News Snippets

July 2006 News

• Is Chip and Pin really safe?
• Business governance meets IT
• Office PDF feature goes missing  
• The Gate is closing for Bill

Is Chip and Pin really safe?

• UK cards still have an unencrypted magnetic strip with data
• Hybrid systems read data from both chip and magnetic strip
• Magnetic strip still needed as chip & pin not universal
• Vulnerabilities have not be resolved and others have been created

The new technology is still vulnerable to old-fashioned cloning techniques and at the same time new risks have been introduced with the exposure of the pin codes in restaurants, retailers, pubs, etc. and it is the same one that is used at the ATM.

Experience has shown in France that after the introduction there the fraud dropped for a period but is slowly returning to the same levels.

Well that was £1.1bn well spent.

Business governance meets IT

Managing IT can be made simpler if the following principles are applied:

• Understand how IT can be used to achieve the business strategies.
• Measure the value received from IT not just the costs
• Assign accountability for the organisational and process changes required to benefit from the IT capabilities
• Learn from the projects and avoid repeating mistakes
• Make re-use and sharing an IT effectiveness measurement

It is important to apply business governance techniques, measures and objectives to IT and not just as a budget / project decision escalation process. Governance should be more about guidance than management.

Microsoft has stopped plans to include the "save as" Portable Document Format (PDF) feature in Office 2007 after an agreement could not be reached with Adobe. It looks as if the XML Paper Specification (XPS) feature might also go missing. Microsoft plan to offer a separate free download for the creation of PDFand XPS files and Vista will have a view and print XPS capability - gone are the days of integrated solutions.

The gate is closing for Bill

Mr Gates is leaving the stage, no wrong. Mr Gates will be leaving the stage in 2008. The gate is still half open and half closed. What will be his legacy? What will Mundie and Ozzie create when the gate has finally closed? What will they have to change? What will remain?

The decision of the richest man in the world to move into philanthropy is an interesting one. Will the world of charity also be changed?

Interesting times ahead. Lets hope that Vista is fully released by then .....

Snippets

• It has not been all chocolate at Cadbury. IT problems have led to £12M loss of profits. The 4-years SAP-based £200M Probe programme left Cadbury with higher inventories which they had to reduce through higher discounts.
• The Information Rights Management (IRM) features in Vista could create a software lock-in as it will not be possible to share with non-Microsoft solutions. The Digital Rights Management (DRM) issues are going to be discussed for a long time.
• Microsoft has released its Windows Compute Cluster Server (CCS) to manufacturing. Designed to run high-performance computing (HPC) workloads it must make the supercomputers have sleepless nights.
• Optimal Vista performance really need the new hybrid hard drives with a minimum 50MB cache according to Microsoft.
• IBM is introducing the 3rd generation System Z9 Business Class mainframe with an entry cost under $100K. This could breathe new life into legacy systems by reducing their TCO.
• Half of all Oracle database outage incidents are caused by hardware faults.

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