Here are five stories you may have missed while out shopping for the perfect Mother’s Day gift:

1. Big Data Gold Isn’t Always Where You Would Expect It
   Many companies are focusing their big data initiatives in areas like sales, marketing, customer service and R&D, but other functions like logistics or finance may offer even greater ROI.
2. Most data isn’t “big,” and businesses are wasting money pretending it is
   Big data! If you don’t have it, you better get yourself some. Your competition has it, after all. Bottom line: If your data is little, your rivals are going to kick sand in your face and steal your girlfriend.
3. Invest in people, not resources
   There is a supply-and-demand paradox brewing in the software business, and it’s getting worse by the day. Companies are searching for rock-star talent, while at the exact same moment talented people are searching for great work. People on both sides of this issue are frustrated — companies can’t find the right workers, or enough of them and talented workers feel stifled, bored, and in many cases exhausted, and even oppressed, by the work they do find.
4. 11 signs your IT project is doomed
   No senior buy-in, minimum spec targets, a ‘nothing can go wrong’ mentality — here’s how to sense demise before your IT project meets its ignominious end.
5. The illusion of simplicity: photographer Peter Belanger on shooting for Apple
   You’ve almost certainly never heard of Peter Belanger, but you’ve definitely seen his photographs. In fact, you may even see his work every day, and it’s likely that you own some of his most famous subjects. Belanger is the man behind some of Apple’s most iconic product images, a San Francisco-based product photographer at the top of his field. Apple is but one of his clients — he’s done work for everyone from eBay and Nike to Pixar and Square — and we sat down with Peter to talk about his work, his background, and some very, very expensive gear.

What’s on your reading list? Tweet us @CAsvcAssur.

Here are five stories you might have missed while figuring out which CA World 2013 sessions you want to attend:

1. Why a Botched IT Project Will Destroy a Major Corporation in the Near Future
   The risks associated with major IT projects are being vastly underestimated, according to the largest study of global IT projects ever undertaken.
2. Should universities offer Cobol classes?
   At universities today, Cobol is mostly taught as an elective, and even then it’s likely offered at less than one in four schools.
3. Network heavy hitters to pool SDN efforts in OpenDaylight project
   Cisco, VMware, HP, and most other major vendors will contribute to the open-source software-defined networking framework
4. Google’s idea of productivity is a bad fit for many other workplaces
   As noted recently by Greg Lindsay of the New York Times, Google believes that centralizing its workforce and designing its offices to encourage random encounters between employees from different areas of the company increases the chances for serendipitous encounters and discussions.
5. Negotiating and patience are keys to landing a fair IT salary
   More than half of IT professionals accept the first salary offer they receive from a new employer, though most organizations are ready and willing to negotiate, according to new data from Dice.

What’s on your reading list? Tweet us @CAsvcAssur.

Here are five articles you may have missed while giving thumbs down to the sad news of Roger Ebert’s passing:

1. How Intel built its own private cloud
   Intel not only embraces cloud computing and the technology behind it, the company uses it in a big way. During the past four years Intel’s internal IT team has been building a private cloud based mostly off of the OpenStack open source cloud platform that serves more than 95,000 workers at the chip manufacturer.
2. The next big thing on Twitter: #TwitterChats
   Twitter Chats seem to be all the rage on the microblogging site. Vendors, social media experts, regular users, customers, analysts, journalists and just about anyone can join in on the conversations, which range from a variety of topics. There are Twitter Chats on any number of subject areas, but in the technology industry, they seem to becoming more and more popular.
3. Job well done? Better ways to assess tech employees
   As IT responsibilities evolve, managers strive for better ways to measure techies’ contributions.
4. 20-Hour Workdays: 4 Ways To Survive A Startup
   Entrepreneurs come in all shapes and sizes. But the most successful pioneers tend to share certain traits. Entrepreneurs are driven, innovative, persistent, resilient, and, as The New York Times’ David Segal suggests, just the right amount of crazy.
5. Social media makes us more productive
   Some new research, conducted by Joe Nandhakumar, reveals the productivity gains provided by social media usage.  It found that the employees that regularly use social channels are in fact amongst the most productive employees.

What’s on your reading list this week? Tweet us @CAsvcAssur.

Here are five stories you may have missed while eagerly awaiting the Samsung Galaxy S4 release:

1. Enterprise apps get social
   Combining the ad-hoc nature of social media with the more structured world of enterprise apps such as CRM is often the best of both worlds, implementers say.
2. Big Data Debate: Will Hadoop Become Dominant Platform?
   Will Hadoop become the hub from which most data management activities will either integrate or originate? Two big data experts square off.
3. Fiber cables made of air move data at 99.7 percent the speed of light
   Researchers say they have created fiber cables that can move data at 99.7 percent of the speed of light, all but eliminating the latency plaguing standard fiber technology.
4. Flipboard 2.0 refreshes app’s look, now lets everyone run their own magazine
   We’ve been playing with the new version of Flipboard for about a week, and it’s definitely better than ever.
5. Want Your Company to Grow? Fire Your Managers!
   Too many employees work for their boss rather than their company or their clients. Businesses these days are filled with multiple layers of management, and employees often find themselves playing politics and focusing on tasks to make their boss happy.

What’s on your reading list this week? Tweet us @CAsvcAssur.

Here are five stories you may have missed while waiting for that early spring promised by Punxsutawney Phil:

1. Consumer habits and behaviors are changing the very nature of work
   Every enterprise employee is a consumer, and the habits, behaviors, and expectations of this persona are changing the very nature of knowledge work and the technologies that we associate with it.
2. March Madness streaming-content bans don’t apply to CEOs: study
   To ban or not to ban? The question comes up every year as March Madness approaches and companies fret about the potential for sluggish networks and lost productivity if employees tune in to games played during work hours.
3. Workers Can’t (or Won’t) Escape From Their eMail
   Do you sometimes feel as if you’re perpetually buried inside your inbox? Join the club. Despite the massive popularity of social media, we spend a staggering amount of hours sorting, reading and sending email, according to a recent survey from Mimecast.
4. 2013 IT Skills and Salary Report
   Get a look at how your numbers compare to your peers and neighbors with these comprehensive lists.
5. Career Paths: Why We Get Sidetracked
   None of us dreams of being an also-ran. Ask any rising professional, and they are charting a sure course to the biggest office, the most prominent job, the contribution that matters most.

What’s on your reading list this week? Let us know @CAsvcAssur.

Here are five stories you may have missed while searching for a tasty Shamrock Shake:

1. APM basis for service assurance, managing complexity
   Applications and business transactions are becoming more important as companies introduce more online or cloud services that have a direct impact on customer satisfaction, revenue and retention.
2. Trust, but Verify: What Facebook’s Electronics Vending Machines Say About the Company
   For employees, it’s simply swipe and go. The system trusts them to use their own judgment about what they need.
3. Patient engagement will be tough task for health tech
   Federal rules encourage doctors to partner with patients, but the systems being designed likely won’t deliver.
4. New evidence that the iPhone is surging in the enterprise
   While Android devices have majority market share worldwide, Apple’s iOS remains dominant in the enterprise. And statistics from enterprise file-sharing company Egnyte suggest that the release of the iPhone 5 is helping Apple extend this lead, even as Samsung emerges as the top Android gadget maker.
5. Big data roadblocks will slow driverless cars until 2040, analyst says
   Leading a new effort in the research firm to gauge the potential time to market for autonomous vehicles, Brennan says Ford and Google are both accurate in their prediction that driverless cars will be street-ready within the next few years. But she sees too many barriers, and says adoption will more likely reach the mainstream around 2040.

What’s on your weekly reading list? Tweet us @CAsvcAssur.

Here are five stories you might have missed this week while wading through all the SXSW hoopla:

1. GM to hire 1,000 in Arizona as it moves IT jobs in-house
   General Motors is hiring 1,000 IT staff for a center in a suburb of Phoenix, as part of its strategy to move more high-value IT work in-house.
2. Improving Capacity Planning Using Application Performance Management
   The unique combination of APM and capacity management helps IT organizations better handle the demands of the business and end-user expectations while keeping costs in check and mitigating risk by building a right-sized IT infrastructure.
3. The Rise of the Marketing Technologist: The CMO of the Future
   Gartner is predicting that by 2017, the CMO will spend more time than the CIO on technology. We’re seeing this already happening with progressive brands shifting budgets towards digital.
4. ‘Big data’ is dead. What’s next?
   “Big data” is dead. Vendors killed it. Well, industry leaders helped, and the media got the ball rolling, but vendors hold the most responsibility for the painful, lingering death of one of the most overhyped and poorly understood terms since the phrase “cloud computing.”
5. Nearly One in 10 Employees Works From Home
   About one in 10 workers toils at least partly from home now, an emerging trend that could boost the productivity of the entire economy.

Here are five stories you might have missed this week while getting your Oscar bets in:

1. A formula for getting the customer experience right
   When the dashboard in the data center shows everything has 99 per cent uptime, that’s good, right? Not really says a consultant with an IT management software company.
2. Does BYOD Cost Too Much?
   It’s a good bet you don’t know how much your company is spending on all those “Bring Your Own Device” smartphones and tablets. Even worse, it’s probably too much, says a mobility management expert.
3. Red Hat embraces Hadoop and big data
   Red Hat, the world’s leading business Linux company, has announced its big data direction and enterprise programs. In addition, Red Hat has said that it will contribute its Red Hat Storage Hadoop plug-in to the Apache Hadoop open community to help transform Red Hat Storage into a fully-supported, Hadoop-compatible file system.
4. Amazon gets (more) serious about the enterprise. No kidding
   If you still don’t think Amazon is serious about winning enterprise accounts for Amazon Web Services, you need to get over it. The public cloud leader wants to be the preferred cloud for even the largest and most security-obsessed companies.
5. Where marketing execs are spending all those tech dollars
   When you think of technology spending at a company, you probably assume the IT department disperses nearly all the money, with a small percentage going to departmental tech like smartphones and cloud services. But according to Laura McLellan, Gartner’s vice president of marketing strategies, 50 percent of IT spending outside of the IT budget goes through marketing departments — on top of IT’s expenditures on marketing technology.

What’s on your reading list this week? Let us know @CAsvcAssur.

Here are five stories you might have missed this week while prepping for a blizzard (for those of you readers in the New England area):

1. Moving to cloud computing is harder, costlier than originally envisioned
   A substantial number of businesses say cloud computing security challenges are daunting and the costs higher than they originally thought they would be, according to the Cloud Survey report published today by consultancy KPMG International.
2. Pushing Boundaries with Big Data Pilots
   Big Data is rich ground for cultivating the information and inspiration needed to create breakthrough products and services and could provide CIOs the game-changing move they need to meet mounting innovation expectations. Yet, the Big Data adoption rate among CIOs is surprisingly low. Why?
3. Cellphone Blizzard Alert Successfully Befuddles Half the East Coast
   If you live along the Northeastern Seaboard, there’s a good chance your mobile phone buzzed or beeped Thursday afternoon with a text alert like the one shown at left. And if you don’t, there’s a decent chance you witnessed the fallout on Twitter anyway.
4. Cloud Foundations: Adopting Standards for Continued Innovation
   The evolution to the cloud is just that — an evolution. From mainframes to distributed systems to personal computers to the Internet and now to the cloud: Each computing wave took hold because the demands of business were served by the advances in technology.
5. The Power of No + Structured Time in a Large Company
   When you’re leading a large company, everyone wants a piece of you. This makes time your most precious asset. How you manage it can truly determine how successful you’ll be.