Ted McLaughlan

The role, impact and usefulness of the "Solution Architect" (i.e., "SA" to the "Enterprise Architect" or "System Architect") has been clarifying for several years across the IT Consulting community, particularly given the increasingly complex nature of SOA, Cloud-centric and Multi-Platform solutions required to meet increasingly real-time, agile and resource-constrained business information management requirements. The SA's role is essentially to be the IT architecture, engineering and resource management lead, as an IT solution is first conceived, planned and begins implementation. Very often, the SA's efforts are initially delivered as part of a proposal - complete with an engineering plan and schedule, high-level system architecture and product list, plus a cost estimate (both labor and direct). This typically assumes the proposals are meeting pre-defined acquis... (more)

On Becoming an IT Solution Architect - 5 Critical Practices

The Information Technology (IT) inventory of HR role and position labels is broad and deep. IT position descriptions may be closely associated with actual black box technology (like "Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Administrator" or "Storage Area Network (SAN) Engineer"), or they may describe roles in a methodology-driven context required for IT success ("IT Project Manager", "Functional Requirements Specialist"). No IT job label is more loosely defined than the "Architect", even with a long string of descriptive adjectives ("Component Services Integration Application Architect")... (more)

Two-Factor Web Authentication in Healthcare

Here's a very good article concerning the various types of strong identity management, multifactor and two-factor authentication solutions that are necessary for healthcare system and process identity enforcement - recently written by John D. Halamka MD, a self-described Healthcare CIO. Strong Identity Management In this article, Dr. Halamka states that he's had a wide range of experience with many of these token-based and tokenless two-factor authentication methods, including security tokens, smart cards, biometrics, certificates, soft tokens, and cell phone-based approaches. His ... (more)

Homeland Security Information Sharing and Social Media

Experimenting a bit with Pipes, Twitter, RSS feeds to LinkedIn, etc....follow a nicely "curated" Internet Media collection of Homeland Security/DHS information and tweeting at @dhsinfosharing - and find it under news in the similarly-named Homeland Security Information Sharing and Social Media LinkedIn group. ... (more)

Ten Tips for Promoting your Employer with Personal Social Media

New Media on Ulitzer I’ve been asked from time to time by businesses about how to educate employees on using Social Media – from two perspectives. One perspective is simply as part of a broader Internet use policy, to help employees stay safe and protect information assets. Another perspective is to encourage employees to support their business in their daily online activities, should they choose to do so. This is essentially giving employees as “social media enthusiasts” the tools and guidance they should get, to help them positively contribute to the overall online marketing e... (more)