Inficron

Confronted with today's challenges such as economic stagnation, environmental collapse, and soaring health care costs, most of us believe that the world needs game changing and sustainable innovation. While it is tempting to hope that we can innovate our way out of trouble, the elusive silver bullet of innovation requires a radical rethink of our ideas about its relationship with expertise.

It seems intuitive to call in the experts to solve tough problems, and so we look to our executives to organize teams of scientists and engineers to tackle problems. But in a world of exponentially increasing information ubiquitously connected across people and technology, this way of organizing may be backwards.

In an interview with with Harvard Business School Professor Karim Lakhani, Saj-nicole discusses this problem in the context of innovation inversion...

Read the full article

Agile decision-making elevates the productivity of an organization. CEOs are not only challenged to quickly pass good judgment for themselves, but also develop the decision-making capabilities of their teams, expedite decisions that support corporate strategy and quickly build buy-in for final decisions. There are a number of guidelines CEOs may leverage to facilitate better decisions across the organization.

Delegate decision making, don't micromanage. Only inexperienced leaders make every decision large and small. CEOs should strive to only make the decisions that are critical to corporate strategy, resource allocation, hiring and firing- those that have a significant impact on the business. It is paramount to build a team that you can trust to accept responsibility for decisions. If they have the expertise and authority to handle a decision, don't allow them to dump it on you...

Read the full article

When the chief data officer at the Federal Reserve Board, referred to data as an asset at the recent Information Quality Symposium, she sparked a debate that, at first glance, appeared to be purely semantic. "Have you ever tried to use the 'asset' word with an accountant?" asked one attendee. When Casey responded in the affirmative semantics soon cut away to fact. "Assets are on the balance sheet," the attendee said, "It's pretty tough to find companies doing that."

According to Gartner, even companies such as Google and Facebook, whose business models are built on collecting and selling data, don't have a line item for their information assets. Yet over 80% of business executives surveyed by Gartner believe that data is implicit within their balance sheets, nested within other intangible assets. There is a growing concern among regulators that it is not...

Read the full article

As we move closer to universal connectivity between mobile devices, appliances, and machines both at home and in the workplace, the threat of damage that may be inflicted due to vulnerabilities in electronics and software becomes more and more troubling. Entire buildings may be rendered seemingly haunted with doors remotely unlocked, thermostats secretly reset; lights flickering; and spam directed to televisions, water coolers and exercise machines.

"This is nothing. This is small social stuff. The big stuff is coming," Andy Thurai, chief architect and group CTO of application security and identity products with Intel Corp., said during the recent Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council's Internet of Things (IoT) conference.

In a world where people and things are always connected to the Internet with the potential to be hacked remotely, the threat of hacking takes on a whole new meaning. Hospital equipment could be maliciously misused to endanger people's lives; a city's traffic controls could cause mayhem in a denial-of-service attack. Hackers controlling the energy grid could hold power hostage from entire neighborhoods for days. A prominent security consultancy, Red Tiger Security, has identified at least "38,000 vulnerabilities in U.S. energy sector alone" said Mr. Thurai...

Read the full article

The promise of the hybrid cloud is drawing a wave of astute IT leaders eager to explore and benefit from this new environment. According to Link Alander, CIO and vice chancellor of Lone Star College in Houston, their college already has almost thirty hybrid cloud applications deployed, including a learning management system and an online student orientation system. They found that a hybrid environment was well suited to their organization's needs, was flexible enough to potentially power their long term plans, and allowed the them to deliver services quickly to faculty and students.

"That's the first thing we look at when we look at a business problem we want to solve: How long would it take to execute on what we want to get done? And what's the total cost of ownership over time?" Mr. Alander said. "When we went to the cloud, we changed our philosophy and decided there should never be a major project that takes more than a year and a half. Business units don't want to wait for a new service...

Read the full article