The Advisory Council: Recent Episodes
TAC (The Advisory Council)
Recorded June 2, 2016 A conversation about the VirtusaPolaris InsightLive software development tool between TAC founder and chairman Alan Guibord, and VirtusaPolaris executive VP of...
Recorded July 24, 2015 A conversation about Demand Management between TAC president Peter Schay and TAC expert Patrick Savard, who consults with Fortune 500 businesses...
A conversation with TAC President Peter Schay, and TAC Founder Alan Guibord, a frequent speaker on IT leadership, organizational strategy, future trends in IT, and cybersecurity.
A conversation with TAC President Peter Schay and guest Bruce Guptil, TAC expert and skilled speaker, media contributor, and author of hundreds of research notes, reports, blog posts, articles, and presentations on business IT change, strategy, tactics, planning, acquisition, and value, from cloud, mobile and social IT, to digital business transformation, to changing IT roles and value.
A little more than a year ago, TAC went live with a new website. The reason for the update then was to give the site...
Monitoring has evolved to mean much more than just managing the network components in the IT production data center. In the good old days, a Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) management product was sufficient to manage all the network components. For today’s complex IT environments, we need a multi-tier monitoring architecture.
Unfortunately, employees tend to forget or disregard policies, especially mobile security policies, so they may engage in risky behavior without thinking about it. They’re generally unaware of the potential risks, and often treat their mobile device like their company PC, assuming it’s secured by IT.
I’ve been using the Windows 10 Technical/Insider Previews (slow ring, now build 10130) on my primary work laptop since October, and it’s clear to me that in Windows 10 Microsoft has successfully salvaged the Metro/WinRT technology, introduced with Windows 8, to create a winning new OS version.
Designed as a stand-alone, on-demand advisory service for the occasional user, the TACwizard has no seat licenses, no restrictions on the use of information internally, and no strings attached.
Everyone likes to be asked for advice. In fact many companies have made a good living by giving advice. But have you ever noticed that these same companies always wrap their research in “safe harbor” statements? Ever wonder why?
I don’t know about you, but I’d like my advisory service to be more like a fine dining experience rather than the all-you-can-eat buffet. I prefer to sit down and be served exactly what I want instead of wandering around with the hopes of finding something that may satisfy me.
How could Home Depot and Neiman Marcus fall into the same trap that Target did months earlier? Could it be that this is not considered material enough to spend money on both the technology (to prevent & detect data losses) and the human behavioral changes needed to minimize incidents?
We still have only twenty-four hours in a day, seven days in a week, and to-do lists that continue to grow. Large companies get around many time limitations by buying more time in the form of employee man-hours, but not all of us can afford to do this.
Reevaluating services and looking for options is always a good idea. It keeps you up-to-date on new technologies, new services, and new engagement models that could reduce your need (and cost) for some services and replace them with lower-cost, higher-value ones.
Investing in new software to resolve an issue within businesses is a common but often misguided solution, since many times the required functionality already exists within the business’s software portfolio or is available at some level for free on the Internet.
Be very careful about the information you rely on from outside sources. Your sources should be subject matter experts, people with many years of experience in the field in which they are speaking about.
There’s a lot of information floating around on the Internet. Some of it is good, but a lot of it is bad. And to make...
Which should you consult for advice, an analyst or an expert practitioner? It depends on the information you are looking to get.
As with ideas, the same factors: need, broad knowledge base, environment, and timing all come into play. We can, In fact, start with the notion that an idea becomes an innovation when it fundamentally changes the way we do things. The more change a new idea makes, the more innovative it is.
“You don’t know when they were there, when they left, what they took, and what they left behind”. And until you acknowledge that, you will leave gaps in your defenses or your monitoring that the bad guys will easily exploit.