Our Thinking

"Turn down that noise!" I suspect that at some point in your life you’ve uttered those words or perhaps had them spoken to you. In my case it was my parents telling me to turn down my music when I was a teenager. What I never understood was why they viewed my music as noise. To me, it was a symphony of sounds that I connected to in a variety of ways. I realized, as I got older, that noise was really just another term for “I don’t understand, like or connect with that.”

Sometimes it’s just about volume. Sometimes it’s about something else.

If you’re already familiar with Design Sprints, then you’re also familiar with one of the hardest parts of running one—getting everyone to dedicate an entire week to the process. If you’re unfamiliar with what a Design Sprint is, it's defined by the author of Sprint as a, “five-day process for solving problems and testing new ideas.” (If you haven’t already, I highly recommend you read the book.)

Digital Transformation. Just two words. By themselves they are interesting. Put them together and they speak to something much more powerful. Those two words put together, “Digital” + “Transformation” = “Digital Transformation”, are driving change like we haven’t seen in a long time.

So, you’ve adopted Agile as your company’s method for project delivery. You packed up your books on traditional development best practices (lovingly referred to as waterfall or sequential) and put them in storage. You’ve invested sufficient time and money to ensure that every stakeholder has taken all the necessary training. You’ve setup all the required tools of the trade – installed white boards, hoarded bunches of post-it notes, identified space for stand up meetings, partitioned a large white wall with magnetic strips to show movement of work, etc. 

Things should be ticking along perfectly now. Right? Releases should be visible, you should be getting the maximum value out of your development teams, clients should be satisfied, and the quality of your product should be exceeding your customer’s expectations. Did you say, “Not really”? 

In early 2017, HP invited a group of cybersecurity industry bloggers and podcasters to gather for an HP Print Security “Tech Day” at their headquarters in Palo Alto, CA. The purpose of the gathering was to introduce the group to HP’s printer security program (#reinventsecurity), foster discussion, and get feedback on the program. This event was the precursor to a major marketing campaign for HP to promote everything they’ve been doing in terms of making their printers more secure and also building printers with “cyber resilience”, meaning they have the capacity to detect malicious or accidental actions and even recover from the attacks. HP has worked diligently to improve the security of printers which in turn helps to create a more secure enterprise network.

Password complexity and authentication has always been a subject of contention both for users and system  administrators. Many assume that forcing users to create more complex passwords, and changing them frequently,   will lead to greater system safety - in theory this may be true. Given human nature, things rarely go as planned and research has shown that forcing users to comply with these additional requirements has actually had a detrimental effect on system security.

In Part One of this blog we introduced the California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018 (CCPA) and highlighted some of the important points organizations need to look out for to be compliant. In Part Two we elaborated on the scope of the CCPA in terms of businesses covered and their obligations. In this final part we will discuss how the CCPA will be enforced and what you can do now to become CCPA compliant.

While Online has always had a culture that promotes innovation, we were proud to officially open the doors to our Innovation Lab (Lab) in May of this year. The Innovation Lab's mission is to collaborate with Online’s customers to solve their most difficult business problems, exploring the latest in technology trends.

We sat down with Online's CTO Tim Siemens and asked him to share his insights on the second of the three technology trends he highlighted in his March blog on 2018 Technology Trends, the Internet of Things (IoT). In this Q&A session Tim answers 5 critical questions about IoT.  

They say that wise people surround themselves with those who are smarter than they are.  Every day I get to work with people that are truly brilliant. While I’m not sure this makes me “wise”, I know that the highly technical engineers on our team are very smart and I know that I’m lucky to be a part of the team with them.