It has been 15 years since the Agile Manifesto was authored and most organizations that develop software now proclaim that they are "agile." The word "agile" is an adjective meaning able to move quickly and easily. What organization wouldn't want to be labeled as "agile" based on the definition? There are many agile methodologies to choose from: Scrum, Kanban, XTreme, Lean etc. The problem is that many organizations lose sight of the basic definition of the word "agile" and focus on the artifacts and ceremonies of their selected agile methodology instead of focusing on supporting the 12 principles behind the Agile Manifesto.

As the executive sponsor of our InfoSec team, I was sitting in on a webcast about the depth and breadth of cloud security. The presentation included a tremendous amount of information and best practices about tightening the security around a hosted offering. There was information about policies and employee habits to go along with all the settings and configurations. All great stuff for a provider of software to businesses, but it was when he said, "compile the infrastructure" that I snapped to attention. I had heard the phrase "infrastructure as code" and dismissed it like I dismiss the use of "cloud" to describe a million different things.

According to an Accenture report, only six percent of the directors overseeing the world’s biggest banks have any technology experience. As someone who spends the bulk of his day explaining technology to bankers, obviously my opinion is every bank should have at least some technology experience on a board of directors. I'm intimately familiar with how slowly the banking industry changes, but this seems like more of an oversight than a slow moving trend. A Harvard Business Review article on the same topic noted that the decision to add a technology expert to your board hinges on two factors:

Epic River, a leading provider of software, data, and process consulting for hospital and financial institutions, today announced that it has signed an agreement to become a co-title sponsor of Team MONARX, an expedition adventure racing team.

In a beautifully irreverent tone, Brian Barrett from Wired magazine took on the long-standing and much maligned "password expiration" policies that have become a mainstay in most modern businesses. You may know password expiration by its more familiar Active Directory message, "Your password will expire in 14 days. Do you want to change it now?" No. Sorry, force of habit. Most organizations and banks, in particular, have been good soldiers of security and implement impossibly difficult password requirements with astonishingly short expiration periods. All of this has led to a situation where users either come up with a creative means of barely altering a favorite password or they forget it all the time or they write it down. None are beneficial to actual security. These expiration policies more resemble flailing and yelling at an armed assailant. Sure it might work, but it's just as likely to not work.

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My last post generated a lot of great discussion by friends and peers who work in bank IT. The overwhelming tone of the conversations was, "If I move our bank to hosted infrastructure, am I eliminating my own job?" I couldn't respond "no" fast enough. True cloud providers like Amazon Web Services (AWS) will provide lots of cost savings and reduce the burden on IT, but everywhere we have seen financial institutions roll out cloud services, internal IT groups have grown and prospered. Less of the IT budget goes to hardware and network infrastructure and more goes to strategically improving IT and InfoSec.

If you ask a banker if it's safer to cloud host their IT infrastructure or keep it in-house, most will tell you the cloud is a great idea and probably where the industry is going, but it's not for them right now. Do you see it? Do you see the comedy in talking to bank management about whether they should keep something important at home or trust a respected third-party with it? Trust someone else with what you value most. Isn't that the cornerstone of the banking industry?

10 years. A decade. According to David Wallace of Small Business Trends (http://smallbiztrends.com/2013/03/infographic-failed-small-businesses.html), if a business is started with fewer than 20 people, only 9 out of every 100 make it to 10 years. I'm glad I didn't know that statistic 10 years ago because 3 people is DEFINITELY less than 20, making that 9% survival rate worse than dismal!

The award for Best Software for New Revenue in a Financial Institution goes to...........MyLoans!