Computer And Information Technology Article

Monday, January 6, 2014

Top 10 CIO interviews of 2013

The top IT leaders in the UK talked to Computer Weekly throughout 2013 to share their opinions and experiences of modern technology leadership and transforming business and government through IT innovation.

Their views are valuable not only for fellow chief information officers (CIOs), but also any aspiring IT professional looking to develop their career opportunities.

Here are Computer Weekly's top 10 CIO interviews of the year.

Government chief technology officer Liam Maxwell has driven Whitehall’s IT agenda for years, previously as deputy government CIO and director of ICT futures.

The role of technology is changing at Marks & Spencer (M&S) – and changing the company itself as a result.

Beginning as a bricks and mortar store in the 1950s, Ikea is now the world’s largest furniture retailer with a turnover of €27bn. The retailer’s priority today is to get closer to its customer through a multi-channel approach using digital and traditional methods.

Gatwick Airport is predicting huge savings as it stops providing employees with BlackBerry devices, and instead encourages staff to use their own smartphones and tablets.

James Thomas, director of ICT at UCLH, has been driving his organisation towards embracing mobile and, in the past four years, has seen some great results.

Migrating IT away from former parent company Royal Bank of Scotland is the main priority for Angela Morrison, CIO at Direct Line Insurance

The decisions taken by the financial and economic wizards whose jobs involve keeping the UK economy on track are underpinned by data and analytics from the Bank of England.

A new IT strategy is about to be implemented at Save the Children, one of the world’s largest children’s rights charities, focusing on mobile technologies, cloud and advanced data analytics.

Graeme Hackland, CIO of Lotus F1, has worked for the race car team for 16 years. He has seen major changes in IT both on and off the track.

Bob Harris, chief technology officer (CTO) at UK broadcaster Channel 4, is not sure how big his big data volumes will grow, but one thing he knows is: “Like most companies, when considering this we arrive at a number with lots of zeros.”

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Consumer Rights Bill needs more protection for digital consumers, says committee

The government’s draft Consumer Rights Bill must resolve inconsistencies from digital purchases before reaching its potential to consolidate, simplify and modernise consumer law.

The Business, Innovation and Skills Committee has published a report today looking into the draft Consumer Rights Bill. The Committee welcomed the inclusion of creating rights for the purchase of digital content, but noted the government must do more before the bill moves forward.

The proposed new law could implement customer protection for digital media purchases while identifying other rights within consumer law.

The government estimates reforms will bring a boost of ?4bn to the UK economy over the next 10 years.

But Adrian Bailey MP, chair of the committee, said there were some inconsistencies in the bill between purchasing digital and traditional media.

"Under the current proposals, somebody who buys a faulty CD would be able to return it and get a refund. If they purchase a faulty download of the same music, however, they won’t. This is a clear inconsistency in the draft bill that should be sorted out,” he said.

The committee said the draft bill risked creating a two-tiered approach to the rights surrounding digital content.

The committee called for the bill to allow consumers to have the right to reject and obtain a refund irrespective of whether the content was a physical CD or downloaded digital content.

“The consumer’s concern is getting a refund for their faulty product, not whether it counts as tangible or intangible content under consumer legislation," it said.

Sunday, January 5, 2014

RSA denies secret contract with NSA

Security firm RSA has strongly denied allegations of a secret contract with the US National Security Agency (NSA).

A report from Reuters claimed the NSA arranged a secret $10m contract with RSA. But in a recent blog post, RSA said it “categorically denies” the allegations.

“We have worked with the NSA, both as a vendor and an active member of the security community. We have never kept this relationship a secret and in fact have openly publicised it. Our explicit goal has always been to strengthen commercial and government security,” stated RSA.

Reuters claimed the NSA paid RSA to generate a random number formula to create a "back door" in encryption products.

The RSA said in its blog post that it has never entered into a contract with the “intention of weakening RSA’s products, or introducing potential ‘back doors’ into our products for anyone’s use”.

In September, RSA advised its developer customers to stop using an encryption algorithm that documents leaked by whistleblower Edward Snowden indicated contained a backdoor.

Last week, the European Parliament Civil Liberties Committee into the surveillance of EU citizens by the NSA called for political and technology changes following the NSA revelations.

The draft conclusions call for an EU cloud and proper analysis of the use of open source software, as well as political signals from the US that it understands the difference between allies and adversaries.

Snowden: 'A child born today will grow up with no conception of privacy'

Future generations will not have any personal privacy, said whistleblower Edward Snowden during the Channel 4 Alternative Christmas Message.

Famous for leaking several classified National Security Agency (NSA) documents, Snowden told viewers on Christmas Day that governments have “created a system of worldwide mass surveillance, watching everything we do”.

NSA documents leaked by Snowden revealed practices such as sending spies into online games to recruit informants and tracking as many as five billion phone records per day.

In the video, Snowden warned that the average person’s privacy is compromised every day.

"We have sensors in our pockets that track us everywhere we go,” he said. “A child born today will grow up with no conception of privacy at all. They’ll never know what it means to have a private moment to themselves – an unrecorded, unanalysed thought.

“And that’s a problem, because privacy matters. Privacy is what allows us to determine who we are and who we want to be.”

Snowden also alluded to loss of privacy for the next generation being worse than George Orwell’s depiction of the future in his novel 1984.

“George Orwell warned us of the danger of this kind of information. The types of [information] collection in the book – microphones and video cameras, TVs that watch us – are nothing compared to what we have available today,” he said.

The video is thought to have been recorded in Moscow, where Snowden has been granted temporary asylum.

Snowden went on to urge the public to claim back their privacy: “Together we can find a better balance, end mass surveillance and remind the government that if it really wants to know how we feel, asking is always cheaper than spying.”

Top 10 information management stories of 2013

Putting analytics to work emerged as the most popular theme of 2013. Tesco, McLaren, and Telefonica Ireland figured strongly in the ranks of companies and organisations gaining real business value from the intelligent application of analytics.

Figleaves.com founder Michael Ross, and Mark Madsen, president of consulting firm Third Nature, were among leading practitioner-thinkers whose ideas on how the data revolution is transforming business attracted strong reader interest.

Online gambling, as a sector, and HR, as a function, also figured markedly as arenas lit up by data analytics. But for financial services firms, the cold, hard discipline of data governance has to come first. And how can mainstream companies and organisations build or buy a data science capability?

In April, Tesco’s financial results made the headlines as the UK’s largest retailer declared its expensive excursion into the US market was coming to an end. But the documents also revealed a drop in returns from capital employed (ROCE), due to operational, regulatory and economic factors.

Capital employed may seem like accountancy jargon, but it is a term IT could tune into. Understanding its importance was one of the driving forces behind an analytics programme, which has saved Tesco ?100m in annual supply chain costs.

The McLaren Group uses high-speed data analytics as it seeks a competitive edge. The company is known for its Formula 1 cars, but it also supplies medical monitoring to Birmingham Children’s Hospital.

O2 Ireland, part of Telefonica, has been using Teradata’s data warehousing and Cognos BI to stop customers leaving, and entice them with new offers with location-based marketing.

Business professionals who combine an understanding of HR and information technology are helping to transform the way companies manage their workforce. HR departments have come relatively late to IT, but the development of sophisticated, cloud-based HR tools, social media and big data analytics is transforming the way HR departments work.

Online retailing requires a new type of action-oriented business intelligence, according to Michael Ross, eCommera chief scientist and founder of online lingerie retailer Figleaves. The former McKinsey consultant and Cambridge maths graduate contends that e-commerce will thrive to the extent that it industrialises the knowledge work performed by data scientists, or analysts.

A new breed of data visualisation tools can work with big data. But they need governance to avoid Excel on steroids, and require greater agility of IT, says Accenture.

Corporate IT’s new vocation will be data integration. Mark Madsen, president of consulting firm Third Nature, told delegates at the London TDWI Business Intelligence (BI) Symposium, in his keynote speech, that the business of big data will change the function of the IT department to be less about technology and more about information architecture. Madsen cast a few swipes in the direction of big data zealots who think their activities “unprecedented”. We need to put precedence back in again. “It is a pity they don’t teach the history of science in science programmes,” he said.

The online gambling and gaming industries crave a structured approach to business data. Volumes can be huge and business need to react quickly to changing customer behaviour.

European banks need to improve how they handle data if they are to recover from the financial crisis and comply with the demanding legislation resulting from it.

Business leaders confront thorny issues in the organisational design of data analytics. Buy or build vies with data science or data democracy as issues in play.

This was first published in December 2013

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