CIO Magazine

New Forrester research reveals three key differentiators that separate DevOps leaders from DevOps laggards. The study, which was led by Forrester VP/Principal Analyst Diego Lo Giudice and commissioned by Tricentis, found that firms with the most successful DevOps initiatives do a number of things differently from their peers:

• They are transforming software testing into Continuous Testing by adopting five core practices, such as automating end-to-end functional testing and integrating testers into cross-functional teams.
• They are almost twice as likely to consider automating the software quality process to be a “critical business differentiator.”
• They are significantly more likely to have high levels of automation for key testing and QA processes (test case design, functional test automation, test data management, etc.).

The research also exposed that many CXOs have a severely inflated sense of their firm’s DevOps and Continuous Testing maturity. According to the report, 57% of CXOs believed that their organization was following all the “leader” best practices—but only 26% actually were. According to the report:

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Project failure is one of the top reasons IT lacks credibility in a company. The good news is that project success is easily achieved, and it’s the path to IT credibility.

The answer to the question above, “Why are my projects failing?”, is much simpler than you might think. Once you know what’s causing your project failure, you can fix it.

Let’s break this issue down into simple components. Project success is based upon 3 specific things:

1. Delivering the project on time
2. Delivering the project within budget
3. Meeting client needs

Failure in one or more of these categories means your project fails. There are some studies that suggest the IT project failure rate may be as high as 70%.

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Single sign-on products have been around for a while, but the latest generation of SSO products have moved to the cloud. Vendors include Okta, OneLogin, McAfee, Numina, RadiantLogic, SecureAuth, Symplified and SmartSignin. See the story version.

McAfee Cloud Identity Manager

McAfee has probably one of the largest collection of identity providers of any product we’ve seen, including AD, LDAP, Google, OpenID, Salesforce, Twitter, various SQL databases and others.

McAfee’s app configuration screen allows you to assign particular users by groups or individually.

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It’s hard not to sympathize with Facebook. Alex Stamos, formerly chief security officer for Facebook, said in his recent Senate testimony that digital platforms face demands for “incompatible solutions.”

“The news media regularly bemoans the power of these companies while calling for them to regulate the political speech of millions. Policymakers demand that the companies collect as little identifiable data as possible on users while also expecting them to be able to discern professional spies from billions of legitimate users. Political parties around the world ask for the platforms to censor their opponents and appeal any equivalent moderation of their own content.”

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Data has shown us time and time again that the tech industry is predominantly led and managed by white men. Though the numbers of white women are paltry in comparison, with 14% at the professional level, 18% at the manager level and 15% at the executive level, their numbers far outpace those of Latinx and black women, which both hover below 2% in all three categories. These white men and women occupying powerful roles are benefiting from privileges that they may not realize — many of which perpetuate the racist and sexist systems and structures that exist today.

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When Kaiser Permanente Chairman and CEO Bernard J. Tyson announced the healthcare provider’s mission to “improve not only the health of our members, but also that of our communities,” Dick Daniels, executive vice president and CIO, knew technology would be a major driver in achieving that ambitious goal. Daniels, who has been EVP and CIO of Kaiser Permanente since 2015, shared with me his thoughts on how technology is helping the organization be a transformational agent for health and healthcare in America.

Martha Heller: What does transformation mean to Kaiser Permanente?

Dick Daniels: For the past year, we have been working on a strategy to build a healthier America with a focus on key areas, three of which are personal health, community health, and medical excellence.   

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For many organizations, understanding how resilient they are can be a nebulous issue. It’s tricky to measure it objectively in a way that allows real comparison with peers or rivals. Yet, it’s something most business leaders want to get a really good handle on because, if you can measure it, you can manage it.

Drilling down into specific business functions, such as IT, can be not only really useful, but increasingly mandatory to understand for digital business. We define IT resilience as being prepared for any type of disruption – planned or unplanned – to eliminate the risk of downtime so your customers’ experiences are seamless, and your focus remains on projects that drive transformation.

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Businesses are eager to embrace new commerce channels and technologies to get closer to their customers and grow conversions. Yet to do this effectively, they must overcome four key challenges: 1) needing to constantly innovate their digital customer experience at speed and scale; 2) designing coherent experiences across multiple touchpoints and technologies; 3) eliminating data silos to effectively harness data and drive real-time decisioning; and 4) integrating new technologies while minimizing disruptions to existing business operations.

To achieve such fine-grained control and create rich and differentiated customer experiences, many companies are turning to “headless commerce” which accommodates an unlimited variety of web, social, mobile, IoT and in-store digital touchpoints, while separating them architecturally from the commerce platform using APIs to deliver commerce services. This improves flexibility to power a wide range of omnichannel scenarios, to commerce-enable any system, application or IoT device, and to seamlessly integrate with any content management systems. A successful headless commerce strategy requires a rich array of capabilities that are open, extensible and easily consumable by developers that have little or no experience with the underlying commerce platform. These capabilities include flexible APIs, extensible microservices, new omnichannel integrations, and comprehensive management tools.

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