Thoughts about Social Media

Social media is relatively new, and the use of social media as a business tool is a rapidly evolving area. That has not stopped a rush of “experts” leveraging social media, promoting themselves to the masses. In many ways it reminds me of fad diets and self-help gurus, works for some people but not the masses.

Personally I have no issue with this, though I have to admit that many of these “experts” either offer conventional wisdom or take a very specific success story and attempt to apply it en masse. I’ve also seen “experts” who offer social media outsourcing services.

Now perhaps some of these methods could apply to traditional marketing, however there is a reason why this is called “Social Media” and not online marketing.

Entrepreneurism and Large Companies – An Oxymoron?

Recently some colleagues of mine were discussing the topic of being entrepreneurial at a large company. The most obvious questions were if it is possible to be an entrepreneur at a large company and if so, what does that really mean.

There was a good exchange amongst a couple of people, but I found the discussion lacking in diverse thought since the active participants are in the same group and we frequently collaborate. To me this is a bit ironic given that in my opinion, one of the top ways to fuel Entrepreneurship involves collaboration across people with diverse thinking. We did agree that it is possible to be an entrepreneur is a large company is possible.

Evolving Higher Education

Hey, I’m back with a new blog. Things have been busy at work, the type of busy that is both full of challenges but also full of rewarding work and collaboration amongst good people.

Outside of work I’ve continued the production of my Seasons in NY videos, Spring in NY is undergoing final edits and should be on youtube in the next couple of weeks. I’ve also just gone through the agony known as college application/acceptance process. An interesting and stressful experience but a good learning experience. One particular observation was the changing value of academic achievements in some elite institutions.

Evolving Corporate Information Technology

Since my last blog I have half written about 10 or so blogs, but can’t seem to finish them, or perhaps I’m not satisfied with my conclusions. So here I am, streaming music on Spotify sometime after midnight writing this blog. I blame Starbucks and their policy to give a free coffee when you buy a pound, or perhaps it’s my selection of music (Metal). But I digress.

During the past week the subject of change came up a couple times, particularly around how information technology has risen to a prominence in corporations equal to other core business functions. Having been in the technology field for many years has given me an amazing opportunity to participate in some of the most radical changes in the history of business. Early in my career the concept of a “C” level technology executive was non-existent.

Social Engineering

Good article on Social Engineering being a large risk to Corporate IT infrastructures and a company's information assets. As the article states, poorly trained workers is a reason, however it is not the only one. Most companies fail to protect their information assets adequately. Having strong perimeter security isn't enough if information assets are easily accessible from within an organization.

Comments and thoughts are always welcome.

Some thoughts on information technology security

I think most of us are aware of the high profile corporate network security breaches that have occurred this year. It seems like every couple of years we experience a wave of security events, quite a bit of activity occurs leading to some nominal changes.

You may think I use the word nominal very casually, however recently I took a look back to see how far security has come in the last 20 years and stand by my use of the word nominal.

Why 20 years? It was about 20 years ago when the first commercially available firewall was introduced by Digital Equipment Corporation. Security in the form of authentication and access controls were widely used prior to the firewall, however security was considered to be primarily a system level function.