Information Technology

By Sandeep Desai (http://www.thedesai.net/)

Outsourcing

The management's credibility and accomplishments.
Collective experience of the employees working for the company.
Top 5-10 customers who are served, and feedback from key customers.
Supervision process and organisational structure for escalations after awarding the project.
Service-level agreement.
Costs incurred in evaluation and ongoing fee for the project.
Company culture, work ethics, and personality.

Websites

www.patentcommons.org (List of patents available for open source use)

Measuring Project Risk

Start early in measuring project risk, don’t wait for problem
Identify Risks, know biggest risks such as ineffective sponsorship, poor project management,
Make a risk list, compare with standard risk profile so you don’t miss anything see book Waltzing With Bears: Managing Risk on Software Projects)
Measure risks, note impact and likelihood, don’t spend more on mitigating risk than the cost of the risk
Prioritize risks, e.g what brokerage firm servers cannot go down during trading time
Verify mitigation, ensure steps are taken such as purchase of backup servers
Improve: track risks that pass in the project , so that you can learn from them

Software Development process

Requirements
Design
Architecture
UI Design
Prototype
Modeling
Managing Resources
Automated Build System
Automated Testing System
Code quality
Bug Tracking
QA
Production Support

Management

Leading Geeks

Do one review per month instead of all at the end of the year

12 ways managers can grade geeks

First 4 applies to junior staffers, Senior staffers would show competence in more

Don't judge people only by project

Technical competence

Personal Productivity
Juggling multiple tasks simultaneously
Describing the business context of technical work
Forging compromises between business and technical constraints
Managing client relationships
Managing technical teams
Playing positive politics
Expanding client relationships
Working through others to make others productive
Managing ambiguity
Managing time horizons

Data Quality: Before doing ERP or CRM implementation or any new project make sure that the data quality is good. ETL process should not be used for fixing data problems

Tools available for improving data quality are

Data Profiling software: sifts data fields for duplication, missing information and other errors
Data Cleansing and matching tools: parse data into discrete elements and clean it, standardize it in formats and match and merge records
Data Enhancements tools: enrich data by incorporating third-party elements
Data Monitoring tools: ensure that data maintains preset level of quality

Data Quality Vendors:

www.firstlogic.com uses a SOA to capture and validate data
www.trilliumsoftware.com
www.dataflux.com (SAS subsidiary)

US Government Regulations

HIPAA: (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act)

Sarbanes-Oxley: Regulations requiring companies to identify, document and audit internal controls for fraud, assets (PC, servers), security etc to comply with section 404. Requires changing passwords every 120 days

RFID

Radio Frequency IDentification (RFID) is a method of remotely storing and retrieving data using devices called RFID tags/transponders. An RFID tag is a small object, such as an adhesive sticker, that can be attached to or incorporated into a product. RFID tags contain antennas to enable them to receive and respond to radio-frequency queries from an RFID transceiver.

RFID generates a large amount of data. See RFID warehouse article

RFID BI practices non-existent according to this Forester view article

RFID Wikipedia

RFID Journal

Finance

Business Math

Security

A rootkit is a set of software tools used by an intruder or illegal hacker to break into a computer and obtain root privileges in order to perform unauthorized functions, hide traces of its existence and exploit its system wide access

e.g. a rootkit could replace the dir command with a hacked dir command that would delete files first and then show you the list of files in the directory

Acronyms:

Java: Programming Language, 32 bit platform independent programming language

J2EE: Server side Java technology Servlets, JSP (Java Server Pages), JSF (Java Server Faces) EJB (Enterprise Java Beans) JAX-RPC

ETL: Extract Transform Load Data

HTTP: Hyper Text Protocol

RPC: Remote Procedure Call, invoke procedure over the network

SOA: Service Oriented Architecture, RPC over HTTP using XML

XML: Extensible Markup Language, used for creating structured data documents

Links

Database Security Vendors

Scan database for misconfigurations, security vulnerabilities, encrypt data, capture log information from Database, OS

www.appsecinc.com