2018 has been a year of rapid technology growth. We have seen changes to the security landscape, an increased adoption of AI and continued generational adjustments to our workforce.  As we look back over the last 12 months, we wanted to share some of our favorite blog posts from 2018 that touch on some or all of these topics: from risk and security assessment, to user experience, design thinking, business consulting, and everything in between. Happy reading!

In his final post of the series, Online’s CTO Tim Siemens shares his insights on the last of the three technology trends he highlighted in his March blog on 2018 Technology Trends. 

(A friendly reminder from our RSP team on practical ways you can avoid being a target of identify theft when shopping on & offline this holiday season.)

What's Your Cellular Data (Protection) Plan?

There’s no shortage of stories from around the globe on new ways that hackers are learning to access our personal data.  Important preventative measures include keeping up-to-date antivirus software, having an active firewall, and using strong passwords.  Even with these controls in place, this can lead to a false sense of security.

While many of us focus on protecting laptops and computers, we often don’t stop to think about protecting our personal or work-assigned smartphones, which is exactly what criminals are counting on. 

{ Part One of this blog discussed 3 factors to consider when planning a true Design Sprint. Be sure to read both blogs in order to get the most accurate depiction & implementation of this important business process, as laid out by our User Experience Designer, Kevin Guenther. }

Honestly, that was my first thought when I started looking at the marketing material HP had put together for Black Hat 2018 this year.

HP has been promoting its efforts to provide security to its enterprise printers for the past couple of years and has done a great job at offering secure solution. They have even involved the security research community by introducing a first-of-its kind enterprise printer bug bounty program. 

But end-point security? HP makes printers. What do they know about protecting end-points like desktops or laptops?

As Agile coaches, it is not uncommon for us to encounter companies that have made adopting Agile a priority in their organization but have come under scrutiny for not delivering any specific business value - despite what was promised. In many of these cases, we have seen these organizations revert back to their traditional ways of delivering projects, while others take a mix and match approach relegating Agile only to small co-located projects.

"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.” 

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”?