The Growing State of Cyber Insecurity

2014 will likely be marked as the year that the warnings from the past decade about Cyber threats were finally realized. Granted, not all of those warnings have come true, yet - but this year will go down as the worst yet for costly Cyber breaches. That begs an important question - why are we becoming less secure as time is passing - and why haven't the billions of dollars invested in Cyber Security worked? This is a complex topic, so it will probably...

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The Art in Artificial Intelligence - Part 2

Part of the reason we decided to explore this topic on Technovation Talks was the claim made earlier this Summer that an AI had finally passed the Turing Test. So what's the Turing Test? It was a very basically described metric by which any sort of true machine intelligence might be assessed or otherwise verified. Here's the basic premise of the test - if an AI can engage in normal conversation with multiple human participants without the humans...

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The "Art" in Artificial Intelligence - Part 1

Today, we are going to launch a problem-solving exercise on what might be the single most complex topic in Information Science - Artificial Intelligence. The goal here is not to provide any sort of comprehensive survey of current theory or practice; rather our journey begins with the stark realization of how little we've achieved in the field since the term was first coined 58 years ago. This is a problem statement and problem resolution exercise...

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The Next Generation of American Leadership - JSA

A worthy cause indeed, invest in the future - support the next generation of American Leadership, right here in Ohio...Junior State of America - Ohio River Valley Scholarship f...

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How to Create an Enterprise Data Strategy

I work as an IT Architect. One of the more interesting things I get asked to do on occasion is to create Strategies in particular technology areas. This represents the "high-level" side of the typical IT Architecture duties one tends to run into (if you're interested in more IT Architecture related topics check my new blog here - The IT Architecture Journal). A very popular strategic focus across industry lately is Data Strategy. In this post, I...

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How IT Hype Inhibits Technology Innovation

There are many unique characteristics connected to the IT industry, some of them are more associated with pure-play IT vendors but others seem to pervade most all organizations which utilize IT in any significant manner. One of the strangest of these characteristics is the obsession with buzzword Hype. For most people this is symbolized through the development and dissemination of Gartner's famous Hype Cycle diagrams. However, the Hype obsession...

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The Innovation Dilemma

Innovation is perhaps today’s ultimate buzzword and most over-hyped topic. People can’t seem to get enough of articles and dialog on how Innovation is the answer to any number of potential issues – yet in all the countless discussions occurring online and in print about this topic, how well do any of the folks discussing innovation really understand it? That’s part one of the dilemma. Part two of the dilemma is that for all the lip service about...

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Building Effective IT Strategy - part 3

In our last two post on IT Strategy, we highlighted how Strategy can be structured, how it differs fro Tactics (although we will explore that in more depth in this post) and how to employ a consistent process towards developing strategy. The first two steps involved determining what the core strategic approach might be; the second focused on goal-setting. The third and most difficult part is assigning actions to goals... So, using our Big Data case...

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Building Effective IT Strategy - part 2

In yesterday's post, I introduced three elementary categories for IT Strategy: Product  Portfolio Transformation I then pointed out that each of these follows a basic cycle of: Determination of Strategic Approach Goal-Setting Assigning actions to goals So, now as promised, I will use this to take a look at a specific scenario. But before we begin, let me mention an important caveat to the three categories listed above. While all strategy...

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Building Effective IT Strategy - part 1

Every great endeavor begins with a strategy, well that may be true but was it an idea, a single spoken command, a drawing on a napkin? How do we quantify precisely what Strategy represents? In military history, Strategy is the highest level of planning - the combination of complex goal-setting and the definition of an over-arching approach designed to achieve said goals. In the American Civil War, A. Lincoln decided early on that the North must...

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