Category: ERM

Program. Check. Not.

Going to present at a conference. You know, to raise one’s reputation that is the single currency in independent-consultancyland, and to gain feedback on one’s private research and professional (industry) development zeal.

So, I was to present at (ISC)2, or rather, not, as notified in an email of May 7th, less than 2 months after proposal submission.
And indeed the program/agenda presented online then (and the weeks before already), didn’t show my name. Bummer. Was granted a slot at a back-up filing (ISACA Copenhagen) but had to decline, due to private circumstances.
Over the course of the last couple of months, did receive some (Google)anonymous cell calls from the UK. Dismiss, obviously, as this is the Fast Route to phone bill exploitation by connect-throughs; everyone knows this, right? The some that I could (Google)trace, and the some that left voice messages, I reacted and sometimes responded to. Lesson: Be traceable via your cell number or else.
And then, yesterday this guru peer sent me a message whether I would be in town already — the town being far away, vaguely recalling the above conference of first preference…

So, … checking the conference agenda (PDF here) … my name is there …!
Texted back whether peer might present the rejection email to conference organizers which he did, causing some more cell calls with some voice mail (08:49h) about ‘terrible mistake’ and whether I could still present, at 12:10h — considering having to dress up, make a full professional presentation, pack up, get to the bus, get to the train or to the airport, get a suitable ticket, get on (train takes only 8,5hrs; plane: gate time delay, flight time, offboard delay = ?), transfer to the conference venue, for half an hour talk time … Oh. Or go the next day, in the slot that the replacement speaker got instead but then, I’d still lose out all credibility before having even started.

This just in: per tweet, MIS Training EMEA thanks me for my session… Adding to the audience that will be aware that I didn’t deliver.

Now, still awaiting a proposal from their side, how to compensate for the:

  • Reputational damage of being shown as if not delivering, to a crowd of foremost peers and potential clients;
  • Loss of outright marketing opportunity [note: not ‘sales’], to the same;
  • Feedback not received, which could greatly have enhanced both my service offering and the acceptance and acceptability of the same;
  • Loss of (permanent) education I would have got from being at the conference and hearing all the cutting edge developments in the field (that the organizers promise);
  • Expense and leisure of private travel (incl. spouse) that would have shouldered the conference and would have been half deductible on business for income tax.

I’ll stop now and wait. Some time, before switching to legal recourse.
DSC_0945
[Justice will be served.]

Where are VR, its breakthroughs ..?

Dropping another question for your tons of response … haha.
Wondered why VR hasn’t broken through to ubiquity. What’s holding it back? I mean, I understand that it’s quite complex, not just an app to be installed and there’s all sorts of physical constraints and installations to be made as portable as possible — but still, hasn’t the invention been around long enough for some, Tesla- or Watson-like breakthrough to would have been able to surface ..?
First next one through the gate, can make a fortune. Leaping over the current offerings, that have so diligently explored all details? Or is it just that there already is enough reality to still be explored with all the senses, out there? That would explain how annual airline mileage still grows so much despite the explosion of touristically oriented vlogs let alone Youtupe channels that were said to replace so much travel.

[Edited to add before publication: Oh yes there’s some chatter lately about VR but that’s mostly about brain warping and rather fundamental still — corroborating my point.]

Oh well. This:
20150911_145750
[Get off your fat a’s, or travel by fat a boat — that’s a plane in the water.]

Blown over — smart dust or where is it?

In all the news about IoT, where has the (admittedly far-flung) prediction about ‘smart dust’ gone ..? Where has the smart dust gone? Was it a wormhole glimpse into the future, was it some runaway brainstorm on steroids (or other stimulative substance) session’s result ..?
Where still, it looms in the background. Once information is created, will it remain in the universe, existing without a result (as it may or may not have a cause, the rebel against entropy that it is)? (Here I go in similar vein, not stimulated!)

Now, let’s first have actual working quantum computers. Similarly vague at inception and counter-intuitive — for which reason I believe it will turn out to have logical fallacies in its current models so will in the end not be feasible to realise ..! —, let that come first. In itself, already difficult enough to cope with, as a global society.

Afterwards, smart dust will look like a rough cut piece of cake, probably. But maybe the Problems of it, will stil be Hard (compute-complexity-wise), as here and elsewhere.

And this, for your blue pill:
20150911_143851
[Excellent or mundane archi; but with sublime acoustics — second (to) one in Amsterdam!]

Guess

OK, your guess (sic) as to what these real actual companies do:
Qwerly, Zlio, Adatao, Viggle, Zoosk, Hipmunk.

Wrong. What they really do here.
Now, the next round: Loopt, Xobri, Heroku, Bump.

Who dreams up these names anyway; yes an algorithm huh your idea about my stupidity is a mirror’s reflection farther away from truth about me you can’t get. But it demonstrates the creativity levels at those start-up / boot camp sweat shops nicely that such a visible, outstandingly creative element is left to such an apparently un-truly-creative, boring machine.

No pic today; your score’s too low.

Drones are the new tablets

It’s obvious once you think about it (which admittedly may or may not be obvious in your case) —

  • Desktop sales rebound a bit, on new (‘large’, expensive-)chip performance;
  • Tablet sales a sagging as they turn out to be too slow, and the ‘keyboard’ size and control pads turn out to be insufficient for all but casual browsing. Though highest-end specs may suffice, almost;
  • But at the lower end they’re overtaken by notephones;
  • And, at the higher end, 2-in-1 laptops shrink with all their convenience and power on board (SSD mem…) to (better) serve the nomads (than till now);
  • Unexplored newness (post-retro-hipster, though a lot of ppl around may have missed a couple of trend switches probably due to being sheeple anyway) is now in Drones. Of all sorts:
    • Not just cam pics/vids of the casual kind,
    • We’ll see an array of submarkets springing up,
    • E.g., photography: Think about all the much-better tilt-shifted [No. No. NO! Not the crapcam idiot-filter kind!] pics of any environment, including cityscapes and high(sic)rise architecture,
    • Or the pro-am sports event coverage that can improve so much (except for the actual pros — they may lose their margin),
    • And industrial inspection may be much easier if done right; replacing bulky dangerous man-manned choppers etc. — see the text of this!
    • Lots of variants are out there, still; no market rationalisation in action (yet),
    • No easy Eple version being in sight. That could only have the functionality that sheeple can handle; two simple push buttons: ‘Take-off’ and ‘Crash’,
    • All this, especially since safety issues (and privacy maybe, huh) may mean full freedom may not be feasible in the end — leaving the drone thing to techies (those that have a developed feel for tech, not the weaklings that have grown up thinking math was hard b/c they didn’t want to put in any effort into anything let alone hard learning stuff and were left free by their ‘I live like my kids are an accessory’ too stupid to should have been allowed to be parents). Where techies just don’t grow the market into early adoptor/early majority sizes quickly.

Oh well, I made my point. I hope. Anything to add ..? Like:
DSC_1003
[This is a test: If you don’t know what that is, you’re disallowed to operate a drone for obnoxious ignorance]

Assurance… No; continuous blockchainproofing will be

Accountants (of the certifying kind) have seen the light of continuous assurance coming. The vast majority of them reacted by being the rabbits [certainly not of the Winnebago / Native American trickster type ..!]; though assuming the headlights were and are still very distant, sitting quite still…
A select few have responded differently – embracing some change as inevitable, researching how Continuous Assurance might be, in times of proliferating XBRL and the like.

That’s OK. And laudable for the Virtue of facing the danger not ducking.

But … all of the assurance industry is still lock, stock and barrel dependent on being the Third Party in agency models.
And now, blockchain tech is around the corner, promising all sorts of unbelievable new ways of transferring trust. If only one could build some system(ic) in which any principal would be able to Read all minute transactions of an agent, and would be able to reliably (…) make sense of it – then the information quality (read: [non]uncertainty, [non] information (access, processing capability) difference) would be immediately visible and actionable. Undoing the need for a trusted third party to give a second opinion that is so beaten down to platitudes anyway that the usefulness has deteriorated way beyond what third parties themselves still believe (if they wouldn’t, who would…?). And note the italics of trusted.

Trusted – the thing that blockchain technology spreads so evenly, so extremely to the opposite of the ultimate non-spread of one person/entity.

Oh well. You know now, and this:
DSC_0235
[Relevant if you think it through: Warped reflections. NY of course]

Ebow to lower prices, up the sharing ec

OK, here we have these two trends:

  • Ebay still being around (although slowly, coming under attack from entrants; check your feeds if you’d have missed that) but when people get tired, they bid lower and lower, when at the same time sellers want decent prices or retract and retreat. A fair market may not exist after all – or it is the minute details that turn out to count.
  • The sharing economy is growing, steadily.

So, the two may go together. One doesn’t get enough on Eb and rather give it away, resulting in less traders and trades on Eb closing the circle. Not a virtuous one. But would anyone care ..? And, data please!

For those in the kno:
20150128_112009a
[Art. My own. [Mostly unedited indoor phone pic]]

All in all, together in order

Ah. Actually, I needed a well-ordered list of the subset of my posts re All Against All. Because searches don’t pony up the rightly ordered results, herewith for future reference:

So… Done. For you:
DSCN4588
[Well-calculated dare, Madrid]

All against all, part 5; discussion

OK, herewith Part V of the All Against All matrix-wise attack/defense analysis labeling. Let’s call it that, then.

Where the big move in the matrix is, of course, from the top left half towards the bottom right half. Where there’s a continuation of politics by other means. At a grander scale, the analysis (or is it synthesis..?) turns to:

  • The resurgence of, let’s call it, Digital Arms’ Race Cost Competition / Collapse. Just like the old days, where economic and innovation attrition was attempted by both sides of the Cold War. Including the occasional runaway tit-for-tat innovation races and some flipping as well. Yes, all the mix applies.
  • The analysis that the world (yes, all of it) over the decades and centuries seems to bounce on a scale between a bipolar 2-giant-block stand-off on one hand, and a 1 giant versus multiple/many opponents on the other. Like, Europe has oscillated between such positions over the centuries. And took them global by enlisting their youngest sibling (as Baldr to the rescue), the half-god saving the others from Ragnarök, the USofA – against the hordes from the East as predicted by our dear friend Nostra da Mus (remember? though he had a diferent view on the ideology involved…) In Da House. Now that the global stand-off had reached the DARC stage, we see a multi-opponent scheming and chessplaying once again. USofA, EU still somewhat attached but …, Russia and Friends, China, India, Brasil and friends, a host of semi-independents in the East and Far-East, and in the Middle-East (what’s with the Middle, if centers of power gravity change and disperse so quickly?).
    Edited to add: This Attali post, basically delineating the same.
  • As usual throughout human history, it’s the underlings and meek dependents all throughout the top left three quarters of the matrix that are war zones and battle grounds, too, suffering and being sacrificed as pawns without too much share of the spoils, profits, trophies and laurels. For the skirmishes and all-out war’lets as the 20th century shows.
  • Still somewhat ethics-bound players (e.g., “democratic” (quod non) countries) will also have to fight internally, for legitimacy of their ulterior objectives (externally, internally), strategies, tactics and operational collateral damage. Which in turn binds them down tremendously, when up against less scrupulous players. Don’t wrestle with pigs because you both get dirty and the pigs love that. Unless of course you’re fighting over the through’s contents for survival. And you have one hand tied behind your back, internally, while fighting for the greater good of all, externally.

So far, so good. Much more could be said on the above, but doesn’t necessarily have to. Because you can think for yourselves and form your own opinions and extensions to the above storylines, don’t you?
Still to come: (probably the 18th) a somewhat more in-depth view on the matrix of part V, going deeper into the defense palette.

And indeed, I’m still not sure this all will lead anywhere other than a vocabulary and classification for Attribution. But I see light; an inkling that actually there may be value and progress through this analysis …

After all of which you deserve:
DSCN1473
[Grand hall of the burghers. I.e., the 0,1% …; Brugge again]

IR-L or 0 (BC)

The spectre of BCM has been haunting ‘business’ departments of about any organization for too long. It needs to go away – as spectre, and take its rightful place in ‘Risk’ ‘Management’. The latter, in quotes, since this, this, this, this, and this and this.
Much link, very tire. Hence,
DSCN4069
[Opera! Opera! Cala at Vale]

Which actually brings me to the core message: ‘Governance’ [for the quotes, see the last of the above link series again] fails for a fact (past, current, future) if it doesn’t include risk management, and when that doesn’t take this into account:
Turf wars
[Here, highlighted for InfoSec as that’s in my trade portfolio…]

First, a reference to that RM-in-Gov’ce mumbo jumbo: Here. (In Dutch, by way of crypto-defeating measure vis-à-vis TLAs… (?)) Listing among others (diversity, sustainable enterprise, external auditor role) the need to do more about risk management at ‘governance’ levels. Which might of course be true, and how long overdue after COSO has been issued and has been revised over and over again already.

But then, implementation … No strategic plan survives first contact with the enemy (ref here). And then, on turf are the wars that be, in all organisations. Among the great multitude of front lines, the one between Information Risk (management) the Light brigade [of which the Charge wasn’t stupid! It almost succeeded but because the commander wasn’t a toff so supporting a brilliant move by such an upstart wasn’t fashionable, he was blamed – an important life lesson…], being overall generic CIA with letting A slip too easily on the one hand, and the all too often almost Zero Business Continuity (management) on the other, outs the lack of neutral overlordship over these viceroys by wise (sic) understanding of risk management at the highest organizational levels. As in the picture: It’s all RM in one way or another. And (though the pic has an InfoSec focus) it’s not only about ICT, it’s about People as well. As we have duly dissed the ‘Process’ thinghy as unworthy hot air in a great many previous posts.

Where’s this going …? I don’t know. Just wanted to say that the IR-to-BC border is shifting, as IR becomes such an overwhelming issue that even the drinks at Davos were spoilt over concerns re this (as clearly, here). But still, BC isn’t taken as the integral part of Be Prepared that any business leader, entrepreneur or ‘executive’ (almost as dismal as ‘manager’) should have in daily (…) training schedules. Apart from the Boy Cried Wolf and overly shrill voices now heard, the groundswell is (to be taken! also) serious: IR will drive much of BC, it’s just that, again, sigh, the B will be too brainless to understand the C concerns. Leaving BC separate and unimplemented (fully XOR not!) next to great ICT Continuity.
Or will they, for once, cooperate and cover the vast no-man’s land ..? Hope to hear your success stories.

Maverisk / Étoiles du Nord