The KIT ─ Knowledge & Information Technology
No. 151 - 1 September 2015
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In This Issue
Mexico Seminar: IT Marketing
Vocabularies as a Service and SKOS
Vint Cerf on the IoT
Security in the Cloud: BrightTalk Webcast
Seen Recently
Claude Baudoin

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Erratum  

Nobody seems to have noticed, or at least wasted time letting us know, but the subject matter of the e-mail containing Issue No. 150, sent on August 17, erroneously said it was issue 149. The title banner in the message body was correct.
Mexico Seminar: IT Marketing
How to bridge the gap between IT and "the business" has been a topic of discussion for years. See for example the Cutter IT Journal's January 2015 issue on "Improving Trust and Partnership Between Business and IT" or Bob Benson's book, "Trust and Partnership: Strategic IT Management for Turbulent Times." The similarity in titles is no coincidence, as Bob was the guest editor of the Cutter IT Journal issue in question.

Cutter will present a one-day workshop by Claude Baudoin in Mexico City on October 15 on "Marketing IT: a Strategic Dialog for Business-IT Alignment," which aims to address this issue by applying the same methods that an external supplier follows to market its products and services to its clients. For example, why isn't there an "IT store" where you can pick up a brochure about IT services offered in your company? Why isn't "IT Marketing" calling on the users to find out how their needs are changing? Learn more about this event!
Vocabularies as a Service and the SKOS Standard
We've said it before: taxonomy may not be a sexy subject, but organizing your business vocabulary (and the relationship between terms) in order to bring order to document storage, enterprise search, Web site menus and product catalogs is a key success factor for content and knowledge management. You can learn about current trends in defining vocabularies during this hour-long webinar (Oct. 15, 10:00 a.m. Eastern US time, 14:00 GMT). This comes from the Netherlands, where public administrations were recently told they must use SKOS, the Simple Knowledge Organization System from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). A standard representation allows the publication and reuse of taxonomies, hence the title "vocabularies as a service."
Vint Cerf on the IoT
At a forum in Germany last week, Google's "Chief Internet Evangelist" Vint Cerf, also known as the "father of the Internet," expressed his concerns about the Internet of Things if enough attention isn't devoted to security and standardization. He pointed out the possibility of malfunction in connected appliances controlled by software, the risk that criminals will remotely access devices and their owners' data, and the complexity of having multiple systems that each requires its own server and network because of the absence of a common standard.

While Cerf's examples were mostly taken from home applications, it is easy to project the significance of these issues if they appear in industrial IoT applications (think of smart electric grids, traffic signals, airplane control systems, pipeline monitoring, and more).

Of course, the IoT is already happening, and no one including Cerf is advocating to turn back the clock. What we all want is for the suppliers and users of the IoT to pay as much attention to security and safety as they do today to connecting the devices and analyzing the data they collect. We're not there yet.
BrightTalk Webinar on Cloud Security
The Cloud Standards Customer Council (CSCC) continued its collaboration with BrightTalk by presenting an hour-long webinar last week about the revised version of its guide "Security for Cloud Computing: 10 Steps to Ensure Success." The speakers were John Meegan and Mike Edwards of IBM and Claude Baudoin of cébé. We were very pleased to have a live audience of almost 500 people. If you missed this, the webcast is now available for replay.
Seen Recently...
"We've spent billions of dollars on defense, but I don't think we've raised the cost of offense a dollar."
-- FireEye president Kevin Mandia, speaking to congressional staffers during
Stanford University's second Congressional Cyber Boot Camp two weeks ago.
"The #cloud will hollow out traditional IT. Steadily and remorselessly."
-- Dion Hinchcliffe, author, speaker and futurist ( @dhinchcliffe)