I can't eat, I
can't sleep, and I can't seem to pull myself away from the Net. Election time
must be near.
While obsessing
over politics, I found some wicked-cool sites I had to share with my faithful
readers.
A couple of weeks
ago I wrote here that YouTube has forever changed our electoral politics]. (I also did a podcast on this topic with Geekazine's Jeff Powers earlier this week. If you've got half an hour to kill, check it out.)
At the techPresident
blog, Micah Sifry has put dollars and sense on YouTube's value. First
he asked YouTube metrics company TubeMogul to calculate how much time
YouTubers have spent watching each campaign's videos (not including those
submitted by partisans and jokesters on either side). The answer: Obama wins by
a huge margin.
Writes Sifry:
"The total in absolute time (views * video length):
Obama 14,548,809.05 hours; McCain 488,093.01 hours."
Then Sifry asked
political guru Joe Trippi how much Obama's YouTube hours would be worth in
actual dollars, using typical TV ad spending as a measure. The answer? A
whopping $46 million.
The value of
McCain's YouTubing? About $1.5 million. So Obama has gotten about 30 times as
much free air time on the Web as his rival. Tells you a lot, don't it?
In some of the articles we have posted this year, some of the Top 10 on the list in this article have been discussed. What would you add - or take away - if you formed your own version of a list like this? Marlene
On Tuesday,
Gartner analysts Carl Claunch and Dave Cearley gave a crowd of IT leaders at
the Gartner Symposium IT Expo 2008 a list of the top 10 technologies that will
provide important strategic advantages to IT over the next three years. They
encouraged the leaders to keep these technologies in mind as they formulate
budgets and long-term plans.
Claunch and
Cearley delivered their list in the presentation “Top 10 Strategic Technology
Areas for 2009″ at the Orlando
event. Here’s how they defined the “strategic technologies” that made the list:
“A strategic
technology is one with the potential for significant impact on the enterprise
in the next three years. Factors that denote significant impact include a high
potential for disruption to IT or the business, the need for a major dollar
investment, or the risk of being late to adopt. Companies should factor these
technologies into their strategic planning process by asking key questions and
making deliberate decisions about them during the next two years. Sometimes the
decision will be to do nothing with a particular technology. In other cases it
will be to continue investing in the technology at the current rate. In still
other cases the decision may be to test/pilot or more aggressively adopt/deploy
the technology.”
Gartner also listed the top 10 tech IT leaders to watch for 2009 - 2011. Watch for the list on Wednesday, Oct 29th. Marlene
This post was appeared previously on October 15th, 2008 Author: Larry Dignan
http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/hiner/?p=867
Gartner has
revised its 2009 IT budget prognostications, a move that isn’t surprising, but
the firm’s projections could be a lot worse.
Peter Sondergaard,
senior vice president of research at Gartner, outlined the research group’s new
projections in his opening keynote at the Gartner Symposium
ITxpo in Orlando
(all posts and the firm’s Twitter feed). Gartner’s opening
keynote is an analyst relay that is part sales pitch and part pep talk to urge
technology managers to innovate, manage through tough times and be aligned with
the business better.
The meat of the
talk, however, was the downturn. The upshot:
Gartner had expected budgets to grow 3.3
percent in 2009.
Now the most likely case is IT budget growth
of 2.3 percent to 0 percent;
The worst case is that IT budgets will be down
2.5 percent.
While Sondergaard
noted all of the gloom and doom, he said information technology execs are most
suited for this upheaval. Why? IT folks have already been through this–has
anyone really forgotten 2001 to 2003?
His overall
message is that IT has options. Sure, it would be silly to think that budgets
written two weeks ago are going to stick. As for overall technology spending,
financial services customers, the public sector, retail and manufacturing are
all likely to curb spending.
However,
Sondergaard said budgets aren’t likely to totally collapse. “IT is embedded in
your business now. You can’t invoice somebody without IT,” he said. Sondergaard
also noted that Western Europe has the worst
IT spending outlook, but Asia Pacific will still grow at a healthy clip. North America looks flattish.
Monday's post about the effect on M&A's on IT departments focused on the critical due
diligence process of examining the overall state of an organization's
enterprise IT systems. This piece by Frank Hayes gets down to a more microscopic vision about the tech pitfalls that are inherent in these "overnight" mergers. Marlene
Here's what
happened: On Sept. 15, giant investment bank Lehman Brothers collapsed into bankruptcy.
Three days later, lawyers for Barclays Capital were furiously working to finish up
an agreement to purchase some of Lehman's assets in time to meet a bankruptcy
court deadline.
Those assets --
contracts that were worth money to Lehman -- were listed in a spreadsheet. One
of the spreadsheet's columns indicated whether Barclays wanted the assets with
a "Y" for yes and "N" for no.
A Lehman exec sent
the spreadsheet to Barclays' law firm barely four hours before the deadline.
But it had to be converted from Excel to a PDF to be submitted to the court. An
associate lawyer glanced at the spreadsheet, saw nothing but Y's in the
"Do we want it?" column, and sent it to a law clerk with instructions
to cut out certain columns and turn it into a PDF.
You can see what's
coming, can't you?
The clerk cut out
the columns, then saw that some of the rows were formatted oddly. He
reformatted the spreadsheet into nice, even rows and converted the result to a
PDF, then sent it back to the associate, who posted the file without even
looking at it.
No one noticed
that the new version was 179 rows longer than the original. In fact, 20% of the
items in the spreadsheet -- the ones with an "N" -- had been hidden
automatically using an Excel function. When the clerk cut out the "Do we
want it?" column, they reappeared.
The American National Standards
Institute (ANSI) and the Internet Security Alliance (ISA) recommend that CFOs engaged in an “overnight” merger and acquisition (as we see
occurring in our current financial climate) should spend the time to ask the
right questions to gain pertinent information from their technology team,
business managers, internal compliance officers, and corporate legal counsels,
as well as crisis management and PR teams. Marlene
New guide gives
CFOs 50 questions about cyberthreats to ask various department heads
October 20, 2008
(Computerworld)A good place for senior executives to start in
trying to understand their companies' financial exposure to cyberthreats is by
getting an overall assessment — not just from IT, but also from business units
and corporate operations such as the human resources, legal and public
relations departments.
That piece of
advice is contained in an information guide that the American National Standards
Institute (ANSI) and the Internet Security Alliance (ISA) jointly released
today in an effort to help high-level execs prepare for the financial
implications of possible cyberattacks.
But as fundamental
as that notion might seem, the guide says that the continued failure of chief
financial officers and other corporate executives to gather a multidimensional
view of IT
security threats often leaves companies dangerously unprepared for the
sometimes staggering
costs that can result when their systems are attacked.
The 40-page guide was
put together by a task force of risk management executives from more than
two-dozen organizations, including Carnegie Mellon University, IBM, insurers American International Group
(AIG) and State Farm Insurance, defense contractor Lockheed Martin and
consulting firms Booz Allen Hamilton and KPMG. The document lists a series of
50 questions that CFOs and other executives should be asking the leaders of
various internal groups, according to ANSI and the ISA.
The questions are
designed to elicit information that can help provide a more holistic picture of
a company's exposure to security threats, and the potential costs of either
ignoring or mitigating
those threats, said Ty Sagalow, president of product development at AIG's
general insurance group.
Sagalow, who led a
series of workshops that resulted in the new guide, said a lesson that the
participants quickly learned during the sessions was that "cybersecurity,
which has been traditionally viewed by some companies as an IT issue, is not
just an IT issue." Just like, he added, it isn't purely a legal or PR
issue.
As for the
possibility that some IT managers could view increased involvement in security
issues by other departments as encroaching on their turf, Sagalow and other
members of the task force said they don't expect that to be an issue. Many IT
departments already recognize that they're only part of the solution to
cybersecurity issues, said Edward Stull, a software architect at Direct
Computer Resources Inc. and chairman of an IT security best-practices group for
the InterNational Committee on Information Technology Standards.
According to
Sagalow, this is the first time that an effort is being made to provide CFOs,
who ultimately have to sign the checks for security investments, with a means
for better understanding the financial ramifications of cyberthreats.
Who among you
have been through a merger and acquisition deal “back in the day”, before the
current Wall Street meltdown? Any words
of wisdom to add to this article? Marlene
Weekend M&As
don't offer IT teams enough time to analyze security threats, competing systems
and integration synergies, or figure out how to consolidate enterprise
applications. But even in today's tumultuous financial landscape, IT needs to
ensure due diligence is done and make the deals work.
Mergers
and acquisitions are not usually quickie affairs. There's much thought given to
M&A synergies, cost savings and value creation. And in the gray zone
between "intent to purchase" and finalizing a merger or acquisition comes
the critical IT-related due diligence—that period where IT (and other) systems
are scrutinized, and buyers can decide to pull out because the company's a mess
or there's just too much risk involved.
But, of course,
these are not usual times.
The critical due
diligence process of examining the overall state of an organization's
enterprise IT systems—the infrastructure, applications, outsourcing deals and
vendor contracts in place—can take up to a week, according to industry
consultants.
Recently, however,
entire acquisition
deals in financial services have taken place over the course of one weekend. A
few of the biggest deals of late include: Bank of America
acquiring a desperate Merrill Lynch;
JPMorgan Chase buying a floundering Washington Mutual
(WaMu); and Wells Fargo besting Citigroup to purchase Wachovia.
These so-called
"shotgun" M&As are both a testament to the dire circumstances on
Wall Street and a test of CIOs' and their IT staffs' ability to analyze,
prioritize and integrate systems in a hurry.
"The shotgun
marriages are being arranged, the companies are at the altars, the ceremonies are
being held over the weekend, the ministers are various federal agencies, sort
of instructing companies about what they need to do and on what terms, and
there is no IT due diligence," says Tom Casey, a VP at Booz &
Company. "It's just not happening."
In M&As, the
Heat Is on IT
The prospect of
not vetting IT systems before a deal is scary: Unknown security threats and
vulnerabilities, and unsecured IT assets and Internet connections are just a
couple of the worries for the customers of Lumeta,
a network mapping and monitoring vendor, says CTO Michael Markulec. "You
can't secure what you can't manage," he says, "and you can't manage
what you don't know."
That type of
insight is even more important in financial services, since IT spend typically
is a hulking 15 percent of overall revenue, according to Casey, which is an
indication of the crucial role IT (and its security) plays in financial
institutions. "IT is the backbone of how these banks operate," he
adds, "and you're not going to get these major [M&A] synergies without
addressing the IT stuff."
When companies
give short shrift to scrutinizing IT systems, M&As become even riskier than
inherently they already are. M&As are tricky to get right even in
"normal" times with appropriate due diligence, and many don't return
the expected value. According to an August 2007 Boston Consulting Group study of more than 4,000 completed
mergers and acquisitions between 1992 and 2006, 58 percent of deals actually
destroyed value for acquirers, with a net loss of 1.2 percent for all
transactions.
Now, in these
crazy times, IT teams will be put to an even greater test to try to make these
deals work. CIOs and IT departments are tasked with assessing and, ultimately,
meshing together dissimilar systems that are expected to provide efficiencies
and savings—ASAP.
"One of the
key factors of very big integrations is the ability of IT to consolidate and
streamline the acquisition onto a single platform and gain significant cost
savings," CIO Tom Sanzone told CIO
in late 2007, when he was CIO of Credit Suisse. (Sanzone took over the top IT
spot at Merrill Lynch in 2008. See "Financial
Industry Mergers, Acquisitions and Meltdowns: What's in Store for IT Execs and
Staffers?" for more on his transition and fate in the new Bank of
America.)
"As the head
of IT," said Sanzone, who has been through several M&As, "I know
what would be expected of me, and that's certainly a type of pressure I have
felt."
But in a heated
M&A climate with little if any time for due diligence, pressure on IT
intensifies. The difficulty of ensuring smooth systems integration and careful
consolidation (with no surprises) is dialed up even more. Unfortunately, said
Barry Jaruzelski, VP and lead marketing officer at Booz Allen Hamilton, in the CIOarticle, companies "don't
realize just how hard and expensive it is to consolidate onto one
platform."
The ongoing chaos
on Wall Street could hold an upside for vendors of risk management
technologies and practices, as well as sellers of compliance management
products.
Analysts expect an
increased interest in these products from financial companies for competitive
reasons, and to comply with the new regulations that many predict are
inevitable following the meltdown.
One area many
agree is likely to see much greater interest is risk modeling and financial
risk management.
There are some
"core tenets" for effective risk management highlighted by the
current crisis, said Dave Hoag, director of clearing technology at
Chicago-based derivatives exchange CME Group.
The biggest of
them: the need for fair and transparent visibility into the models, data and
analytics that go into calculating the risk associated with different financial
transactions, Hoag said. Expect to see greater investment in risk management
technologies as companies seek, or are driven to, implement this greater
transparency in their risk calculation processes, he said.
Even though the
current problems on Wall Street have more to do with an absence of regulatory
oversight than with faulty risk-management practices, expect to see a greater
focus on accounting for risk at least for some time, said Glyn Holton, an
independent financial risk management consultant based in Boston.
"Financial risk
management makes a wonderful scapegoat [for the current crisis]," Holton
said. "This is a cycle we go through when we have losses. We trot out the
back-office risk management guys. There will be some more focus on
strengthening risk management, some technology will be purchased, and probably
monitoring will be increased."
Dennis Santiago,
CEO of professional services firm Institutional Risk Analytics, said the Wall
Street crisis has exposed some fundamental shortcomings in the risk-modeling
technologies and analytics being used currently.
"We have been
pretty much using the same tools now for a decade. One of the things that is
clearly beginning to show itself at this stage is that the techniques that
worked in the last business cycle for managing risk don't work as well
anymore," Santiago said.
No
surprise I'm sure to most of you out there that IT spending would be affected
by the country's economic downturn. But do you think that the IT world
will bear more of the brunt of the funding squeeze in businesses than some
other departments and areas? Let us know your thoughts and
suggestions.
Marlene
Deepening
economic gloom prompts consulting firm to reduce its IT spending forecast for
'09
The image of Franklin Roosevelt was among
those flashed on the screen during the opening session at Gartner Inc.'s Symposium/ITxpo 2008 conference here
today, as part of a parade of grim messages and recommendations from Gartner
analysts about the Wall
Street meltdown. The only piece of advice about the economic situation that
drew a hearty laugh from the IT managers in the crowd was this: "Don't buy
junk."
The No. 1 item on
Gartner's list of what IT execs have to prepare for was the worst of all, from
a manager's standpoint: hiring freezes and possibly
even layoffs. It was a somber message for the 6,000 attendees at the
conference.
"The next big
thing in IT is not a technology — it is cost reduction, risk
management and compliance," said Peter Sondergaard, Gartner's global
head of research.
Gartner, which
said in a report late last month that it didn't
expect a recession in tech spending, now is forecasting that overall
spending will grow 3% year over year during the current quarter and then increase
2.3% next year — a reduction from its previous projections. And the consulting
firm isn't ruling out IT budget cuts as deep as 20% at some businesses.
"This is no downturn; this is a crisis," Gartner analyst Whit Andrews said.
But what does all
this bad economic news mean, exactly? Other than Gartner's somber outlook on
possible staffing actions, much of the advice dispensed here was familiar, and
some of it has long
been on the radar of many IT managers who were in attendance. And it has
always been true that companies want to cut costs as well as expand their
technical capabilities.
September 29,
2008(Computerworld) Last
week, a pair of security researchers spread the news that a new class of
vulnerabilities, called "clickjacking," puts users of every major
browser at risk from possible attack.
Robert Hansen,
founder and chief executive of SecTheory LLC, and Jeremiah Grossman, chief technology officer at
WhiteHat Security Inc., spilled
some beans last week after they gave a semi-closed presentation at OWASP
AppSec 2008 in New York.
Maybe because of
the catchy name, or perhaps because it's actually serious stuff, clickjacking
got some press. But that still leaves open the question: Just how spooky is it?
Are we talking run-for-the-hills scary, or is this just another theoretical
attack vector? And what should you do to protect yourself?
We have questions,
as usual, and fewer straight answers than we'd like.
What is
clickjacking?
Good question. Getting to an answer, though, is a little tough, since Hansen
and Grossman are keeping virtually all details confidential, at least for now.
Here's how Grossman put it to Computerworld last Friday:
"Think
of any button on any Web site that you can get to appear between the browser
walls. Wire transfers on banks, Digg buttons, CPC advertising banners, Netflix
queue.... The list is virtually endless, and these are relatively harmless
examples. Next, consider that an attack can invisibly hover these buttons below
the users' mouse, so that when they click on something they visually see, they
actually are clicking on something the attacker wants them to."
In plain English,
clickjacking lets hackers and scammers hide malicious stuff under the cover of
the content on a legitimate site. You know what happens when a carjacker takes
a car? Well, clickjacking is like that, except that the click is the
car.
Hey! You! Get off
of my cloud Hey! You! Get off
of my cloud Don't hang around 'cause two's a crowd On my cloud, baby. So say the Rolling Stones back in 1965. What say all of you out there about the following statements by Stallman and Larry Ellison? Marlene
Web-based programs like Google's Gmail will force
people to buy into locked, proprietary systems that will cost more and more
over time, according to the free software campaigner
The concept of
using web-based programs like Google's Gmail is "worse than
stupidity", according to a leading advocate of free software.
Cloud
computing – where IT power is delivered over the internet as you need it,
rather than drawn from a desktop computer – has gained currency in recent
years. Large internet and technology companies including Google, Microsoft and
Amazon are pushing forward their plans to deliver information and software over
the net.
But Richard
Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation and creator of the computer
operating system GNU, said that cloud computing was simply a trap aimed at
forcing more people to buy into locked, proprietary systems that would cost
them more and more over time.
"It's
stupidity. It's worse than stupidity: it's a marketing hype campaign," he
told The Guardian.
"Somebody is
saying this is inevitable – and whenever you hear somebody saying that, it's
very likely to be a set of businesses campaigning to make it true."
The 55-year-old
New Yorker said that computer users should be keen to keep their information in
their own hands, rather than hand it over to a third party.
Part 4 and the conclusion of the interview with Vint Cerf, "Father of the Internet".
In the first part of the
interview, Cerf voiced his concern about the idea of trying to
centralize everything, and that a Washington appointed "czar" to assume
control over technology policy could be compared to the "War on Drugs"
or "War on Poverty". He feels it never quite works, but suggests a cabinet- level person, comparing this to his "evangelist" position at Google, wherein he does not make decisions. What he does is "lobby like crazy". Any comments on this premise? Marlene
Should government play a role in building out infrastructure or is that best
left to the private sector alone?
Cerf: It sometimes takes steps
to illustrate the existence of a market to motivate the business sector. In the
late 1980s, I asked the Federal Networking Council for permission to put a
commercial electronic mail system up on the Internet. My motivation, in part, was
to allow commercial traffic to flow on the government-sponsored backbone as a
way of demonstrating to the business sector that there might be a market that
[businesses] should invest in.
Getting rid of
that barrier created an opportunity for commercial Internet service without
having to build the backbone. Once that market was demonstrated, it didn’t take long before the
government said: Gee, we don’t
need our government-sponsored backbone anymore, because everybody can buy
commercial service.
With
Google unveiling its Android operating system to challenge the iPhone, I’m reminded ofJonathan
Zittrain’s thoughts on “generative” technologies, open platforms that allow people to tinker and innovate, versus closed or tightly
controlled platforms like the iPhone. What kind of phone are you carrying, and
what does it say about you?
Cerf: I use a RIM BlackBerry. I’m anticipating the use of
an iPhone or something like it. What I’m eager for is a phone that runs the Android
operating system, because of the openness of the design. It’s the evolving flexibility
of mobile platforms that’s so critical.
One can understand
some of the decision-making that went on at Apple when preparing the iPhone.
A closed device
has the benefit that people can’t
make changes to it that may cause it to stop working.
The counterpoint
is that almost every information technology I can think of, as it becomes more
useful and competitors arise, leads to demands from users that interoperability
is paramount. In the case of the Internet, the TCP/IP protocols turned out to
be demanded by the buyers of new equipment, so that they wouldn’t be locked into any
particular manufacturer. So standardization has this wonderful benefit of
leading to interoperability, and it also creates a platform on top of which new
innovations can happen. But there’s this tension between differentiation and
interworking that repeats itself over and over again as time goes on.
The following is the 3rd part of 4 sections from a CIO interview with "The Father Of The Internet". Here he refers to the FCC argument to relax all regulatory strictures, to encourage people to offer broadband services. However, he does not feel that intermodal competition is going to be a solution to the problem we are facing of not having very effective broadband services .
Hmmmm. Very interesting. Where have I heard something about the problems occurring following the relaxing of regulatory restrictions? Let me think... Marlene
Cerf: One of the most important
things CIOs should be asking themselves is, Are we ready for IP version 6?
And if we’re not, why not, and what
can we do to fix that? The reason that’s so important is that the Internet cannot continue
to grow effectively without the new address space. There are efforts going on
to implement that, but it’s absolutely critical that
our business sector, the private sector, be prepared for operation of both IPv6
and IPv4. The Internet service providers need to start offering that service.
Not very many of them are; they’re
claiming they don’t see a market for it. The
answer is: We’re going to run out of v4
address space somewhere around 2011, and that’s not very long from now in terms of preparing a
fully operational IPv6 system running concurrently with IPv4. So please pay
attention to that.
We’ve spoken before about
exaggerated claims that the Internet is ready to choke on traffic volume,
especially video traffic. Those claims obscure real problems at the edge of the
network, the so-called last mile.
Cerf: There is substantial
capacity -
potential,
anyway -
in the core of
the Net. The edges are at issue, and part of the reason is that there too few
competitors providing service. In the United States , the idea that the
Internet is choking at the edge of the Net might have some validity. Our
delivery capacities are far less than what other countries and other Internet
providers have been able to achieve.
The following is the second part of 4 sections of a CIO interview with "The Father Of The Internet", Vint Cerf. I find the issues about "bit rot" to be particularly interesting - as we all struggle day to day with figuring out how to access files in different formats. Any comments? See part 3 on Friday, October 3, 2008 Marlene
The Obama
campaign has talked about naming a national chief technology officer.
Cerf: If there were such a
position, whether a CIO position or a CTO, as the Obama campaign refers to it,
having that position in the cabinet leads to the question, What does that party
actually do? Does that party have a budget? Will the organization formed under
this position have authority for certain things and, if so, what will they be?
The worst thing is
to have a position where all you can do is say “no,”
because if you say “yes,” you can’t afford to pay for
anything. That’s a source of frustration
for a number of people in the private sector who serve as chief technology
officers: If they don’t have budget and staff, it’s very hard to make
something happen.
Your
advocacy for network neutrality carries some weight, given your role in
Internet history. What’s your thinking on the issue?
Cerf: This is more complicated
than it looks. The debate was boiled down to bumper stickers for a while, which
was not helpful in terms of understanding what the issues are.
Openness to new
applications, openness to devices that are compatible - those things are
important to us. At Google, we take the view that the providers of Internet
access should not take advantage of their access position to interfere with
people offering competitive applications to the applications provided by the
underlying transport and access provider. We don’t think that’s a good thing from the consumer point of view, and
certainly not from the innovative point of view.
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