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According to research by Gartner: “IT won’t have much of a role in the emerging business-intelligence technology as the tools make it easier for users to build their own analytic applications. To address users’ increasing independence, Gartner suggests that IT departments incorporate the new technologies into the standard BI architecture, communicate which performance measures should …

I was talking with a prospect yesterday who is an information security manager; extremely professional and creative at what he does.   In the course of the conversation, I realized that there are fundamental differences in mentality between IT and Security practitioners. Back when I wrote COBOL/CICS applications for Tadiran Information systems – some of our …

I read today that the South African government is more committed to ODF than ever. (ODF – is Open Document Format – for the unwashed…) As someone who has been involved with open source since 1998 – I believe that the support and adoption of ODF by the South African government would never have happened …

Show me a profitable business application-as-a-Service (SaaS) company. There is a lot of trade talk about the success of Salesforce.com. Here is a company with a $3.2BN market cap as of Oct 26, 2008 currently trading at 24 down from 72, 5 months ago. In 2007 – SF.com  posted a net income of $480K on …

I’m surprised with the blood bath in the financial markets and demise of WaMu, Lehman Brothers et al – that there has not been a cry to investigate the auditors of these companies. Did any of the SOX-compliant firms like AIG and Lehman Brothers really comply? I don’t think so. What should have happened if …

Well this doesn’t really count as better software, jazz or biking – but Mike Carasik is a great guy and married to my first cousin Jan Bruckner. Mike has an excellent weekly “Torah Talk” podcast in English that can be found here: podcast of parashat hashavua Shabbat shalom

Kudos to ANSI for publishing a free guide to calculating cyber risk. Better late than never – thousands of security professionals in the world use the Microsoft Threat Modeling Tool and the popular free threat modeling software PTA, to calculate risk in financial terms – not to mention the thousands of other users of risk …

I recently signed up on the ANSI Web site to download a document on cyber risk calculation and they had a minimum 10 character password requirement -  they also share your personal data (all demographics are required fields by the way) with third parties – at least they have an opt-out check box on the …

Alistair Milne, a professor at the City University of London’s Cass Business School deserves gets my nomination for Cassandra of the year award. I saw a report on BNET this morning that “1/3 of US companies had no plan for the downturn”. In Israel it’s more like 99% of companies and 100% of the government …

Is your 50-something IT manager the last one to know about the company getting acquired? An extremely obvious yet perhaps unpleasant observation for over-40 IT managers is that under 30 employees know a lot more about technology and ways to bypass the company security safeguards than they do. A young, hip, mobile and techology-facile workforce …