- Data of any EU citizen / entity cannot be shared without explicit consent. Terms & Conditions / Privacy checkbox doesn’t suitably give consent as per this law. Explicit consent is required
- Records of when consent was given, how, what time, when revoked, etc. must be stored
- Any breach of data or hacking must be informed to the stakeholders within 72 hours
- It applies to whole of EU
- Consent can be withdrawn anytime & when they want, and data processor / controller must comply
- There is an option for right to be forgotten. If someone says to a data processor / controller that “FORGET ME” they must remove all data on them. It applies to all places which store & process / control the relevant data
- GDPR applies to Production environment of Digital Systems which have data on EU citizens or entities. If Test / Pre-Production environment has unmasked data of EU citizens / entities again this law applies
- https://www.zdnet.com/article/gdpr-an-executive-guide-to-what-you-need-to-know/
What should managers be doing in IT industry – Part 1
There are many things that senior engineers and managers do well in IT industry among which few are listed below:
- Architecture
- Presales
- Solutioning
- Debugging and solving problems
- Exploring new technologies around the areas they have learned in the past
- Analysis of scenarios
- Product Management
- Project Management
- Setting up processes
- Team Management
- Digital Marketing & Sales
Some things that they don’t do well:
- Put in long hours in support & maintenance
- Explore completely new areas in which they have not worked before
- Testing
- Programming
- Learning new trends and technologies
If you are born in 1980s or before, you would have become a manager in IT industry by now. In this case, at times many stop updating themselves.
Below are some pointers on how to update oneself and rebuild your career:
- Instead of only reading about domains and technologies, experiment with software practically
- Setup a small consulting / teaching / area specific business where you have passion, create a website, host some parts on traditional shared servers and some on AWS / Azure / etc.
- Do some freelancing on the sides
- Meet startups, founders, discuss their problems and offer free consulting hours to solve their issues
- Network with local young IT professionals and see the latest apps and trends
- Attend various MeetUps in your area
- Pick up a new programming language and product
- Try out Linux and other open source projects from SourceForge, GitHub, Apache Foundation, etc.
- Take up courses from Coursera, edX, Udemy and similar portals
- Go for further education in part time, online or distance mode – courses like MBA, MCA, Executive MBA, MSc, MS online from Universities across the world, MTech, PhD, etc. which can be done with your job
- Follow industry professionals in upcoming technologies and domains on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook or other social media platforms to get updates
Unless one keeps up with the times they risk becoming obsolete !!
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Advantages & Disadvantages of Crypto-Currencies
List of some of the major Crypto-Currencies as of now:
- Bitcoin
- Ripple
- Ethereum
- Litecoin
- Zcash
- Dash
- Monero
- More are on the way
Advantages of Crypto-Currencies:
- Decentralized
- Digital
- Easy access
- Traded on exchanges
- Block-chain or similar modern database & protocol based non modifiable ledger of transactions
- Immediate settlement and difficult to reverse / refuse payment
- Lower fees
- Difficult to do identity theft for conducting fraudulent transactions
Disadvantages of Crypto-Currencies:
- Less or no regulation
- No or less audits of exchanges where they trade
- Price discovery does not follow standard financial rules
- Mining is ad-hoc and affects money supply
- Difficulty in reversal of payments in case of mistakes
- Price volatility
- Less clarity on taxation in some countries
- Anonymity
- Cutting edge technology which is yet to stabilize
- Functionally features are complex for layman to understand
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Information security tips while working with digital sources and internet
- Setup OTP and recovery emails for all your accounts
- Check permissions that various apps have on your phone
- When you get an option – TRUST THIS DEVICE in Gmail or similar accounts, only select this option on your personal devices not public devices
- Keep your desktop, laptop & mobiles password protected & encrypted if possible
- Use standard Anti-Virus like McAfee, Windows Defender, Symantec, Norton, etc. Note: Android phones also have anti-virus
- Explore and use a good VPN service
- Go to your ACCOUNT settings regularly in Linkedin, Facebook, Gmail, etc. and see the logged in sessions (Who is using your account) and check which apps are integrated with your account, what information they are taking out – typically they take your friend’s list / relatives, age, email, phone number, etc.
- Learn to backup your data in Cloud or external Hard Disk or both
- Setup locate your phone, remote wipe, virus scan, link check, capture pic on wrong password attempts, etc. especially on Android via Anti-Virus or other means.
- Update your devices across laptop, desktop and mobiles regularly using the official update process
- Do not root your mobile devices
- In Android don’t switch on the feature to TRUST UNKNOWN APPS to install APKs. Always install APPs from Android Play Store and Apple App Store only
- Keep Bluetooth, WIFI, NFC off when not in use
- When you leave your home switch off your WIFI
- Change your passwords of WIFI, emails, accounts once in 6 months at-least. Your WIFI at home via router should be on encrypted network not non-encrypted, check the ADMIN page. Change the ADMIN password of your router at home, mostly many don’t change the username/password from admin/admin which is an easy entry point for wrong use. Update your router software also regularly via the official update option
- For storing your passwords either use a diary / notebook OR there are encrypted software like password managers / wallets which store your passwords safely as an APP in your mobile – use them. See their ratings in PLAY STORE / APP STORE and then install or use. Don’t store passwords in plain text on computer or mobile.
- Don’t keep same passwords across all your accounts – if you do so and one gets compromised all others get compromised
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What do Presales Consultants / Solution Architects do ? – Part 1
All software projects and software product development goes through a cycle whether in AGILE / WATERFALL / ITERATIVE / HYBRID AGILE / DEVOPS / etc. where requirements are discussed, finalized or atleast finalized at a high level with prospects / customers – internal or external, post which project Statement of Work is created / signed or product backlog is created, agreed and work on software / product development starts.
Presales Consultants OR Solution Architects typically work on below items:
- Responding to Request for Proposals / Request for Information / Request for Quote by building proposals which cater to various sections like compliance, terms and conditions, pricing, milestones, requirements, architecture, etc.
- Finding the fitment of the prospect’s work in terms of organizational / technology / domain / process / quality / etc. with company and providing input for continuing the work of the prospect or not
- Finalize or participate in high level solution and architecture design
- Take decisions or participate in the same for areas like open source vs. proprietary or mixed
- Conduct demos of earlier projects done / products built / solutions
- Build pricing models for the project and milestones
- Estimate or participate in estimation discussions
- Conduct user / customer interviews as a business analyst or tester
- Build proof of concepts / technology or functional demostrators
- Participate in consulting assignments as a facilitator for architects and / or build the high level direction of the assignment or solution
- Participate in or present the solutions / products to clients
- Stay updated with trends in technology / domain, news, happenings in IT industry and overall in the organization which they represent so as to right fit the solution to the customer’s needs based on what’s available and possible
- Build case studies, proposal and estimation repository, create white papers / presentations, processes for responding to client requests, list of standard questionnaires and their answers, etc.
- Understand and study competitors, document the same
- Build or participate in building best practices across technology, domain, process and quality
- Create statement of work, proposals, quotes, approach documents, presentations, minutes of meetings and other artifacts that act as base documents for a sales discussion from back-end sales support side
- Provide inputs to sales, marketing, delivery, testing, finance, HR, etc. and others as required based on the trends and customer knowledge that they acquire from industry / customer interactions
- Hand over signed contracts and statement of works to the software delivery team via a hand over to start development or activities required before that and transfer understanding of customer expectations
- Monitor the project along with project manager at high level for cost, architecture, technology, domain and duration, then participate in testing to ensure that product or project is on right track
Above was Part – 1 on details of what a Presales Consultant or a Solution Architect does. Moving forward I will post more details on the whole Presales and Solutioning life cycle
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BPM (Business Process Management) and trends
Business process management from 1990s / 2000s in simplest terms is a set of activities (automated or manual) with breaks for events and interactions with external systems / human beings along with notifications / rules / filters / etc. Traditional BPM / Workflows included manual and automated tasks, integrations (mainly offline or asynchronous), notifications, auto-escalations, interactions with human beings.
Come to 2017 and we have plethora of new technologies / products in the ecosystem which we can use along with BPM – some are already in use and some will evolve with time.
- Real time analytics integration with social media and other areas
- IoT integration
- Automation, Machine Learning & Artificial intelligence
- Collaboration
- Omni channel
- Cloud
- Entity modelling and Decision model & Notation instead of BPMN
- Chatbots as entry points
- Low code business process management platform
- Real time analytics – With all of the social media APIs in the market like Twitter / Facebook and so on we can integrate them with BPM as an entry point based on for example for many of the tasks or in other activities in integration. A positive or negative review with specific keywords can for instance trigger a specific part of or the start of workflow. Something similar was done by a bank in India recently where they had twitter based banking
- Internet of Things has a lot of intelligence built into them from beacons, electronics kits, sensors, biometrics and so on. They could act as augmentation to the normal input provided by other systems and BPM users / admins. For instance based on a specific temperature threshold emergency systems could be activated and series of various fire mitigation steps could be activated
- Robotic process automation, machine learning and AI have the capability to automate many of the steps of BPM / Workflows. They could for instance automate the under-writing of various insurance policies based on earlier inputs and rules
- Collaboration and omni channel are buzz words today in marketing and horizontal portals. BPM can potentially now work with multiple channels like smartphones, APPs, SMS, calls, social media, etc. driving more productivity
- Many companies now offer softwares in cloud as SAAS and workflows too for instance can be hosted in say AWS to connect anywhere, anytime and in multiple ways over internet
- Entity modelling and Decision model & Notation are two new ways of modelling your workflows and business processes. They are closer to business and non technical users can use them for modelling the processes
- Chatbots which use Natural language processing to create chats between humans and backend systems could be another potential entry activity for workflows and BPM
- Lastly low code platforms are getting more traction as we move into world of automation, artificial intelligence and machine learning. With decision model & notation and entity based modelling we are already moving in direction of low code platforms
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Blockchain for ECM and Digital Assets
What is ECM ?
Enterprise Content Management is a repository of documents with workflow, scanning, digital rights management, integrations, metadata, web content management and portals weaved around it
What is BlockChain ?
Database mainly used as distributed ledger which does not allow modifications of earlier stored ‘Blocks’ in it and secured by cryptography in a way where earlier blocks’ signature is stored on the next instance resulting in immutability. If any of the earlier blocks are modified it results in a corruption of network majority
What can we do when we merge BlockChain with ECM ?
We have immutable strings in Java, we have immutable objects in programming. But to maintain immutability in Enterprise Content Management, Document Management and Digital Assets we go upto great lengths to have hashing, signatures, complex repository engines, MD5s and so on.
One thing that could help us is BlockChain. People have already started speaking of building custom ECM engines using open source products from NoSQL and Portal domain. If we add a BlockChain database to this mix, we get a serious contender for a new type of ECM repository – one that does not need complex repository logic or probably simplifies it.
Use cases:
- ECM – We can take a NoSQL database, Blockchain and a horizontal portal. Portal works for the workflow, presentation, rules, etc. NoSQL for the metadata and BlockChain for integrity of the repository assets like documents.
- Digital assets repository – All the signatures of the various repository assets in an enterprise could be stored in the BlockChain which can verify assets’ integrity just like what MD5 does
Its worth exploring. BlockChain can be so much more than just transactions’ integrity management.
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Technology trends in software industry
- Angular – Front end user interface framework and much more
- React – Interactive way of programming
- React Native – New mobile app framework
- BlockChain – Distributed non modifiable database of BitCoin which is being used majorly in BFSI
- Spark – Cluster computing framework
- ChatBots – Intelligent conversational messengers
- IoT – Internet of things enabled by beacons, Arduino, Rasberry Pi and others
- RPA – Robotic process automation
- NoSQL – NoSQL databases like Graph, XML, Columnar
- Mobile Apps – Android / iOS / Ionic
- Analytics – Building predictive and other analytics based solutions using products like SAS / SPSS / BigData / Cloud / R / Talend / Tableau / MongoDB / etc.
- Functional programming – New way of programming evolving ahead of Structured / OOPS – works like mathematical functions
- Machine Learning – Supervised / Unsupervised and reinforced learning like we have in Android phones using Google Now. Next step deep learning
- Languages that compile into Java Byte Code – Kotlin, Scala, Groovy
- GitHub – New way of code management and much more
- Node.js – Javascript based runtime
- Cloud – AWS, Rackspace
- Spring Boot – Opinionated spring framework with auto configuration
- Security – Penetration testing, OWASP, Firewalls/UTM/IPS, Cryptography
- DevOps – Integrated AGILE and Operations
- API Platforms – Apigee, Swagger
- NLP – Wit.ai API.ai
- Micro-Services – Docker, REST, loosely coupled, fine grained
- Integration – MuleSoft, Talend
- Design thinking – Thinking focused on solutions and actions rather than problems
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Framework for reviving old software projects
We are now decades into ERP, Internet and Enterprise software. Multiple years into social media. So many sites, apps and softwares come and go. So many sites and apps are now in decline. There should be a framework & programming language just like we have Hibernate, Spring, Dot Net, Swift and others to revive old projects – enter database, configurations, code and it should revive a skeleton plus load/create data.
Old things still hold value !!
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Railway safety
Some suggestions for railway safety:
- Put threads of wire inside track while building along with insulated areas in track to hold the wire safely
- Sensors at each joining fish plate attached to wire and WIFI / low energy Bluetooth or other devices
- Extra ballast and heavy concrete for IED protection
- Weld all fish plates, clamps and other things with shock absorbing joints for heat and train movement
- At each track joint of fish plate put WIFI sensor which sends encrypted signal and tells if conductivity is right from wire in track to sense damage / sabotage
- Red Blue shift based radio sets sensing distance with unique codes for each train which tell if trains on same track are coming towards each other mapped to WIFI sensors on track to avoid collision like TCAS of flights
Too many accidents – this could be a good start
