Angry Birds on a Hacked ATM

Source: YouTube, 14th February 2013
So you could hack an ATM to obtain some Primary Account Numbers (PANs) and expiry dates, or on the other hand if the ATM is touchscreen…

Read More

Why we should ban resumes!

The idea of matching someone’s skills and experience on a resume to a job description consisting of an arbitrary list of skills and experiences seems rather archaic to me. Some people actually defend doing this faster as a major advance in modern HR practices.
(Note: due to the interest in this topic I've scheduled a live webcast on February 28th to discuss alternatives to resumes. One idea - a performance-based segment as part of a LinkedIn profile. Add your ideas below.)
In a recent post I suggested that a better first step was a candidate being referred to a recruiter or hiring manager by someone already in the company, a vendor, a customer, or someone who can personally vouch for the job-seeker based on the person's past performance. This is equivalent to using the company employee referral program to proactively seek out more top performers. Most companies recognize this as one of their best sources for new talent and the primary reason why referral programs are being expanded using tools like LinkedIn. Promoting people through internal mobility is also based on the tried and true concept that performance is more important than experience.
In my new book I suggest that the process used for internal promotions represents a good model for finding and hiring people from the outside. Adopting this approach involves eliminating traditional skills-infested job descriptions, replacing them with performance profiles, and reconfiguring the box-checking first step.
Due to the “radical” nature of this proposal I asked David Goldstein a senior attorney with Littler Mendelson, a highly respected U.S. labor law firm, for his legal perspective. His white paper is now available. Here’s his opening statement:
Because the Performance-based Hiring system does differ from traditional recruiting and hiring processes, questions arise as to whether employers can adopt Performance-based Hiring and still comply with the complex array of statutes, regulations, and common law principals that regulate the workplace. The answer is yes.
In particular:
A properly prepared performance profile can identify and document the essential functions of a job better than traditional position descriptions, facilitating the reasonable accommodation of disabilities and making it easier to comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act and similar laws.
In the book I also suggested that the standard “submit resume and box-check skills” approach should be replaced by an initial matching process that didn't inadvertently eliminate fully-qualifed people. One idea was to have candidates submit a one-page summary of two accomplishments most comparable to the real requirements of the job. Since the job postings I recommend minimize skills and emphasize opportunities and challenges (sample), this is pretty straight-forward. For example if you’re hiring a maintenance supervisor to minimize machine downtime and upgrade the team, ask all applicants to describe something they’ve done in each area as the first step. This will minimize the pool of unqualified people from applying and broaden the pool of the most qualified who might have a different mix of skills and experiences. David gave a legal thumbs-up to both the creative advertising idea and the alternate approach for applying.
Coincidently, in the past few days two different starts-up companies approached me to consider being on their advisory boards. Both had far different and unique ideas on how to broaden the pool of potential candidates by breaking the same nonsensical skills-matching process described here. The common idea: the best people aren’t interested in lateral transfers, the best people often have a different skill-set, and these same people aren’t interested in enduring the insensitive application process. Excluding the most talented people from consideration when hiring from the outside never made sense me. It's exciting to see some technical advances being proposed to now do this at scale.
If you follow my posts you know I’m on a quest to change the focus on finding and hiring people to one based on their actual performance – they’re ability to deliver comparable results. It’s what people have accomplished with their skills and experiences that matters, not their accumulation. This opens up the door to a whole new pool of more diverse, younger, older, military veterans, displaced workers and the physically challenged. We don’t have as big a skills gap as the national media contends, we have a bigger thinking gap.

Original Article : https://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20130221192310-15454-why-we-should-ban-resumes?_mSplash=1&sessionid=0UCnpc6JHY-Rkwe99FK0

Read More

More Details Leak About Microsoft's Next Operating System: Windows Blue

As we previously reported, Microsoft is gearing up to release a new version of Windows, possibly this summer.
It's codenamed Microsoft Blue and more details about it are emerging.
Redmond is rumored to be halfway done with its development, reports Mary Jo Foley.
Windows Blue is some kind of update to Windows 8 and it is expected to be free to all Windows 8 users, win8china, reports. They will get to test it and offer feedback to Microsoft before Microsoft makes it available to everybody.
It sounds like it will be an upgrade to Windows 8, not a new operating system that will be sold in addition to Windows 8.

One big change will be to the "search charm." It's being improved all the way around, and will do a better job of finding and previewing more kinds of content, like movies and apps, The Verge reports.

Windows Blue is also expected to include the new Internet Explorer 11, run faster and work better on 7- and 8-inch devices.
We do wonder about choosing the code-name "Windows Blue" though, given that blue has never been a very good sign for Windows. The "blue screen of death" (BSOD) is the name for that awful error message indicating Windows had crashed.

Original Article: http://www.businessinsider.com/more-details-leak-about-windows-blue-2013-2#ixzz2Lu5Z8WkR

Read More

Big Data Without Integration Is Broken

Big data involves interplay between different data management approaches and business intelligence and operational systems, which makes it imperative that all sources of business data be integrated efficiently and that organizations be able to easily adapt to new data types and sources. Our recent big data benchmark research confirmed that big data storagetechnologies continue to follow many approaches, including appliances, Hadoop, and in-memory and specialized DBMSes. With the variety, velocity and volume of big data being part of today’s information architecture, and the potential for big data to be a source to feed other systems, integration should be a top priority.
Many organizations that have already deployed big data technology now struggle to access, transform, transport and load information using conventional technology. Even replication or migration of data from existing sources can be troublesome, requiring custom programming and manual processing, which are always a tax on resources and time. Barriers such as having data spread across too many applications and systems, which our benchmark research found in 67 percent of organizations, do not go away just because an organization is using big data technology; in fact, they get more complicated. However, big data also creates opportunities to use information to innovate and to improve business processes. To avoid the risks and take advantage of the opportunities, organizations need efficient processes and effective technology that makes information drawn from big data available to all people who need it.
Organizations need integration technology flexible enough to handle big data regardless of whether it originates in the enterprise or across the Internet. For this reason, tools for big data integration must be able to work with a range of underlying architectures and data technologies, including appliances, flat files, Hadoop, in-memory computing and conventional databases, and move data seamlessly between relational and non-relational structures. They must be able to adapt to events or streams of data, and they must harvest data from transactional systems and business applications in enterprise data warehouses. Supporting data quality and master data management needs is also part of supporting big data with data integration.
Selecting the right approach to big data integration is difficult when organizations lack knowledge of the functional requirements and best practices relevant to their industries, lines of business and IT. Deficiencies in existing software and data environments can further complicate the ability to choose wisely and so should be factored into the deployment decision-making process. Organizations must identify the types of integration being used or under consideration to handle data other than that formatted for relational databases, and evaluate processing capabilities and techniques to handle the proliferation of big data. IT professionals therefore must understand how to work with analysts and business management to deliver timely, benefit-based big data deployments.
IT should evaluate whether it can use existing skills to shorten the time it takes to get big data to users. Since our research has found lack of resources to be the top barrier to using innovative technology, according to 51 percent of organizations, businesses should make sure their IT staff does everything possible to maximize skills and resources internally and not waste them on custom, manual siloes of effort. Having the right data integration processes and data management methods can help IT work more efficiently and partner better with the business units.
Not having a dialogue about what information management competencies a business needs is a mistake. I have seen most IT industry analyst firms’ content deal with just a portion of the big data picture, discussing for example just the technologies for storing and accessing data, with a fixation on variety, velocity and volume. However, decision-makers must consider the efficient flow of data across its entire path of travel, from its origins to user systems, to ensure the effective functioning of any big data project. Failure to do that means failing to optimize information across its life-cycle for business value. Without the ability see the entire big data value chain, a business may find its initiatives exceed available limits of cost and time and damage a business case built on time-to-value metrics. According to our research, the most important benefits of big data technologies include retaining and analyzing more data (74%) and increasing the speed of analysis (70%). Organizations need to make sure they do not increase the number of manual processes they run and the time spent on them, thus impairing the value of big data.
We have begun research to assess the latest big data integration technologies and best practices to help advance these efforts, as we outlined in our research agenda on big data and information optimization for 2013. We will document emerging best practices in big data integration to meet business needs, from basic access and replication to transformational migration. Until we can share our results, be sure to consider big data integration as part of your business case and project, because it is essential to gaining the most value from your big data investments.

Original article

Read More

Business Analytics and Hollywood: A Match Made in Heaven?

My favorite acceptance speeches are from Oscar recipients in science and technology. In contrast to actors, directors and writers, these winners love pushing the envelope in fields like animation, special effects, costume design and sound editing. They are like NASA engineers enjoying the thrill of landing an astronaut on the moon, placing a telescope in orbit, or landing a rover on Mars that can provide facts that answer questions that so many of us are interested in the answers.
How do film awards relate to implementing projects?
There is a tight connection between Oscar winners and project teams implementing business analytics of all flavors. Examples are regression, cluster, segmentation, and correlation analysis. A subset, predictive analytics, is now also popular since decisions made today only affect the future. Project teams also enjoy success seeing these types of solutions go live and being leveraged for employees to gain insight and foresight, make better decisions, and align work activities and priorities with the executive team’s strategy.
Here are few examples of the Academy Award best movie nominees with these connections to business analytics:

• Zero Dark Thirty – In this film Maya, a CIA operative, is single-minded in her pursuit of leads to uncover the whereabouts of Al Quaeda’s leader Osama Bin Laden. She demonstrates the tenacity that experienced business analysts have in using data mining, business intelligence, and analytics tools to gain insights from data and patterns to gain insights to solve problems or realize benefits from opportunities. 

• Argo – In this film that takes place in 1979 the American embassy in Iran is invaded by Iranian revolutionaries taking American hostages, but six managed to escape to the residence of the residence the Canadian Ambassador. CIA expert Tony Mendez concocts a phony Canadian film project as a ruse to successfully smuggle the Americans out. This demonstrates how companies can use teamwork to outsmart competitors not by taking them head-on but rather framing the problem with out-of-the-box thinking. 

• Les Miserables – In this film based on the novel by Victor Hugo during post-revolutionary France prisoner 24601, Jean Valjean, played brilliantly by actor Hugh Jackman, is released from prison. He breaks parole to create a new life for himself while evading the grip of the persistent inspector Javert. There is an enterprise performance management (EPM) lesson here involving analytics. Competition requires constant adjustment of strategy and its successful execution. A strategy map, from which balanced scorecard KPIs are derived, is a commonly accepted method for this and correlation analysis can validate the explanatory value of KPIs on the KPIs they influence. Many organizations guess at what KPIs to measure and monitor. 

• Lincoln – In this film that takes place in 1985 as the American Civil War winds down toward conclusion USA president Abraham Lincoln experiences a race against time to muster enough votes to pass the landmark constitutional amendment to ban slavery. He sacrifices many lives of soldiers to pass the amendment before peace would arrive and southern states would block its passage. The business analytics message here is that executives need to first gather a strong team, as Lincoln assembled, and then consider the long-term planning horizon even if they may disappoint short-term financial performance expectations of the Wall Street investment community. 

• Silver Linings Playbook – In this film after a stint in a mental institution for a bipolar disorder former teacher Pat Solitano, played excellently by actor Bradley Cooper, moves back in with his parents. He is determined to get his life back on track and also tries to reconcile with his ex-wife against a myriad of distractions including meeting Tiffany (played by Jennifer Lawrence) who becomes his new love.  The business analytics message here is that when strong discipline, although sometimes elusive, is combined with creativity, any challenge can be overcome.

Implementing, embracing, and leveraging business analytics is a challenge that requires teamwork. The most motivating Oscar acceptance speeches for me are not self-serving but rather are speeches that humbly acknowledge that the collective effort of a team makes the difference.

Original Source :  http://smartdatacollective.com/garycokins/106641/business-analytics-and-hollywood-match-made-heaven

Read More