be challenging. “The second challenge is culture. In healthcare we can be quite slow adopters of innovation, for all sorts of reasons. “Some of that has to do with professional confidence, some of that has to do with our ability to change work practices. We tend to be quite conservative as an industry, for really good reasons… clinical safety and not doing harm is at the core of what we do. “The third is around demonstrating the impact that it has and building the evidence base in a way that it is scientifically robust so it can go through the regulatory steps.”

Intelligence Agencies Seek Fast Cyber Threat Dissemination

Intelligence officials said getting the right information into the right hands as quickly as possible is mandatory for battling online attacks. "One of the focus areas for NSA is not just the speed but the classification," Rob Joyce, senior adviser for cybersecurity strategy to the director of the U.S. National Security Agency, said during the panel, gesturing to the NCSC's Martin. "I can give Ciaran some very valuable information at the classified level, very, fast and very easy. But if it turns out that's needed in the critical infrastructure of a commercial company in the U.K., I haven't helped him a lot by handing it to him at that highest classification level." Less classification - or declassifying information altogether - can make it more useful. "Getting it ... unclassified at actionable levels and down to actionable levels is really the area that's going to pay the most dividends," Joyce said. "Exquisite intelligence that's not used is completely worthless."

How data storage will shift to blockchain

“Blockchain will disrupt data storage,” says BlockApps separately. The blockchain backend platform provider says advantages to this new generation of storage include that decentralizing data provides more security and privacy. That's due in part because it's harder to hack than traditional centralized storage. That the files are spread piecemeal among nodes, conceivably all over the world, , makes it impossible for even the participating node to view the contents of the complete file, it says. Sharding, which is the term for the breaking apart and node-spreading of the actual data, is secured through keys. Markets can award token coins for mining, and coins can be spent to gain storage. Excess storage can even be sold. And cryptocurrencies have been started to “incentivize usage and to create a market for buying and selling decentralized storage,” BlockApps explains. The final parts of this new storage mix are that lost files are minimized because data can be duplicated simply — the data sets, for example, can be stored multiple times for error correction — and costs are reduced due to efficiencies.

Load Balancing Search Traffic at Algolia With NGINX and OpenResty

An Algolia "app" has a 3 server cluster and Distributed Search Network (DSN) servers that serve search queries. DSNs are similar in function to Content Delivery Network Points-of-Presence (POPs) in that they serve data from a location closest to the user. Each app has a DNS record. Algolia's DNS configuration uses multiple top-level domains (TLDs) and two DNS providers for resiliency. Also, each app's DNS record is configured to return IP addresses of the 3 cluster servers in a round robin fashion. This was an attempt to distribute the load across all servers in a cluster. The common use case for the search cluster is through a frontend or mobile application. However, some customers have backend applications that hit the search APIs. The latter case creates an uneven load as all requests will arrive at the same server until a particular server’s DNS time-to-live (TTL) expires. One of Algolia’s apps suffered slow search queries during a Black Friday when there was heavy search load. This led to unequal distribution of queries.

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Quote for the day:

"Managers maintain an efficient status quo while leaders attack the status quo to create something new." -- Orrin Woodward

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