Not Hanging in the Louvre Just Yet, But Close

I am thrilled to say that a piece I did earlier this year was shown at the Lourve this month. Though I have pieces in private collections in Paris, Munich and England, this is a thrill beyond what I envisioned when I started my art journey in late 2008. Here is the piece that made the cut :)  Below is the official letter of recognition.


                                                              Apple of My Eye

Other honors include: 2010 Glendale Jazz Festival 2011 Artist's Magazine (Award) 2012 Art Takes Time Square (Award) 2012 Defenders of the Children Auction 2013 The Story of the Creative Exhibition in New York (Awards) 2013 Art Takes Paris (Featured Artist on Facebook) 2013 Art Takes Miami (Featured Artist in SeeMe Art Booth) 2014 Faith Youth Auction 2014 SeeMe Art Takes Times Square (13 Selections) See http://jimsinur.blogspot.com/2014/07/my-contribution-to-art-takes-times.html Below you will find your official letter of recognition for participation in the Exposure Award and the digital display at the Louvre. It's an honor to have your work included in this year's event and in the books to come. Net proceeds from the sales of the books will benefit our charity partner, Pencils of Promise, working to build schools in developing nations.  SeeMe Exhibitions  OFFICIAL LETTER OF RECOGNITION Dear James Sinur, It's been an honor to show your photography as part the Fifth Annual Exposure Award. The work of this year’s project has been extraordinary, viewed by over five million photo enthusiasts from around the world. Additionally, your photograph was included in a digital display of images presented at the Exposure Award Reception at the Louvre. Your photography was included in the Ultra-Color Collection and was presented at a private reception at hosted at: Musee du Louvre 75058 Paris - France July 13th, 2015 Photography holds power. The act of taking a photo acts as a historical marker and a capture of time. Just as archaeologists offer hypotheses about ancient societies based on cave paintings, historians of the future will base their conjectures about us on the photography that is happening at this very moment, including yours. As technology makes our world more interconnected, the act of creation has become a universal language and a vital conversation. Your photography, represented at the Fifth Annual Exposure Award reception is a thrilling contribution to that dialogue. It's been an honor to have your work included. Thank you for sharing your photography with us and with the world. Sincerely, William Etundi Jr. Founder of SeeMe

Racing to Digital While Managing Legacy

Everyone is shouting "Go Digital" from the mountain tops, but someone has to keep the legacy business processes and applications running. Sometimes the domain business and programming knowledge is on board the organization and sometimes not. Legacy can be one of the major obstacles that organizations will have to deal with in their incremental transformation to digital because few organizations are willing to blow up their legacy. There are three good options for dealing with legacy beyond walking away from their legacy completely or getting burnt by legacy.

See http://jimsinur.blogspot.com/2015/03/digital-transformation-just-blow-up.html

Remove Portions of Legacy:

If you want to lower the pain levels of maintaining legacy, there are ways of reducing the load. We all know there are processes and applications that are just plain dead weight in our legacy portfolios. There are a couple of ways to determine if the impact of removing legacy systems. One is just turn them off and wait for the screaming and downstream effects. For portions of legacy that are not mission critical this could work well. The other is to do an analysis of which data and systems will be impacted by the removal. This may be a light or heavyweight approach to portfolio analysis. I have done both with good results, but knowing the impact of each legacy piece is helpful.


Remodel Portions of Legacy:

There are obvious mission critical components in your legacy that could be remodeled for better livability. If one does a change analysis on a legacy portfolio the areas of frequent change will be obvious. These portions could be remodeling with great care as to not disturb the rest of the legacy components. Identifying business control points and doing volatility analysis for the most important or constrained is an effort with the investment. These volatile portions should be remodeled. I have learned that it is important to have business and IT types involved with analysis to get the best result.


Re Purpose Portions of Legacy:  

This is the fun category of legacy management in that you can leverage portions of the legacy portfolio and use the pieces in new contexts to attract new contexts with potential additional benefits. It could be a simple as putting an new mobile front end on a successful process or application or complex as identifying reusable portions of legacy and making them consumable by other processes and systems. The opportunities for wrapping and leveraging are usually rich and frequent and there is a lot of low hanging fruit.


Net; Net:

There is no one simple answer to deal with legacy in our transformation to digital and it will likely require a hybrid approach of all of the approaches above. Going digital should not have to be dragged back by legacy for the more successful organizations. The best will create an incremental transformation plan that leverages removal, refurbish and re purpose approaches. Best to all of you in your journey to digital while dealing with legacy.

On Top of the World with Secured Shared Processes

Like it or not, we are headed towards participation in shared processes. Processes that share across internal and external organizational boundaries. It might be taking a value or supply chain or a process outsourcing effort and making the policies, rules and constraints, more changeable by any of the partners or customers. This means that these process definitions, rules and performance dash boards will be visible to many outside your organization at a minimum or alterable at the maximum. Some of these process parameters will be global and shared with very tight security and others will be local and loose. Either way great security is necessary to optimize and protect these shared processes and their contributing components to stay on top of the world. As depicted in one of my favorite groups, Imagine Dragons, in the official video below:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w5tWYmIOWGk


Staying on Top of  Securing Process Flows:

If your processes are pretty static & dumb or if they are smart & nimble to determine their own direction, they all need security that is top notch. There should be security that is granular enough to identify who has the right to change the process flows (human or bot) that guarantees an end to end flow that delivers the results that all of the parties in the shared process can support. This starts with simple authentication of the individuals / bots making the changes and includes guarantees that all parities agree to the change. A unsecured change to a process could be devastating to any one of the participants or partners in the end to end process where the shared portions are unauthorized.

Staying on Top of  Securing Policies,  Business Rules & Constraints:

Even the most simple of rules in a shared process can have positive or negative effects to the overall process, the shared portions of that process or individually owned portions of a process. It's really difficult to outsource or share processes that differentiate value chains and individual processes when the rules that govern them are outside the organization. This is why great security over global and shared policies, rules and constraints have to be identified to require global agreement before changes can happen in our speed hungry world. Those business rules that only have local impact will also be secured and authorized, but not to the same extent.

Staying on Top of Securing Transparency of the Outcomes:

Visibility to all parties in essential in local and shared processes. Shared processes are likely to have a global performance management dashboards that highly shared to see the operations on a moment by moment basis and impact of any new changes authorized by the global partner networks. Every one's view of that corporate performance might be different, but the data / information will be consistent. Changes to that data will require significant collaboration and security, Local variations to the performance measures and views will again require a lighter security touch.

Net; Net:

There are many partners, parties and pieces to a shared process that have to measured properly for the proper level of security. If processes are just between your organization and a customer, then the security must be there, but not to the same level of scrutiny. Shared processes have to have top security methods, tools and techniques to stay on top of the world !!


Additional Reading on Security:

http://jimsinur.blogspot.com/2015/07/great-security-doesnt-ruin-party-time.html
http://jimsinur.blogspot.com/2015/07/imagine-no-passwords-its-easy-if-you-try.html
http://jimsinur.blogspot.com/2015/06/security-is-boat-anchor-to-digital.html

Do More Digital by Attending The IT / Dev Conference

For those who are faced with a digital transformation or are just interested in technology should attend the IT / Dev Connections Conference.  This conference offers an executive track plus 5 technology tracks and 180+ sessions that are led by the industry’s top experts. It is packed full of valuable information, which you can bring back to work and put into practice immediately.  The tracks are as follows:

Executive Insights

Cloud & Data Center

Data Platform & Business Intelligence

Development Platform & Tools

Enterprise Collaboration

Enterprise Management & Mobility

Please View This Video :)

 https://vimeo.com/user27658831/review/134851331/62571eb0b4



See the following link for all the details 

http://www.devconnections.com/?gclid=CM_h_ofx2sYCFUxqfgodV4sGFw

See the following link for the Executive Track:

http://www.devconnections.com/session-track/executive-insights?utm_campaign=&reference=

I will be running a workshop and involved with four other presentations, so I hope to see you in Las Vegas between September 13th and 16th at the Aria Hotel. My sessions include the following:

The Race to Digital: Managing Legacy Applications in a Big Data Era 

Panel: Making the Mobile Work in a Multi-Vendor World

Enterprise Mobile and loT: Managing Devices, Apps, and People

Cognitive Computing and Business: Teach Your System to Be Your New Digital Assistant 

Analyst Workshop – Digital Transformation: Create a Target Digital Architecture for your Enterprise

Great Security Doesn't Ruin Party Time

As organizations roll out most excellent / smarter processes and applications to compete in the digital world, the opportunity for abuse increases. The number of smart resources dynamically contributing to changing goals and desired outcomes will be increasing and the power that these resources posses will make them a target for those with bad intentions. These smart processes can be lead the wrong direction easily as they are built to auto-adjust to changing conditions thereby producing unexpected consequences in the hands of the wrong people. Those with bad intent can change the goals, decisions, and actions of processes and applications and hurt many as a consequence. Security will have to step it up while becoming less visible and easy to deal with in the new digital world. See http://jimsinur.blogspot.com/2015/06/security-is-boat-anchor-to-digital.html

Misguiding Processes with Patterns & Goals:

The kind of dynamic and real time processes and applications that will be emerging in the digital world will be susceptible to bad consequences through fooling the process into pursuing the wrong sets of goals by feeding these processes with false patterns. Most of the new processes will be able to sense events and patterns of events and those with bad intent can mislead a processes into sensing the wrong events and changing the goals to undesirable under the conditions and contexts.


Misguiding Processes with Decisions:

These dynamic processes will likely be dependent big data and embedded algorithms. Those with bad intent could alter the algorithms or the data bound for the analysis. Switching the combinations and sequence of these algorithms could have a bad and maybe undetectable effect until later down stream. This could be true of cognitive services (COGs) or machine learning where constraining rules and policies could be tampered with in real time.


Misguiding Processes to Act Improperly:

Besides messing with the goals or decisions, the actual actions could be altered in real time to create havoc. If for instance a fire drone was being flown for observation purposes it's code could be altered to interfere with outcomes rather than help. In the case of fire observation, the drone could be directed in the flight paths of retardant craft and cause misses and delays at a minimum.


Net; Net:

Great security starts and making sure that the participants in the processes are authenticated and the persons authorizing change to the processes are authenticated in a fool proof manner. In additions there should be extra controls on key pieces of code and code sequences. There should be a security sensitivity analysis based on likely and unlikely scenarios in addition to authentication.

See http://jimsinur.blogspot.com/2015/07/imagine-no-passwords-its-easy-if-you-try.html

Andy Sinur, It's Been a Long Year Without You, My Friend

First it was my acting hero, Paul Walker that left us on November 30th, 2013 at only 40 years young. Then it was my life hero and son Andy 238 days later at age 39. On July 9th, 2014 it seemed pretty dark, but then all of Andy's siblings, friends and co-workers celebrated his short, but influential life. While I miss him terribly, he created a positive ripple effect on all those he met. You can't ask for more. I envision him looking down and smiling at us all. :)

He lived like he knew he wasn't going to be here long as everyone was his friend plus he was a blast to be around. He made life fun for all those around and I believe he landed at Disney to perpetuate his fun thread. It was amazing to see he had participated in another two Oscar winning efforts with his great Disney team, besides Frozen, in Big Hero 6 and the short called Feast.

I think he also had a premonition that he wasn't long for this world. Several months before his departure from spaceship earth, he did a self portrait that seemed to show his spirit leaving him. When I saw it, I panicked and quickly arranged a weekend where we could go to the Getty Art Museum and spend some more quality time. While he calmed my concern, he wore a shirt that made me think that he knew that something was up after reading the caption on it. 

It was just like Andy to apologize for leaving us. We all miss him dearly and we will all tell him when we see him again, It was my honor and pleasure to call him friend and son. Andy, your children are still the great kids and honor students. Celebrating with donuts below !!

If you wish to read more about Andy, see the following posts:

http://jimsinur.blogspot.com/2015/01/happy-40th-birthday-andy-sinur.html

http://jimsinur.blogspot.com/2014/07/god-now-has-one-of-his-gems-back.html

http://jimsinur.blogspot.com/2014/08/thanks-for-prayer-support.html

http://jimsinur.blogspot.com/2014/11/big-hero-6-bh6-rockets-out-of-blocks.html

Imagine No Passwords: It's Easy If You try

You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one. Well it is a bit of a dream, but It will happen and is a must for digital organizations to move forward quickly to transform and adapt to change. See http://jimsinur.blogspot.com/2015/06/security-is-boat-anchor-to-digital.html

Biometric technologies hold big promise and have for years, but they all seem to have problems. We are seeing all of them roll out at the same time. The question is which one dominates and makes passwords passe?  Let's dig a little into each approach. 

Voice:

Voice authentication seems well-suited to smartphones: They’re already designed to handle the human voice, and include technologies like noise filtering and signal processing. Approaches to speaker identification vary, but they all have to handle variations in speech, background noise, and other differences. As long as there is not static pin, there is hope here to foil recordings. Voice prints will have to be guarded in way that does not allow local phone storage and spying to be successful.


Finger Printing:

Typically, users swipe a finger over a narrow one-dimensional scanner, and the system compares the data to an authorized user. The process of scanning and matching is complex, but as the technology has evolved, accuracy has improved and costs have come down. But fingerprint readers have downsides. The most obvious are injuries like burns and cuts — imagine being locked out of your phone or computer for a week because a potholder slipped. Stains, ink, sunscreen, moisture, dirt, oils, and even lotion can interfere with fingerprint readers, and some fingerprints just can’t be scanned easily.

Facial Recognition:

Another biometric scan technology is facial recognition. This technology is considered a natural means of biometric identification since the ability to distinguish among individual appearances is possessed by humans. If there is movement that can be detected to prove life versus a captured image, this approach seems promising. Bad lighting, glasses, smiles, goofy expressions, hats, and even haircuts can cause problems. Even the best facial recognition systems struggle with angled images, and people’s faces can change radically with age, weight, medical conditions, and injury.

Iris Scanning:

Iris recognition also has pitfalls. Users would likely have to hold a device closed to their face, with decent lighting and little to no motion. Most eyewear would have to be removed, and some drugs and medications can deform an iris pattern by dilating or constricting pupils try passing an iris scan following an eye exam. iris scanners can be fooled by quality photographs, or even contact lenses printed with fake irises. As a result, right now the technology is mostly used in human-supervised situations — like immigration and passport control — rather than automated systems.

Tattoos & Pills:

Pills and tattoos could replace passwords as new and radical solutions to the authentication problems. You could easily tattoo, inject or ingest electronic ids onto or into people. Of course there would be great push back to these forms of invasive forms of branding. Maybe you could make these approaches cool, but the resistance would be great unless there were negative consequences for not conforming. Of course, this is an idea from DARPA. I would die first. 

Net; Net:

Biometric approaches depend things not changing and nobody else being able to duplicate the biometric of choice. Once they are breached, there is little to do, but to change approaches or create a random and evidence of life approach. I'm not normally a betting man, but I think voice has the best shot with a little hashing & randomizing because phones are getting better at killing background noise.   

Some of the materials in this blog were sourced from Goeff Duncan. 

United States Celebrates Another Birthday

While many of us are thinking about blowing out of work early to enjoy a long weekend with our families, I wonder if we are thankful. We can thank God for our freedoms to live, love and worship. We also thank the soldiers who laid down their lives for our ability to enjoy our fun of choice. I wonder if our fathers and grand folks would be proud of what we are doing with our freedom. One thing is for sure, we have the free will and freedom to do so !!!!  How blessed and fortunate are we here in the US. Happy 4th to my family, friends, associates and to even to those who may not appreciate my beliefs. May God continue to bless us despite our failings. Isn't grace and freedom wonderful?