I am a 25-year veteran freelance business/technology writer and editor.
I prepare classic journalistic features for publications, and I also create content marketing pieces for corporate clients.
Scleroderma Foundation of Greater Chicago
Learn how life-changing the right doctor can be for your scleroderma journey
CIO.com
Institutions of higher education are using large language models to transform operations - everything from admissions, student services, and administrative processes. But how do CIOs ensure efficiency without losing the human touch?
Fast Company
SAP Insights' global survey reveals the opportunities and challenges of AI for midsize wholesale and distribution companies
SAP Insights 2024
For years, Karen Brown has used DEI principles to build leadership teams. Here’s why she’s undaunted by the DEI backlash.
A sustainable construction-material entrepreneur brought her idea to life by engaging local communities.
These guidelines will help you get started using GenAI to help your product and innovation teams develop fresh ideas.
Reducing harm is not enough. For our planet to survive, companies must shift how they operate, giving more than they take.
Technology developers are finding intriguing ways to stem and reverse carbon emissions and prevent additional damage to the planet.
Author and academic Jake Rosenfeld explodes our fondest beliefs about compensation, especially that employees are paid their worth.
Operational technology is changing fast; new machines roam the shop floor. Time for IT/OT convergence at last. Here’s how.
Squeezed by a drop in donations, nonprofits are turning to artificial intelligence tools to increase efficiency, improve donor engagement, and boost their mission.
An anthology of useful articles on how AI should be managed within organizations.
A sustainable construction-material entrepreneur brought her idea to life by engaging local communities.
Author Eric Siegel says most leaders miss the boat when it comes to deploying the biggest breakthrough technology to date.
MIT News/MIT DMSE Web Site
Having harnessed MIT's innovation ecosystem, PhD candidates Grant Knappe and Arjav Shah will focus on commercializing their research as 2024 Kavanaugh Fellows.
MIT seniors Louise Anderfaas and Darsh Grewal won the 2023 ASM competition with innovative materials design. Their computational design strategy focuses on enhanced strength.
The EMERGE program at MIT teaches MITES Saturdays science discovery middle school students how to use scanning electron microscopes, sparking STEM curiosity in underserved communities.
Two MIT undergrads got a winning start to their senior year by taking the top spot-and $2,000 in prize money to share-in the annual ASM Materials Education Foundation's 2023 Undergraduate Design Competition. Louise Anderfaas and Darsh Grewal, students in Professor Gregory Olson's 3.041 (Computational Materials Design), worked with MIT postdoc mentor Margianna Tzini on the complex project.
n aluminum-sulfur battery that is lightweight, doesn't burn, and can be made much more cheaply than the lithium-ion batteries currently in use. When MIT's Donald Sadoway sits down with colleagues to invent something, as he often does, the bar is set high. It's not enough, he believes, for a new technology to be novel and interesting.
A fisheye lens offering a 180-degree view via a single pane of glass. Traditionally, to get a crisp panoramic image required the stacking of multiple lenses on top of each other, resulting in a bulky form factor and adding cost to the production process.
An integrated circuit chip design that combines compound semiconductors with a silicon complementary metal-oxide semiconductor, or CMOS, the technology used in most of today's integrated circuits. The development of strained silicon technology more than 20 years ago by MIT's Eugene Fitzgerald, the Merton C.
A cheaper way to make carbon fibers that are stronger and lighter than steel, using leftover waste from crude oil processing. Such fibers could be used to manufacture strong, lightweight materials for cars and aircraft, among other applications. The process grew out of a DMSE research project spurred by a 2019 request from the US Department of Energy's Vehicle Technologies Office.
SAP Insights
Author Dan Gardner cautions executives to heed the age-old advice: do meticulous planning up front or risk repeat failure.
Next-generation farming processes promise higher yields, greater efficiency, and better sustainability, all of which will improve business performance.
Supply chains need innovation, but tech investments too often fall flat. Three experts offer insights on fixing the problem.
Author Phil Simon says the forces reshaping the workplace make remote and hybrid work inevitable. We can’t go back to 2019.
Sustainable business practices are investments that pay, like R&D and customer relationships, argues author Andrew Winston.
To get a diverse team to thrive, focus on how people need to behave, not thoughts or opinions that divide more than unite.
To determine the right balance of controls you'll need, the first step is understanding the implications of low code compared to no code. No-code tools, as the name implies, do not require technical knowledge such as how to create an SQL query. In many cases, they are largely collections of templates for already-defined functionality.
Innovation entails risk. Effective early tech adopters aren’t reckless; they manage risk with proven processes and metrics.
Wearing a worn smock stained with a rainbow of oil paints, John Sabraw's vocation is clear to see. Sabraw, who chairs the painting and drawing and the digital art programs at Ohio University in Athens, never expected to find himself working alongside engineers, scientists, historians, state officials, students, and environmentalists on a major ecological cleanup project.
Situated on the western tip of Labrador about 1,000 kilometers northeast of Quebec City, Wabush is home of Rogers Electric and Machine, a provider of electric motors, gearboxes, pumps, compressors, and heavy machinery equipment. The Rogers team serves companies in the petroleum, mining, lumber, hydro, potable water/water treatment, and fisheries industries.
It's challenging enough to craft clear, effective communications with employees during good times. But it's even harder to do so when times are tough and changing fast. Charles Cohen, managing director of Benco Dental, a U.S.-based distributor of dental supplies and equipment, learned that lesson overnight.
Though cavepeople wouldn't recognize much of what goes on in the world today, they would understand our need to learn at work and improve our skills. Without constantly honing their abilities to hunt and gather in collaborative teams, they would have starved, and we wouldn't be here.
It's just a fact of life: Whether on the job or at home, people will do almost anything to avoid boring content. That's a problem for learning organizations, which are tasked with training employees on topics that are critical but not natively interesting to most. Take cybersecurity, for instance.
Ah, training - everyone loves to hate you. Providence, a US$25 billion not-for-profit healthcare provider network, was struggling a few years ago to make its annual compliance training more palatable to its 120,000 medical professionals and office workers. Mandated by federal and state law, the skills review training covered subjects such as protecting patient record privacy and handling hazardous biowaste.
Lawrence Dearth, leader of one of the largest staffing companies in the United States, gently brings a reality check when he sits down with a new client to talk about filling desperately needed IT roles.
It's difficult to achieve breakthroughs in cancer research without studying real people and what happens to them. And these days, you can't do that without looking at patient data while protecting the identities of the people attached to that data.
Sheila Jordan was on the job as Honeywell's newly minted Chief Digital Technology Officer for just 59 days when the global COVID-19 shutdowns hit. On an episode of Honeywell's podcast "The Future Is...," Jordan says that she left her post as CIO at Symantec to join the US$36.7 billion industrial conglomerate in large part because she was attracted to its digital transformation (DX) strategy.
In the United States during the COVID-19 pandemic, there were numerous reports of urbanites moving to the country. The reason was straightforward: Fewer neighbors made social distancing and, by extension, healthy living easier. Many people also learned that they could work from anywhere because their jobs did not require commuting to an office.
You can't attain the digital transformation that will power your next big innovation unless your people possess critical datacentric skills. But while it's clear that technical skills will remain important, experts say organizations also need to develop and nurture innately human capabilities like resilience, emotional intelligence, and curiosity to try new things.
Decades after the company he founded made the transformation to using sustainable materials, Ray Anderson, CEO of Interface, remembered the realization "like a spear in the chest." The large manufacturer of commercial flooring needed a higher purpose, a mission that included chasing profits but went beyond.
You're the CEO of a community bank. While seeking ways to cut costs during the fallout from the pandemic, you're intrigued when one of your executives shows you a plan to cut call-center costs by 30%.
Tech Target
By As part of environmental, social and governance programs, companies can use ESG reporting frameworks to disclose information on the sustainability and ethical performance of their business operations. These frameworks offer a structured approach to evaluating a company's practices and ESG-related business risks and opportunities, including its impact on the environment and society.
By Corporate reporting on environmental, social and governance issues can be used by various stakeholders -- including employees, investors, customers and others -- to assess the ESG-related risks and opportunities relevant to an organization. While environmental and governance factors are often at the forefront of ESG considerations, the social aspect is equally important.
By Web 3.0 is a work in progress. The coming new iteration of the World Wide Web will be decentralized, with distributed control to provide greater autonomy for content creators. Meanwhile, Web 2.0, the current generation of the internet, won't go away any time soon.
In case you missed it, a new generation of the world wide web is coming. The current iteration, Web 2.0, tends to concentrate content on social networks owned by big technology companies such as Google and Meta.
GitLab blogs and case studies
As a seasoned DevOps engineer, an individual contributor (IC) role might eventually start to chafe. Here are 5 strategies to make the case that you're ready for a DevOps manager role, and 3 key things to keep in mind once you get there.
On March 14, 2020, Tangram Vision CEO Brandon Minor flew from Colorado into the Bay Area to meet with COO Adam Rodnitzky. The two had just launched Tangram Vision, the company they co-founded to make sensors simpler for robotics, drones, and autonomous vehicles. Their plan was to, each month, alternate working at each other's location.
Even if you're totally happy in your current position, it pays to keep an eye on your DevOps career path and learn about emerging roles, especially given the way the DevOps space evolves so rapidly.
MIT Sloan Management Review (ghostwritten)
It’s hard to sustain success indefinitely. To stay relevant, companies need to reinvent themselves. The next wave of reinvention is being driven by data. As a leader, you need to rely on solid, meaningful data to make decisions now and prepare for what’s ahead.
MIT Technology Review Insights (ghostwritten)
Sercompe Business Technology provides essential cloud services to roughly 60 corporate clients, supporting a total of about 50,000 users. So, it's crucial that the Joinville, Brazil, company's underlying IT infrastructure deliver reliable service with predictably high performance. But with a complex IT environment that includes more than 2,000 virtual machines and 1 petabyte-equivalent to a...
Placing computation and analysis close to where data is generated offers high speed and performance for a new class of applications.
Case Studies
Content Marketing Writing Samples (ghostwritten)
Every company - every individual - has been or will be impacted by climate change. Look to your ecosystem - partners, clients, vendors that have sustainability projects under way - to identify where your organization can have impact, says Sophia Mendelsohn, Cognizant's Chief Sustainability Officer.
A majority (61%) of organizations are evaluating and exploring use cases, while the rest have already begun to use it, according to the survey conducted by Harvard Business Review Analytic Services.
Business Change: From Disruptor to Differentiator In business, as in life, it seems, the only constant is change. And in the digital age, the pace of change is more rapid than ever. Unfortunately, the human ability to assimilate change has not accelerated with the times-it is the same as it ever was.
Going Beyond the Roadmap
Marketers know what it takes to succeed today: Stop talking “at” customers and engage with them. By making customers feel listened to and “known,” marketers can capture their loyalty. Here’s a look at what customer engagement means today, through the eyes of six organizations that have transformed their marketing efforts by focusing on the customer.
Innovative cruise company adopts predictive analytics and real-time business capabilities, with the aim of improving the guest experience and ensuring operational efficiency.
Customers no longer tolerate long order processing times, inconsistent information across channels or service glitches. And yet, business is increasingly global and complex. To meet these demands, businesses of all types- not just digital giants and deep-pocketed competitors-certainly need instantaneous access to relevant data. They also, however, need the ability to [...]
ESRI WhereNext Magazine
If a fool knows the price of everything and the value of nothing, the saying goes double when it comes to data. Any CIO footing the bill for enterprise technology is keenly aware of how much it costs, but do they know the value of the data on which those systems run?
The COVID-19 pandemic has strained most businesses, but retailers' challenges have been exceptional. Some were already struggling with industry disruption, and nearly all experienced a sudden cratering of revenue from unprecedented levels of unemployment and the shuttering of physical stores.
Many corporate executives are now learning that a too-slow approach to digital transformation before COVID-19 has hampered their ability to adapt during the outbreak and its aftermath. With so much uncertainty in the marketplace, it has been tempting for businesses to put implementations of digital technologies on hold.
The conditions were ripe for a global pandemic, and there were warnings as far back as last November. But for most everyone in the world, the COVID-19 crisis caused by the novel coronavirus came as a bolt from the blue.
Automation World magazine
Though they don’t often receive the attention given to other automation technologies, cables and connectors are critical to the power and data transmission needs of industry’s digital transformation.
Though the devices used in many Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) projects may not be entirely new, the architectures used to facilitate IIoT levels of data aggregation, sharing, and analysis tend to be of a more recent vintage.
Like most everything in 2020, global supply chains were thrown into disarray during the pandemic. Demand plans and equipment maintenance schedules went out the window with U.S. e-commerce volume growing 44% as consumers stayed home to buy everything they needed to sustain life. In response, many supply chain managers increased safety stocks to hedge against increased volatility.
In the world of manufacturing, augmented reality (AR) is one of those technologies that has been eagerly anticipated for years but isn't yet widely used due to a lack of numerous commercial application examples.
You might not ever have thought of it, but Stephen Perry wants you to think of operating your car as a process with variability. "When you're driving, you have to measure distances visually and adjust as you go by steering or applying the gas or brakes," says Perry, senior controls engineer Tyson Foods.
For more than a decade now, Ethernet has been making big moves into the manufacturing and processing industries and is well on its way to becoming the de facto industrial network.
Digital transformation was at the top of the manufacturing agenda this year, as companies continued implementations of advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), analytics, and connected sensors as part of Industry 4.0 and Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) initiatives.
Voice-controlled, hands-free wearable devices are bringing virtual and augmented reality to field service, training and other uses.
It was the worst-case scenario. On March 23, 2005, hydrocarbon vapor encountered an errant spark and ignited at BP's refinery in Texas City, Texas. Fifteen workers were killed in the ensuing explosion, and more than 180 were injured. The refinery, the third largest in the U.S., was seriously damaged.
The cybersecurity world changed forever on June 27, 2017, the day of the NotPetya attack. Masquerading as ransomware, the particularly vicious malware first surfaced in the Ukraine but rapidly went on to destroy data on Windows computers all over the world, taking down whole data centers-and businesses-at a time.
For a production supervisor, it's the stuff of nightmares: Somewhere on the line, a tiny milling bit breaks, shutting down the line. This unplanned downtime is not only costly, it causes delays that spell major headaches for that supervisor. Unplanned downtime has been a nemesis of manufacturers from day one.
Global energy consumption has grown steadily over the past century and will continue to grow-by a hot 30 percent between today and 2040, according to the International Energy Agency. This explosion in energy demand is expected to greatly increase stress on the worldwide public energy generation system, which is already being required to perform in ways for which it was not designed, according to the U.S.
As a virtualized representation of production equipment in a factory, digital twins play a key role in helping manufacturers model different scenarios to optimize energy efficiency, among other objectives. The twin can contain a massive amount of data about existing machines, down to the component level, according to Andy Garrido, product market specialist for Beckhoff Automation.
The use of robotics in the industrial space has exploded. Long a staple of the automotive industry, robots are getting into new areas of operation such as retail, distribution and order fulfillment, often working alongside humans in the form of collaborative robots (cobots).
The gaseous byproducts of crude oil are toxic and must be controlled. Over-pressure situations can put the plant and personnel in danger, so pressure relief valves (PRVs) are installed that send gases and vapors to a flare stack for burning.
Chevron Oronite 's additives plant in Singapore had always kept track of its 2,000 employees through a paper sign-in sheet located in the control room. Not only was this disruptive to the operators in the control room, it was often difficult to account for everybody if they weren't where they were expected to be.
Not long ago, the prospect of a cyber attack on an industrial control system (ICS) was frightening, but speculative. No more. The hoof beats of looming public-safety disaster have grown ever louder after the 2010 wake-up call of the notorious Stuxnet worm attack on the control systems that ran Iran's nuclear program.
Oil and gas used to be one manufacturing segment that had the luxury of putting process automation and optimization on the back burner. When oil is priced near $200 per barrel, who has time to do anything but pump that liquid gold out of the ground as quickly as possible?
Manufacturing execution systems (MESs) and historians have never been the sexiest technologies. But they are champs at handling data. So, in an age of increasingly connected assets and the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), these stalwarts are getting new attention.
The need for better insight into production, continuous process optimization and mobile access has driven manufacturers to connect their automation...
If he were here today, Colt Reichert's great-grandfather likely would not recognize much about Red Gold, the Elwood, Ind., tomato business he founded in 1942 to provide food for World War II troops overseas. For one thing, continual investments in automation have bumped up yields exponentially.
As manufacturers turn their attention to preparing the digital workforce of the future, training is key. Toward that end, Emerson this week opened its Interactive Plant Environment (IPE) within its Rosemount manufacturing facility in Shakopee, Minn. Emerson executives led tours of the IPE as part of this week's Emerson Global Users Exchange in Minneapolis, and the first classes were open to attendees.
We knew it would happen someday. The automation-enabled productivity improvements that have propelled our economy for the past 30 years are drying up. "Performance gains are getting smaller," said Mike Train, executive president of Emerson Automation Solutions, speaking at the annual Emerson Global Users Exchange in Minneapolis.
Health.com
Sometimes I feel inhuman. Two years ago, well into middle age, I developed dry eyes, a common condition that sounds benign and manageable. Of the roughly 16 million Americans who have been diagnosed with dry eye, most have a mild form. For them, dry eye is harmless, and using artificial tears will soothe temporary redness and irritation.
Boston Globe
In a summer punctuated by alerts from the Sharktivity app, the Cape's 1,000 lakes and ponds offer freedom and peace of mind. On a balmy summer evening, I shut my laptop around 6:00 and walk over to Spectacle Pond, a kettle hole pond in East Sandwich.
Cape Cod Times
One evening I shut off my computer around 6 and walk a few minutes in the humid air until I reach Spectacle Pond, a kettle hole pond in East Sandwich. The olive-green water merges with the color of the trees on the shore, making a textured palette.Happy to feel sand under my feet, I walk steadily into the warm water.
ESRI WhereNext magazine (ghostwritten)
Shopping for a mattress used to resemble visiting a used car lot. Cavernous warehouses featured tons of models, but it was tough to understand the differences between them. Pricing was opaque at best. Most people would gamely try out a mattress or two before succumbing to an aggressive sales pitch.
Recent headlines about climate change make it difficult to bury one's head in the (rapidly receding) sand. In 2018, a total of nearly 400 natural disasters caused US$225 billion in damage worldwide. The insurance industry covered $90 billion of those losses, according to reinsurer Aon.
When a company is looking for new customers, its executives have two basic choices: Find new prospects within the existing footprint or forge a path into new markets. The latter is often more daunting, since deciding which markets to enter is fraught with risk.
Selling through a middleman is so old school. In search of growth, brands and manufacturers are taking their messages right to consumers and selling direct, some for the first time. By engaging consumers on their own terms, online as well as in brick-and-mortar stores, brands are delivering personalized shopping experiences.
Out-of-home (OOH) advertising is having its Hollywood moment, thanks to the Oscar-winning Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. But in the digital age in which consumers receive targeted offers and messages on their smartphones and within their browser windows, OOH advertising might seem to be a bit of a throwback.
TechBeacon
IT Ops should pay special attention to open source this year. Because of the growing use of the open-source platforms Docker and Kubernetes, over 3.5 million applications have been placed in containers that use Docker technology, and over 37 billion containerized applications have been downloaded, according to Docker.
New England Monthly Magazine
Your Teen magazine
At 15, my son became addicted to nicotine, which led to him vaping THC oil, implicated in the deaths of a dozen teens to date. We don't know how to help him. Like so many teens of his generation, my son, now 17, has always been adamantly anti-cigarettes.
Boston Business Journal
Heller Magazine
December 22, 2016 By Lauren Gibbons Paul Photos by Mike Lovett This article appears in the Winter 2016 issue of Heller Magazine. One evening in September 2013, the Eliot Church in Newton, Massachusetts, held a community forum on homelessness. Last to testify was a large man, who spoke haltingly about the despair of life on the streets.
Ms. magazine
Public-company boardrooms are the last official stronghold of the old boys' club. The number of women directors of public companies has climbed in recent years, but at the moment only 19 percent of S&P 500 corporate board members are women, according to Catalyst.
Boston magazine
On the western end of Beacon Street, a block from Newton-Wellesley Hospital, sits a charming 1917 brick firehouse with a lookout tower, known in these parts as Engine 6. Decommissioned as a fire station decades ago, the building marks the entrance to Waban, one of the most affluent of Newton's 13 villages.
TechTarget
Making the decision to move your financials to the cloud is pretty simple: The cost savings, increased flexibility and ease of maintenance are too good to pass up. After that, though, things get complicated. With all the different cloud options out there today, it can be confusing to determine which deployment choice to use for cloud-based financial software -- public, private or hybrid.
There's no question that today's companies operate in a demanding, dynamic environment. New regulations, a greater focus on growth and increased competition for talent all create a need for more Agile finance systems. Cloud financials promise just that: A financial management system that can adapt and scale as business needs change, and provide a real-time view into performance.
For many companies, the decision to migrate core financials to the cloud seems like a no-brainer: The cost savings, flexibility and ease of maintenance are too good to pass up. That doesn't mean that the move can be done without planning, however.
ERP is, by its very name, directed more at the big guy. It's enterprise resource planning, not small-business resource planning. That's because smaller companies usually lack the budget or time to put an ERP platform in place. Even so, small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) can benefit greatly from ERP.
Sustainable production and supply chain practices are not just good PR -- they often help the bottom line by cutting resource consumption and opening up new lines of business. Those benefits aren't the only drivers toward greener, most sustainable manufacturing practices.
When small and medium-sized business (SMB) manufacturers need to select an ERP platform, not surprisingly, they must consider a number of variables. For starters: size of business, special demands of its vertical industry and likely need for customization.
CIO magazine
As a CIO, you know data is the lifeblood of your organization. But did you ever think of packaging up that data in a different way and creating a whole new product or service? Savvy CIOs in different industries are doing just that, as discussed by panelists at the 12 th annual MIT Sloan CIO Symposium.
WHEN GROCERY RETAILER and distributor Giant Eagle embarked on knowledge management three years ago, there were already several strikes against the nascent movement. For one thing, most employees at the chain's 215 stores had never used computers in their jobs before.
Karen Hogan understood what she was up against from the get-go. It was 1978, and even though she had scored 100 on the federal government entrance exam, qualifying her to be an entry-level programmer, she was given a job as a keypunch operator.
Virtually no company or industry has been spared during the brutal economic slump of the past few years. With a recovery seemingly at hand, it's tempting to breathe a sigh of relief and get back to business as usual. Bad idea.
Desktop Engineering magazine
Collaboration has always made the business world go round. And electronic tools for sharing information - everything from email to videoconferencing to PDF documents - have advanced the art of sharing data exponentially in the past 20 years. Now, in the age of digital transformation of manufacturing enterprises, collaboration is becoming turbocharged.
ere's a cautionary tale for design engineers working in the medical device industry. Excited at the prospect of bringing its innovative new endoscope to market, a company rushed to get its prototype in front of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) with an eye toward fast-track approval.
State Tech magazine
Several years ago, New York City experienced an unacceptably high number of fires in illegally converted apartment buildings. In 2005, two firefighters died while attempting to rescue residents in a blaze that injured 20. City officials knew older buildings with limited exits were the primary source of the problem, but when they began to explore the data more closely, they discovered an interesting pattern.
With modern air travel marked by frequent delays, long lines and crowded gates, the nation's airports rely on IT to enhance the passenger experience and make airport services more efficient. The SITA 2012 Airport IT Trends Survey shows that airports have embraced mobile apps, social media and other technologies to make travel more enjoyable.
In 1897, when the building that housed Beaver County's previous emergency operations center was constructed, state-of-the-art rescue technology had four legs, needed to be fed, and wore a saddle. What a difference 112 years makes. The Pennsylvania county is putting the finishing touches on a shiny new 18,000-square-foot emergency operations center (EOC).
When it comes to buying technology, banding together just might be the way to go. All levels of government have long tapped collective purchasing agreements to gain up to double-digit discounts on IT purchases, among other things. Now, buying this way seems to be increasing in popularity as cooperative purchasing agreements expand to cover everything from cloud services to mobile device management.
Uninterruptible power supplies may not be sexy, but they keep computers and networks of all kinds running without a hiccup during a power failure. In data centers and emergency operations centers, where the cost of downtime ranges from highly expensive to life threatening, UPSs are nothing short of critical.
CSO magazine
Rich Maurer was once hired to do security consulting for a property management company that had recently leased space to a child-care center. Not 30 seconds into the site visit Maurer, a managing director in the government services division of Kroll, realized this particular day-care business was going to be nestled in an extraordinary setting.
Global healthcare provider Best Doctors employs the most robust technologies and practices available to protect the privacy of its members' personal data-but that's just a part of doing business in this industry. Less obvious but equally important is the degree of vigilance with which the company protects its brand name, which is trademarked in dozens of countries worldwide.
Back in 2007 Johnny Long came to a fork in the road. An accomplished IT security pro with 13 years working at one of the big names, he had a great career and family, but he didn't feel fulfilled. And he had no idea why not.
Intellectual property (IP) protections exist in U.S. law for the purpose of ensuring inventors and creators are compensated for their works, encouraging innovation. Unfortunately, the very protections afforded by the federal government-patents, copyrights and trademarks-are now often used as weapons by companies that exist only for the purpose of shaking down other companies for licensing fees.
When it comes to education, most people agree, more is better. No one embodies that principle - at least in regard to IT certifications - better than Jerry Irvine. CIO of IT consulting firm Prescient Solutions and member of the National Cyber Security Task Force, Irvine holds more than 20 IT certifications, of which at least six are specifically information security-oriented.
Few would deny the chief security officer role has evolved quite a bit in recent years. At many large companies, the heads of both physical and information security now report in to the same person, an enterprise CSO. The pace of change for the function is accelerating along with the ever-changing nature of threats.
The strands that weave together to form the fabric of a satisfying career are often rich and varied. Even threads that appear out of place join to form a cohesive tapestry. This is especially true in security, which (despite its ancient roots) is, in many respects, a new field.
Channel Pro Network
With no hardware to buy and install on-site, and services literally just a click away, many channel players are at a loss to figure out how to make money in a cloud world.
Cloud offerings are now part of just about any channel partner's bag of tricks, and for good reason. Cloud reduces up-front costs for customers, shifting the burden of maintaining the IT infrastructure to the cloud provider. For Microsoft partners, Office 365 is the cloud.
Amy Babinchak, president of Harbor Computing Services, is that rare SMB channel partner who is not afraid of Linux, command prompts and all. Though none of her small business customers has yet asked about the potential of replacing the soon-to-be-sunsetted Microsoft Small Business Server (SBS) with the open source alternatives, Babinchak wanted to become familiar with Linux.
Security gets most of the attention when it comes to mobile device management, but channel pros face a host of additional challenges from the BYOD trend. By Lauren Gibbons Paul BYOD, or "Bring Your Own Device," has a nice friendly ring to it, don't you agree? Bryan Boam doesn't.
Computerworld magazine
When it comes to education, most people agree, more is better. No one embodies that principle at least in regard to IT certifications better than Jerry Irvine. CIO of IT consulting firm Prescient Solutions and member of the National Cyber Security Task Force, Irvine holds more than 20 IT certifications, of which at least six are specifically information security-oriented.
The eyes of the online world are on Joe Sullivan. As the CSO of Facebook, Sullivan is without a doubt one of the most visible security chiefs in the business. He must mitigate myriad security and privacy risks not only for Facebook's employees and corporate systems, but also for the social network's 800 million members.
When Coast Mountain Bus Co. decided 10 years ago to invest in enterprise asset management (EAM) software, even the executive who approved the purchase could not have foreseen how valuable it would turn out to be.
The strands that weave together to form the fabric of a satisfying career are often rich and varied. Even threads that appear out of place join to form a cohesive tapestry. This is especially true in security, which (despite its ancient roots) is, in many respects, a new field.
For a security industry leader, Tim Williams is a pretty modest guy. As the former head of ASIS International and now as global security director for the $42.5 billion construction equipment manufacturer Caterpillar, Williams has won his share of recognition, which he doesn't take lightly.
