Daily News Archive

Please note that The Daily News is publishing (hopefully) twice a week for the foreseeable future due to time constraints.

Tuesday, August 8th

Quality in a product or service is not what the supplier puts in. It is what the customer gets out and is willing to pay for.” – Peter Drucker

 

The Picks of the Day

Record gas prices seen after Alaska shutdown

“But Kloza said the runup in price is more psychological than anything else, as the amount being taken offline isn't that much and gas prices are more impacted by Mideast violence or tropical storms in the Gulf of Mexico, home to much of the nation's refining.”

http://money.cnn.com/2006/08/07/news/economy/gas_prices/index.htm?cnn=yes

 

The Impact of Global Warming on IT

“Most people who acknowledge the reality of global warming tend to focus on its environmental and meteorological effects. But rising temperatures also can have a serious impact on modern computing technology, creating a number of physical and economic challenges for organizations and networks.”

http://itmanagement.earthweb.com/columns/article.php/3624786

 

Regulatory Compliance Remains Hot Through 2007

“However, regulatory compliance lagged only slightly behind the more pressing options, suggesting the sheer volume of new compliance requirements is touching companies of all sizes in multiple vertical markets. Likewise, the priorities in front of regulatory compliance—security infrastructure and disaster recovery (Nos. 1 and 2, respectively, on both the midmarket and enterprise list)—are a part of the fabric of ensuring businesses meet and maintain compliance.”

http://www.varbusiness.com/sections/technology/tech.jhtml?articleId=191800757

 

IT Process Improvement

ITIL: 4 Experts Share Keys to Success

“Proponents of the Information Technology Infrastructure Library, or ITIL, are promoting the framework as a way to boost discipline in technology operations, and adopt a common vocabulary for discussing quality of service and establishing metrics.”

http://www.baselinemag.com/article2/0,1540,1995131,00.asp

 

The Quick and the Dead

Making and executing strategic decisions with greater pace and confidence using RACI.

http://www.closequarter.co.uk/CloseQuarter_RACI.pdf

[This is another very good RACI resource.  I really think the author, John Corr, does a great job explaining the technique and what to analyze.]

 

Legal and Regulatory Compliance

Data center efficiency bill passes the House

“The issue of power consumption in the data center has taken center stage in many IT departments, as energy costs have skyrocketed and businesses look to expand their data centers or build new ones.”

http://searchdatacenter.techtarget.com/originalContent/0,289142,sid80_gci1199068,00.html

[I missed this when it first came out.]

 

New York trumps London for floats

“The figures reflect a growing reluctance on the part of Russian and other firms to accept America's Sarbanes-Oxley corporate governance rules. These were introduced in the wake of Enron and other accounting frauds and impose expensive disclosure requirements on all US-listed companies.”

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/business/story/0,,1838000,00.html

 

Importance of Basel II

“Basel-II is designed to help banks adopt a more comprehensive, sophisticated and risk-sensitive approach for calculating regulatory capital. It also provides banks with a unique opportunity to modernise and upgrade their overall risk practices and risk infrastructure, specifically for credit and operational risk. So for the banks, Basel II means more than compliance; rather it denotes the opportunity to achieve distinct competitive advantage in a competitive global market.”

http://www.financialexpress-bd.com/index3.asp?cnd=8/7/2006&section_id=5&newsid=33450&spcl=no

 

Security and Risk Management

Beware the ‘Bump’ Key

“As lockpicking gains traction as a hobby, a surprisingly easy new technique has been circulating online and among hackers.”

http://msnbc.msn.com/id/14157179/

[I’d not heard of this before and the article was very interesting.  From there, I did some digging and turned up a number of interesting links for further reference:

·         The Open Organization Of LockPickers (TOOOL) website
http://www.toool.nl/

·         “Bumping Locks” at TOOOL
http://www.toool.nl/bumping.pdf

 

Teens arrested in VA laptop theft

“Two teenagers were arrested Saturday in the theft of a laptop and hard drive containing sensitive data on up to 26.5 million veterans and military personnel, authorities said.”

http://www.cnn.com/2006/US/08/05/laptop.arrests.ap/index.html

 

People the Achilles' heel of computer security: hackers, pros

“The most vexing weakness in computer security is not in the hardware or the software, it is in the people who use the machines, according to top hackers and cyber safety specialists.”

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20060807/ts_alt_afp/afplifestyleitinternet_060807092531

[What a brutal, but honest, quote:  “Social engineering specialist, because there is no patch for human stupidity” – Kevin Mitnick]

 

Human Error / Safety

The Environmental Protection Agencies’ Global Warming Website

http://yosemite.epa.gov/OAR/globalwarming.nsf/content/index.html

 

World View of Global Warming

http://www.worldviewofglobalwarming.org/

 

Companies embrace ‘green’ buildings

“Green construction and renovation techniques are spreading in the commercial real estate industry. Innovations -- such as sun-reflecting ceramic dots in windows, giant vats of ice for overnight energy storage, plant-covered rooftops, bigger eaves and compact fluorescent lighting -- are being used in structures ranging from an unassuming PNC branch that opened last month in Ashburn to the new Bank of America building that will soon be New York City's second-tallest skyscraper. The new designs have been spurred not only by concerns for the environment but also by the cold, hard calculation of the potential savings in energy bills.”

http://msnbc.msn.com/id/14193541/

 

Outsourcing / Globalization / International

Goodbye, Guanxi

“China’s politically connected companies are under pressure to overhaul financial management. The initial success of China Gas may indicate cause for some optimism.”

http://www.cfoasia.com/archives/200606-01.htm

 

India needs huge services boost

“India needs to invest $331bn (£173bn) on infrastructure over the next five years if it wants to maintain its rapid economic growth, a study suggests.”

http://southasia.oneworld.net/article/view/137477/1/1893

 

Skills shortage hits India

“Facing a shortage of skilled workers for India's booming software and services industry, Infosys recruiters have been scouting the world for talent.  Graduates are being trained by Infosys to become top-notch software programmers in just 16 weeks.”

http://australianit.news.com.au/articles/0,7204,20042766%5e15306%5e%5enbv%5e,00.html?from=rss

 

Infosys Hires Non-Indians

“Partly in response to the developing shortage of skilled tech workers in India, Indian IT and business process outsourcing (BPO) company Infosys is hiring more foreigners.  That initiative is part of an aggressive hiring year for Insosys, which plans to add 25,000 workers this year alone. The company's total current workforce is close to 58,000 employees, of which 1,800, or 3 percent, are non-Indians.”

http://www.line56.com/articles/default.asp?ArticleID=7825

[I have a hard time fathoming the processes and organizational structures needed to onboard 25,000 new employees in one year.  That proposed volume is absolutely stunning.  Without mature standard processes, this would be impossible.]

 

Economics / Business / Misc.

Economics: Overshooting pains: Has Fed gone too far?

“While Bernanke and his colleagues may leave their interest rate target unchanged Tuesday, the U.S. economy might already be headed for a steeper slowdown than the Fed wants. Housing, consumer spending on durable goods and corporate outlays on equipment all contracted last quarter for the first time in 15 years as interest rates and oil prices rose.”

http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/08/06/bloomberg/bxecon.php

 

VOIP Cuts Out Middlemen

“The accelerating migration of service providers and enterprises to VOIP peering platforms is having a profound and permanent impact on the economics of telecom network interconnect, resulting in the disintermediation of a number of operators from once-lucrative businesses …”

http://www.unstrung.com/document.asp?doc_id=100757&WT.svl=wire1_2

Thursday, August 10th

"The single most important thing to remember about any enterprise is that results exist only on the outside.  The result of a business is a satisfied customer. The result of a hospital is a healed patient. The result of a school is a student who has learned something and puts it to work 10 years later. Inside an enterprise, there are only costs.” -- Peter Drucker

 

The Picks of the Day

SEC Extends Small-Company 404 Deadlines

“The Securities and Exchange Commission on Wednesday granted smaller public companies, including many foreign private issuers, extensions for complying with Section 404 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act.  Further, the SEC has proposed that newly public companies not be required to meet Section 404 requirements, covering internal controls over financial reporting, in their first annual public filing.”

http://www.cfo.com/article.cfm/7270124?f=alerts

 

Could We Go Dark Again? Utility companies say they've taken steps to prevent outages

“’The system has been upgraded in a number of areas and I'm confident that since 2003, large strides have been made to ensure that distribution and generation systems are more reliable,’ said Peter Lark, chairman of the Michigan Public Service Commission, which regulates electric generation across the state.

http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060806/BUSINESS06/608060480

 

XBR-What?

“Proponents say it will speed reporting, aid analysis, reduce errors, and improve audits. Some claim that it may ultimately streamline the gap between internal and external reporting by uniting disparate information across ERP and other core IT systems.  If this comes as news to you, you're not alone. Few CFOs seem aware of what XBRL can do, where it stands in its development, or how a company might take advantage of it.”

http://www.cfo.com/article.cfm/7239661?f=FinancialSoftware080806

 

IT Process Improvement

ITIL assists Arab Bank

“Based in the Jordanian capital, Amman, Arab Bank today has one of the biggest branch networks in the Middle East.  For the banking group, considered to be the largest by equity in the Arab World, introducing and adopting ITIL (IT Infrastructure Library) processes was considered to be a sure shot way to help improve service delivery, quality and customer satisfaction.”

http://www.cpilive.net/v3/inside.aspx?scr=n&NID=739&cat=CASE%20STUDY&pub=COMPUTER%20NEWS%20MIDDLE%20EAST&k=Arab%20Bank,%20ITIL

 

Walter A. Shewhart

This wikipedia page is dedicated to the father of statistical process control.  Shewhart was a mentor to Deming.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_A._Shewhart

[When one looks at the volumes of graphs IT generates, one must wonder why we do not make greater use of proven statistical process control techniques.]

 

Legal and Regulatory Compliance

Cox's Year 2 Means Showing Sarbanes-Oxley Works

“Critics' primary evidence is the overwhelming number of big initial public offerings that have launched in London, Hong Kong and elsewhere - anywhere, it seems, other than New York.  Ignored in this picture is that many of the IPOs involved the privatization of state-run companies, which presumably would favor local exchanges like Hong Kong's.”

http://accounting.smartpros.com/x54256.xml

 

Security and Risk Management

Black Hat Attendees Most Interested In Vista Security

“More than half of the attendees of the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas plan to review Microsoft's Windows Vista platform in the next year, a survey released Friday showed.  The survey conducted this week by Applied Research on behalf of security firm Symantec Corp. also found that Web services followed by mobile technologies were expected to generate over time the hottest issues within Web application security. Web services is a term used to describe Web-based applications that dynamically interact using open standards.”

http://www.channelweb.com/sections/allnews/article.jhtml?articleId=191800827&cid=ChannelWebNews

 

Security guru lays into database vendors

“In his address at the Black Hat conference in Las Vegas last week, he released details of more than 20 holes that he and his researchers at U.K.-based Next Generation Security Software had uncovered in IBM's Informix database family.”

http://www.infoworld.com/article/06/08/07/HNdatabaseholes_1.html?source=rss&url=http://www.infoworld.com/article/06/08/07/HNdatabaseholes_1.html

 

Chemical Industry Giants Zone in on Cyber-Security

“In a worst-case scenario, lax cyber-security at a chemical company could be truly explosive. Security inadequacies have the potential to result in safety risks to plant employees and local communities, business interruption, lost capital, physical attack, identity theft for the purpose of acquiring chemicals, and access to systems to cause plant disruptions, according to a position paper issued by the Chemical Information Technology Council Executive Board.”

http://news.yahoo.com/s/zd/20060807/tc_zd/184941

 

VA desktop PC stolen, 36,000 could be at risk

“For the second time in less than three months, a computer with the personal information of thousands of U.S. veterans has been stolen. The Department of Veterans Affairs said Monday that a desktop PC containing data on as many as 16,000 veterans was stolen from the office of Unisys Corp., a contractor that was doing insurance collections for the VA.”

http://searchsecurity.techtarget.com/originalContent/0,289142,sid14_gci1208747,00.html?track=NL-102&ad=559506HOUSE&asrc=EM_NNL_430927&uid=3121061

[Note who was responsible – Unisys – not the VA.  The desktop was stolen from a Unisys office.  It highlights the need to have sensitive data properly secured – ideally on a physically and logically controlled server and not just a desktop.]

 

Is Your Blackberry a Hacker's Back Door?

“BlackBerry is in the news again. This time, the buzz surrounds a soon-to-be-released hacking program aimed at the tool. But don't worry. Like the threatened shutdown of Blackberries this past winter, this new threat may do little more than highlight the ubiquity of the devices.”

http://www.cfo.com/article.cfm/7269356/c_7269383?f=alerts

 

Human Error / Safety

How to get to the bottom of the global warming debate

“The pronouncements of climate modelers, who don't do experiments, don't make observations, don't even confect theories, but rather [in my opinion] play computer games using huge programs containing dozens of separate components the details of which they may be largely ignorant, don't move me. I am much more impressed by direct evidence: retreating glaciers, longer growing seasons, the migration of species, rising sea level, etc.”

http://www.usatoday.com/tech/columnist/aprilholladay/2006-08-07-global-warming-truth_x.htm?csp=34

 

Scientists Say Melting Permafrost Could Amplify Global Warming

“New research shows that global warming might be worse than expected because of melting permafrost, permanently frozen soil, which can release the ‘greenhouse’ gas, carbon dioxide. Computer models predict higher future temperatures when these gases are taken into consideration.”

http://www.voanews.com/english/2006-08-07-voa72.cfm

 

Expert View: Global warming: 100 years of living dangerously

“Not many people now dispute that it is happening. Although variations in temperature are nothing new (the Romans made wine in northern Britain, Samuel Pepys recorded oxen roasted on the frozen Thames), the speed and size of the increase in the global average temperature in recent times is unprecedented. Moreover, it is readily explained by the greenhouse effect, which is a long-established piece of 19th-century science.”

http://news.independent.co.uk/business/comment/article1215870.ece

 

Homeowners may feel heat of global warming

“Global warming could soon hit homeowners in the pocketbook.  An influential but little known segment of the insurance industry is considering whether climate change might be partly to blame for more intense hurricanes in the North Atlantic. The result of this examination, which comes as scientists debate the same question, could be skyrocketing insurance rates in coastal regions from Maine to Texas.”

http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2006/08/06/homeowners_may_feel_heat_of_global_warming/

 

U.S. scales back Atlantic hurricane forecast

“The United States hurricane season will be slightly less intense this year than first predicted with nine hurricanes expected to form, government forecasters said on Tuesday, but they warned the most dangerous part of the season was still to come.”

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14244391/

 

Safety a concern as drones catch on

“Crashes of drone planes flying over the USA are worrying pilots and lawmakers who fear that a surge in interest by federal and local agencies to use the unmanned aircraft could lead to danger in the skies.”

http://news.yahoo.com/s/usatoday/20060807/tc_usatoday/safetyaconcernasdronescatchon

 

Outsourcing / Globalization / International

US BPO firms post solid performance

“More US-based and publicly listed global business process outsourcing providers reported strong Philippine call center operations during webcasts of their second quarter earnings releases, Catanduanes Rep. Joseph Santiago, a backer of the country's technology-enabled service industries, said.”

http://www.mb.com.ph/archive_pages.php?url=http://www.mb.com.ph/issues/2006/08/07/BSNS2006080771165.html

 

Big U.S. Business Troupe Is Being Readied for India

“The Bush administration is organizing a business delegation to India this fall, potentially the largest such mission ever to a single country, an administration official said Monday, and one that underscores the economic potential of a nation of 1.1 billion, with an annual growth rate of 8 percent.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/08/business/worldbusiness/08trade.html?_r=1&ref=worldbusiness&oref=login

 

Viewpoint: Outsourcing vs. isolationism

“If anyone is singularly qualified to offer advice to policy makers, business executives and academics on managing the politics of outsourcing, it is Gregory Mankiw.  As the chairman of George W. Bush's Council of Economic Advisers during the last U.S. presidential campaign, the Harvard University economist got badgered by Democrats and Republicans alike for suggesting that it was fine for American companies to relocate customer help desks to India.”

http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/08/08/bloomberg/sxmuk.php

 

Economics / Business / Misc.

Worker productivity growth slows

“The Labor Department reported that productivity — the amount of output per hour of work — slowed to an annual rate of increase of 1.1 percent in the April-June quarter, down from a 4.3 percent rate of increase in the first three months of the year.”

http://msnbc.msn.com/id/14242625/

 

Execs: Foreign rivals gain on U.S.

“Nearly half the senior executives of U.S. companies in a survey by PricewaterhouseCoopers think the USA has lost competitive ground in the global economy.”

http://www.usatoday.com/money/world/2006-08-08-compete-usat_x.htm?csp=34

 

Science reveals secrets of invisibility

“Invisibility has long been a fantastical ability exclusively enjoyed by teenage wizards, super heroes and the ultra-advanced civilisations of science fiction.  But more pragmatic-minded scientists and engineers now believe that invisibility-enabling technology may be within reach of lesser mortals as well.”

http://www.cnn.com/2006/TECH/science/08/09/feature.invisibility/index.html