IT Professional

PrePrint: End Brake Retarder Prohibitions: Defining “Shall Not” Requirements Effectively

This paper looks at how to define a set of “shall nots” requirements that is as complete as possible, starting with the elicitation and discovery through system integration and testing using a process called hazard mining. Hazard mining deeply probes the semantics of the code while the code executes in attempts to flush out forgotten hazards that need to be defended.

PrePrint: IT Innovations: Evaluate, Strategize & Invest

Technology innovations have shaped the IT Industry ever since its inception. Adoption of a particular innovation sometime becomes a key survival factor. Incumbents not adopting an innovation may loose market share. IBM lost market share to Microsoft who adopted the emergence of PC during the Mainframe era. Siebel who were late to realize the potential of SaaS lost market share to Salesforce. Evaluating a trend becomes important. In this attempt, “Diffusion of Innovations (DoI)” theory by Everett M. Rogers was found incomplete since the focus there is mostly on the “customer context”. However, historical analysis of IT innovations hint at influence by other contexts like the “Competitor Context” and the “Technical Intricacies Context”. “Business Ecosystem” play a very vital role in IT. This paper proposes a new framework to evaluate emerging trends. Emerging trends like SaaS, SOA and cloud computing have been analyzed using this framework.

PrePrint: Finding Your True IT Transformation

If you want to transform the business and cause a dramatic improvement for the enterprise, you’ll need to start by truly transforming your IT life cycle. It’s easy to believe that IT is truly reinventing itself by hiring new people, installing new tools, or with a new methodology. However, providing transformational leadership starts with the leadership itself along with the development of the three core competencies of Strategy, Solutions, and Implementation. They should be put into practice as concurrent activities because the “new IT you” will not be sustainable if your organization accomplishes these activities only one time. Your job in IT leadership is to develop all three competencies in your organization by cultivating the necessary skills and techniques, and then to cause each of them to happen continuously and concurrently. When these changes become the new habits of the organization, you are on the path to true transformation.

IT Professional - September/October 2009 (Vol. 11, No. 5)

IT Professional

PrePrint: Intrusion Detection Techniques in Grid and Cloud Computing Environment

Providing security in a distributed system requires more than user authentication with passwords or digital certificates and confidentiality in data transmission. Rigorous control of the executed tasks is needed in order to prevent malicious users from breaking policies, to identify the use of stolen passwords, and also to make possible rapid detection of known attacks. In this work, a solution for intrusion detection in grid and cloud computing environment is presented in which audit data is collected from the cloud and two intrusion detection techniques are applied. Analysis for anomaly detection is performed to verify if user actions correspond to known behavior profiles and knowledge analysis is performed to verify security policy violations and known attack patterns. This approach was evaluated in terms of performance results.

PrePrint: BUSINESS–IT STRATEGIC ALIGNMENT MATURITY: PREDICTING THE IMPACT ON TRANSFORMATIONAL STRATEGY AND BUSINESS RESULTS

Academic and management literature hypothesize that organizations that adopt organizational and management practices (“complementary factors”) that improve IT-business communications and partnership are better able to transform their business models. This implies that these firms obtain higher productivity and profitability from IT investments than organizations with comparable levels of IT investment. This study employs a stage-growth model (the “strategic alignment maturity model”) that focuses on the evolution of a bilateral and ideally co-adaptive relationship between business and information technology functions to empirically test that hypothesis. Employing the results of a survey of pharmaceutical industry business and IT executives, this research provides new insights into the relationship between IT-business strategic alignment maturity and firm-level productivity and profitability. This study also helps to quantify important “complementary factors” that provide transformational impact on a firm’s production function by its investments in IT.