Got a text this morning from my colleague Andy Green at Kennesaw stating that “This seems to be the next step in BEC,” along with this link.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-47161340

Basically a company that was exploited via business email compromise for about 220000 British pounds is now going after the employee that made the funds transfers claiming negligence on her part.

Her defense? Lack of training.

“However, Mrs Reilly’s legal team have said that she did not receive any training on how to spot online fraud and have called for the case to be dismissed.”

This is an interesting turn of events and could have very significant impact on security training and awareness programs and employment law in general moving forward. I plan on watching this very closely as it develops.

What do you all think? I would love to get your take on the situation!

So I have been watching the television show New Amsterdam lately. The main character of the show is named Max Godwin, and is the newly appointed medical director of New Amsterdam Hospital. The first thing he does in his initial meeting was to fire the entire Cardiithorasic Dept because they put billing above patient care.

This got me thinking…as a professor, do I put my research above the needs of my students? As I continued into the series, Max’s continued focus on what really matters, his patients, continued and the other stuff took care of itself. So today, I started class with a single question on the whiteboard.

How can I help?

And placed a poll in canvas where students could let me know what I could do to help them be successful not just in my class, but at UNT and beyond.

Let’s see how it works……

…..and how much trouble it gets me into!

THE Indiana Jones!!

** Unsolicited Political Opinion **
Over the past year so I have become very concerned about the divisiveness that only seems to be growing in our country. I have watched people become estranged and disconnected from lifelong friends and even family based on statements in support for or against a political party or individual. So I thought I would share this excerpt from Washington’s farewell address.

[Party spirit] agitates the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms, kindles the animosity of one part against another, foments occasionally riot and insurrection. It opens the door to foreign influence and corruption, which finds a facilitated access to the government itself through the channels of party passions. Thus the policy and the will of one country are subjected to the policy and will of another.

Washington then went on to advise us that a knowledgeable population, one that is acting not on behalf of a party agenda, but on behalf of the country is the key to maintaining our Democratic Republic.

So, my unsolicited opinion is that we as a nation need to separate whatever legislation is being proposed from the party or individuals proposing it. Focus on whether it’s constitutional, whether it is in the best interest of our nation, and then finally whether it is in our own best interest.

I would like to close this post with one more unsolicited opinion. Just because someone disagrees with your position on something does not mean that you are right and they are wrong. It does not mean they are stupid and you are intelligent. And by all means it doesn’t change the person with whom you are disagreeing . In fact, the most likely scenario is that you are both wrong and both right to varying degrees. So please, learn to tolerate opposing viewpoints. Seek to understand what their position is. Seek to learn from them. You may find that your own position changes and, if not agreeing to disagree on something is a lot better than losing a friend or loved one to an opinion. Especially if that opinion has been dictated to you by someone else. As the British philosopher Bertrand Russell once said “The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.”

Let’s focus on putting the KIND back in mankind and we will all be better off.

If you made it this far…congrats….and thanks.

JP

For those of you that have known me for a while, you probably know me as that “professor guy from NSU”.

Some of you may have actually noticed that this blog hasn’t been updated in QUITE a while (ahem..Green).

Well, for those of you that don’t keep up with my life on a daily basis (and given the fact that I am not a Kardashian, I assume that is most of humanity), I have moved to the University of North Texas in Denton, TX.  It is an exciting move because it puts me at a Carnegie Tier 1 research institution, but it is also a little daunting because my three years of being the Chair of the Department of Information Systems and Cybersecurity at NSU has dulled my research brains (let’s face it…if you don’t use it…you DO lose it).

However, thanks to the help from some great colleagues, students, former students, and numerous others, I finally feel like I am getting back into the swing of things.  I have truly been blessed to have been surrounded by such wonderful people.

So, if you don’t mind it too much, I would like to take a departure from the usual content of this blog to spend some time reflecting on the past year starting with the reasons that I made the move to Texas, moving through the adjustment process to a new state and university, and then finishing up with how things are going now.

After that, I will return to our regularly scheduled programming.  Also, you may all officially start referring to me as “that professor guy from UNT”.

JP

 

I learned something cool on the @curiositydotcom app: Why Do Seven People Hold The Keys To The Internet?

https://curiosity.com/memes/why-do-seven-people-hold-the-keys-to-the-internet-curiosity/?ref=android

Recently, Marcia Pounds from the Sun Sentinel interviewed some of the panelists at our most recent SFTA event about the employment environment here in South Florida (the full article can be found here). in conjunction with data from an annual survey released Friday by longtime SFTA sponsor ProTech Staffing the panelists confirmed what I have been seeing for quite some time.  South Florida is a hot place to find a job!

I’m not just saying this from the perspective of temperature (although it’s only the third day of spring and temperatures are already in the high 80’s), but from the perspective that there are a lot of jobs here and competition for qualified employees is at a  high.  However, outside of the pay and perks, there is another thing that is making this area attractive to companies.  We have great companies here.

In my travels around the area as the SFTA President, I have noticed this is fairly common around our area.  We have a ton of great companies with great corporate cultures and happy employees.  These companies range from large, established companies such as Citrix Systems, to upstart entrepreneurial companies such as Yellow Pepper, MDLive, and Modernizing Medicine that have been growing tremendously over the past few years.

We at the SFTA are working to spread the word about this “well kept secret” about our tech economy.  Not just to the tech professionals, recent graduates, and students currently residing in South Florida, but to everyone around the nation and the world.  If you’re looking for a high paying career with great pay and benefits that just happens to be located in paradise, South Florida is the place for you!!

For those of you that read this blog, you may have come across a recent post that encouraged people in the South FL technology community to participate in the event known as ITPalooza.  This year’s event happened on December 4th and was bigger and better than ever!  The event hosted more than 2,000 attendees representing all aspects of technology and featured hackathons, a hiring fair, speaker sessions on tracks from Bitcoin to startups, and a great holiday party at the end with live music from  the ITPalooza house band.

The Expo Floor was hopping with tech companies and user groups of all kinds!

The Hiring Fair boasted more than 25 companies looking for IT Talent.

The ITPalooza Band rocked into the night!

In fact, the event has grown so large that the organizers went to a social voting process to select speakers and I was honored to be chosen as one.  The topic of my presentation was “The 5 Tech Trends that will Impact Business” and in it I covered some trends that in my opinion will alter how businesses perform and how work is done.  I was delighted to see that the talk was well attended and that the audience seemed to be engaged and interactive.  In fact, a portion of my talk was even featured in a Miami Herald article on ITPalooza by Nancy Dahlberg.  You can read it here: http://www.miamiherald.com/news/business/article4286090.html

Our newly formed AIS Student Chapter even participated by having a table in the expo and the online members provided a “Twitter Help Desk” to answer questions about presentation times and locations.

All in all, it was a great event that highlights the vitality of the technology ecosystem in South Florida and allows us to give back to our community.  I am looking forward to it being even better next year!

As an educator and general technology enthusiast, I am always interested in what skills are in demand in the tech market.  I have always seen them as a barometer of where technology is now and, perhaps more importantly, where it might possibly be headed.  So when I saw that Computerworld’s tweet on the “Hottest IT Skills for 2015,” I had to stop what I was doing and give it a read.

Overall, there wasn’t much in the article that I saw as particularly surprising.  Application development was tops on the list and the usual suspects of business intelligence/analytics, security, and mobile were all represented.  However, while the composition of the list was uneventful (for the most part), the movement of the skills on the list did cause an eyebrow raise or two.  For example, project management skills moved from #5 on the list to #2.  The lead researcher for SIM’s Tech Trends study (just released at their conference in Denver) seems to believe that this is attributable to the fact that many organizations are “catching up” after IT spending hiatuses.  I partially agree that this is the case, but I believe that other factors are coming into play as well.

If you look at the Computerworld ranking as a whole, you can see that networking skills took the biggest plunge falling 6 spots from the #3 position on the list to #9, mobile development fell 4 spots from #4 to #8, and web development was the biggest jumper moving from not being on the list to the #5 spot.  It was also noteworthy to see that database, BI, and Big Data remained relatively unchanged.  To me, the drop in demand for infrastructure or device specific skills is indicative of companies moving away from developing for devices (mobile or otherwise) and in-house infrastructure and towards using the cloud as a delivery platform for applications.

In fact, I see the movement to the cloud as almost inevitable for most companies where computing is not their core competency.   In my opinion, this will have a profound impact on what the front line “IT” worker will look like in the next 5-10 years and the skills that will be required.  No longer will deep applied technical knowledge be the skills that are needed, but rather an ability to leverage cloud based resources that are maintained by other organizations to create innovative solutions to complex business problems.  In other words, the front line IT worker will look a lot like a systems analyst, someone that knows enough about the organization to diagnose what the problems are and enough about the technology to provide a solution.

I’m curious to know what you think the skills of the front line IT worker will be in the next 5-10 years.  Feel free to leave me a comment and share your thoughts!

JP

ITPalooza – An Incredible Opportunity for South Florida Technology

By: James Parrish, Lenny Chesal, and Joe Monaco

The ITPalooza event is scheduled for December 4, 2014 at Nova Southeastern University’s Graduate School of Computer and Information Sciences.   In just its third year of existence, the annual gathering of technology groups has become one of the largest technology events in the region. This year, the organizers are anticipating more than 2,000 registrants who will attend daytime presentations and training from over 60 speakers on a wide variety of technology related topics, learn about the 50 plus technology groups representing themselves at the event, enhance their career options at the ITPalooza hiring fair, and enjoy the evening holiday celebration featuring a live band comprised of local IT Professionals.

On the surface, the event seems to be all about the local technology community getting together for a day of education and fun. However, we at the South Florida Technology Alliance (SFTA) believe it to be much more. We feel large technology events such as ITPalooza and the eMerge Americas Conference to be held in April 2015 are opportunities to demonstrate and enhance the strength of the tech ecosystem in South Florida, which is central to the SFTA mission to enable the present and shape the future of technology in the community that we love.

ITPalooza, perhaps more than any other event, is representative of this community. Everything about the event, from the planning, to the selection of topics and speakers, to the event operations and entertainment is carried out by a group of dedicated volunteers from the technology community who share a passionate belief that South Florida can become a technology hub comparable to California and the Northeast. Yes, the event might be for attendees and technology groups in South Florida, but the audience who will be paying attention to ITPalooza is much greater as evidenced by the number of media outlets that covered the recent press release from October 28^th entitled “Today, Analytics is King.”

The attention  ITPalooza has received presents an incredible opportunity for all of us involved with technology in South Florida. As was the case with the first eMerge Americas conference, a well-sponsored and well-attended ITPalooza will send a signal to the rest of the nation that South Florida has a strong technology ecosystem where business, education, and government have all aligned to create an environment attractive enough to entice investment from outside our area, but also to retain the talent  we are producing within. However, whether or not the South Florida technology community can capitalize on this opportunity is the question. Unlike the ITPalooza event, this opportunity can’t be carried out by a small group of dedicated volunteers. It is going to take involvement from the entire community.

Therefore, we at the SFTA are putting out a call to action. We need the support of everyone that loves technology, the technology community, or the community in general in order to make ITPalooza a success. Your support could come in many forms from becoming a sponsor, to giving your time as a volunteer, to simply registering for and attending the event. Every bit of support will help ensure the message  we want ITPalooza to send will be heard loud and clear (like the rock and roll band). The South Florida technology community is our community and ITPalooza is our event. Please help us to leverage the opportunity we have to strengthen both for all of our benefit.

James Parrish is an associate professor of information systems at Nova Southeastern University’s Graduate School of Computer and Information Sciences, Lenny Chesal is the CMO of Host.NET, and Joe Monaco is the Director of Florida/Gulf States sales for Earthlink. All serve on the Executive Committee of the South Florida Technology Alliance (www.southfloridatech.org).