Enterprise software vendors face deflation: Advantage SaaS | ZDNet.
by Thomas W. Malone, Robert Laubacher, Chrysanthos Dellarocas :: SSRN
With the opportunity for CIOs to focus on data and process (two of the three IT pillars of the future), exploring how collective intelligence can add value to their enterprise business units may seem a bit “far out there” but the fact Professor Malone is involved in this means it has definite IT impact. Applying the collective intelligence approach to process is a logical start, and at a micro-level, the internal Microsoft project scenario provided in this paper is a pragmatic way to analyze collective intelligence, process, project and even gaming for corporate advantage.
“Abstract:
Over the past decade, the rise of the Internet has enabled the emergence of surprising new forms of collective intelligence. Examples include Google, Wikipedia, Threadless, and many others. To take advantage of the possibilities these new systems represent, it is necessary to go beyond just seeing them as a fuzzy collection of “cool” ideas. What is needed is a deeper understanding of how these systems work.
This article offers a new framework to help provide that understanding. It identifies the underlying building blocks – to use a biological metaphor, the “genes” – at the heart of collective intelligence systems. These genes are defined by the answers to two pairs of key questions:
– Who is performing the task? Why are they doing it?
– What is being accomplished? How is it being done?
The paper goes on to list the genes of collective intelligence – the possible answers to these key questions – and shows how combinations of genes comprise a “genome” that characterizes each collective intelligence system. In addition, the paper describes the conditions under which each gene is useful and the possibilities for combining and re-combining these genes to harness crowds effectively.
Using this framework, managers can systematically consider many possible combinations of genes as they seek to develop new collective intelligence systems.”
Sr Manager Tech Infrastructure Operations
Job Location: Bedford, MA
GENERAL SUMMARY
We are looking for TechOps senior manager to join SaaS Operations management group. The senior manager will be managing the global TechOps/Security team in Boston and in Israel. The team is responsible for maintaining 24 x 7 production data centers infrastructure environments hosted in US and in EU. The team participates effectively in RSA SaaS incident management processes, in maintaining the SLA and in maintaining high level of systems and networking availability and redundancy, capacity planning, patches, security and general performance.
PRINCIPAL TECHOPS DUTIES AND RESPONSIBILITIES
– Ongoing global team management
– Lead technical TechOps and IT offering support and all infrastructure related activities
– Ensuring proactive measures to ensure systems availability
– Maintenance of all production and development instances
– Monitoring of production systems from availability/performance/stability point of view
– Participate in incident management remediation activated, lead and work to resolve ongoing related issues/crisis.
– Lead new projects and infuse new technologies, new DC vendors such as AWS.
– Work closely with other peers, managers and team leaders in SaaS Operations/Engineering/QE/CTO and other customer facing teams
– Emphasizing the security aspects of the services, focusing on the following :
· Work with the Compliance and Risk Management teams to determine applicable compliance requirements and work to ensure compliance
· Develop and maintain the SaaS information security and compliance training programs
· Assist in the planning, designing, and implementation of new SaaS initiatives
· Contribute to and maintain systems standards as they relate to security
· Maintains data files and monitors systems configuration to ensure data integrity
· Performs information security procedures and maintains documentation that covers functional areas including production control, job scheduling, and security administration
· Handle and maintain the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of sensitive information
Technical skills
– At least 10 years of experience as a TechOps, Security or IT and 4 years of management experience. (preferably Solaris/Linux environment)
– Experience with all infrastructure aspects, including servers and peripherals installation, certificates, systems and LB configuration, storage and backups/restores etc.
– LINUX skills.
– VMWare skills.
– Bladelogic skills
– UNIX skills.
– Familiarity with Systems Management disciplines, security regulations and ITIL processes.
– Familiarity with maintaining high performance / highly available client facing environments.
– Familiarity with dealing with multi-site / multi-vendor environments.
– Familiarity with handling highly secure / sensitive client data.
– Understanding of network topography and management.
– Understanding of SAN/NAS and storage environments.
– Program / Project management certification.
– Experience in an environment containing sensitive information
– Experience with the ISO 27000 Framework
– Experience with PCI-DSS, Visa ACS, HITRUST/HIPAA, 201CMR 17.00, and EU Privacy / EU Safe Harbor standards
– Experience with the NIST 800 Series
– Experience working within the following Information Security disciplines: Incident Response, Penetration Testing, Forensics, Secure Code Review, SDLC, Physical Security, Security Architecture, Systems Hardening, Documentation, Vulnerability Management, Encryption, Authentication, Intrusion Detection and Prevention, and Log Management and Correlation
– Experience with Identity Management systems
– Experience with Firewall technologies
– Experience with networking and network security
Experience with IDS/IPS Systems
Managerial Skills
– Self managed and self taught – a must
– Excellent communication skills – a must
– Willing to work non-conventional hours and weekends according to ad hoc needs
– Willing to perform manager on call duties
– Ability to interface customers on special escalation cases and RSA customer facing teams upon need
– Ability to work in a complex distributed environment
Education Required: Bachelors (Tech) or equivalent
Experience Required: 10 Years
via Boston Engineering jobs – Sr Manager Tech Infrastructure Operations at EMC.
“…it is difficult to predict exactly which Intercloud scenarios will gain the most traction and which ones appear promising but will die on the vine. However, it does seem clear that increasing cloud adoption is driving a rich ecosystem of industry players and initiatives that will usher in the next wave of the cloud. In the same way that online ticketing sites and interline baggage handling enrich the usability of airline services, rather than supplanting them, the Intercloud offers the promise of enhancing the customer benefits of the cloud by complementing and facilitating cloud vendor products and provider services.”
Per Gartner, Gartner: Startups Born in Digital Era Will Kill Off Tech Giants , emerging technology vendors warrant a look see…
…the “Vendor Management” article at http://www.itconnecter.com/technology-articles/ addresses the importance of a formal vendor management process, preferably using a specialized resource or service (“VaaS”) familiar with existing investments so that IT innovation can truly be via an “adjacent possible” emerging technology or vendor.
The potential upside of getting this right has always been significant (e.g. early adopters of server virtualization avoiding building new data centers) but per the Gartner article, the magnitude of impact continues to increase.
While the ECCMA (ehttp://www.eccma.org/aboutus/aboutus.php) may appear to a layperson to be more manufacturing industry focused, in actuality, their focus on an OTD ( Open Technical Dictionary) is applicable to any industry. For example, see below for the ECCMA’s “practical steps for the financial industry.”
With today’s SaaS and cloud applications growing in use by corporations, data portability will be key to allow true vendor-independence. IT can take a leadership role today by defining how to best separate data (and keep separate) from applications as well as how and where to store the data. This then lays the foundation for a true corporate-wide Master Data Management focus, which does not need to be implemented as a multi-year project before receiving benefits (http://www.itconnecter.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/0912-MDM-Bests-Review-Published.pdf ).
Practical steps for the financial industry:
1. Never use proprietary concept identifiers for the purposes of encoding your data.
2. Do not store or use third party identifiers for which you cannot obtain the authoritative characteristic data necessary to validate the identifier.
3. Create a reference from all third party identifiers by associating the third part identifier with an identifier of the organization that issued the identifier.
4. Use Government issued identifiers whenever possible.
5. Do not use third party identifiers as look up fields in your data without a valid license.
6. Where possible obtain the data model from the authoritative source and identify and separate the data elements used to validate the identifier from any associated data.
7. Use identifiers correctly, always validate identifiers using all the appropriate characteristic data.
8. Create and manage a data requirements registry and the associated terminology in a corporate dictionary.
9. Measure the quality of your data by comparing your data to your data requirements.
10. Track the source of all data at the data element level as specified in ISO.
Record-breaking Gartner Summit Attendance Confirms Rising Interest in Improving ITFM | ComSci IT Finance Blog is a blog post from ComSci about the recent Gartner IT Financial, Procurement and Asset Management Summit. Although I’ve not see it yer, my understanding is ComSci and Gartner co-authored a white paper on the evolving relationship between CIOs and CMOs…
PwC’s recent survey, which can be downloaded at http://www.pwc.com/gx/en/innovationsurvey/index.jhtml , resulted in the below infographic. While not a surprise in and of itself (businesses that innovate achieve higher growth), strategic CIOs stand to gain by understanding:
External Job Title: Product Innovation Intern Summer 2014
Job Description …athenahealth is transforming healthcare by giving doctors greater control over their practices, their patient care, and their cash flow. Our innovative cloud-based applications and services…
…Who are athenahealth Product Innovators? … We are driven, perfectly comfortable with technology, strong communicators and …working in a collaborative environment. Not all of us started out in healthcare…
What will you do as an intern in Product Innovation at athenahealth? … part of a team that drives design and delivery of strategic business solutions… re-engineer athenahealths product offerings and internal service operations… help athenahealth build a national information infrastructure that enables healthcare to work as it should. ..apply the best of technology, standardization, and aggregation to healthcare processes that have resisted modernization for far too long.
Location of Role Watertown, MA via athenahealth – Job details.
IVIS-32, Don’t Wait to be Asked to Expand your Role as a CIO
Next Step – While Tracey was fortunate enough to be asked to assume ownership for process, don’t wait. Take the lead on your company’s initiatives in process, data or integration (cloud or maybe even social media); take the lead today…
GREAT blog ( Finding the Fit Inside of Ricoh – Tracey Unfiltered ) from the former CIO, now COO, of Ricoh….as mentioned in earlier ITconnecter blogs about specific focus areas for CIOs wanting to add more strategic value to their businesses, this COO was asked to lead a process improvement initiative across the company when still CIO….
“…how did I actually make that transition from CIO to COO? As you would expect it wasn’t an overnight transition.My evolution beyond the role of CIO started nearly five years ago when I was asked to lead process improvement across our company.”
and
“in the meantime, say yes anytime you can when an opportunity to learn more about your company and expand your role is presented to you. You won’t regret it.”