Friday, June 28, 2013

Dealing With Illegal IT Usage


Illegal IT usage, such as the use of copyright materials without a license, has been quite common, albeit decidedly illegal. Various attempts have been made to deal with this issue. Most recently there has been a trend to deal with it by using the laws on fair trade. E&Y has a useful set of materials on this topic on its website. It covers the basic trends, gives examples of companies that have employed fair trae based policies, and contains recommendations that companies might consider.

Tuesday, June 18, 2013

Illegal IT Usage and Unfair Competition

Ernst & Young has an interesting report on their Global website that provides an update on the status of illegal software use in business and how it relates to unfair competition legislation. The relationship was not always apparent. However, the US has been insisting in recent years that companies doing business in the US must be complaint with their unfair competition legislation, which includes unfair use of IT, such as software.

Use of unlicensed software has been an issue since IT went mainstream. Over time, legislation has been updated to take it into account, and the unfair competition legislation is a case in point.

The report outlines how companies can use their compliance to improve their competitive position. It also provides three examples of companies that have taken positive steps in this area.

The report is on the E&Y Website.

Monday, June 10, 2013

Learning from Africa about Social Media

A thought leadership series from KPMG points out that there is a lot we can learn from Africa about the use of Social Media. For example, here is a excerpt about Nigeria's largest bank:

"Recognizing the unique needs and demographics of their customers, GTBank’s executives encouraged the bank to go further in leveraging social media to identify ways to make banking easier and more accessible for current and potential customers.

As a result, the Bank now boasts a fully functional online social media ‘customer care’ team (available 24 hours a day, seven days a week) and has launched a Facebook banking application which allows people to open GTBank accounts on Facebook. Future enhancements will customers to securely transfer money, purchase mobile air time, pay bills, and confirm their account balances, all through their Facebook accounts.


In this, GTBank ranks among just a handful of banks around the world that plan to offer this feature; not surprisingly, most are in the developing world (such as India’s ICICI and Brazil’s Bradesco) where traditional bank account opening processes are often considered cumbersome or inaccessible."

A series worth following. Check it out here.

Thursday, June 06, 2013

Unlocking the Value of Big Data

An article I wrote on the subject of creating more structured data for investment purposes.
Check it out.

Tuesday, June 04, 2013

Security Strategy is Becoming More Important than SecurityTechnologies

The annual survey of corporate security by InformationWeek shows that the approach taken has been shifting with the environmental changes taking place. While the approach is previous years seemed to place an emphasis on getting the technology in place to protect the company, now there is more emphasis on employee training and awareness.

The survey covers over 1000 companies and only 13% of them say they are more vulnerable to attacks than last year, a significant decrease. The element of their security structure they feel is least effective is their firewalls. And they are, as one would predict, more concerned than ever about mobility and its effect on corporate security - with good reason.

One possible explanation for the shifting attitudes of companies away from technology and towards strategy seems to be a recognition that increased employee awareness is needed. The technology wars have been increasingly combative and much more difficult to keep up with. Training employees to recognize and deal with threats and actual attacks seems to pay bigger dividends.

For a copy of the survey report, check this link.