Worst quote about Scrum I’ve ever read

” If Agile is the teachings of Jesus, Scrum is every abuse ever perpetrated in his name.”

James Turner, The Best and the Worst Tech of the Decade

Entity-relationship diagram

Keys to the Internet

“Well, the design of the system is pretty smart,” said Ritchie. “If something were to happen, there’d be time to round people up. There’s unlikely to be the sort of emergency where everything’s wiped out at one moment.”

And if there was such an emergency?

“Then we probably have bigger things to worry about than the Internet.”

Norm Ritchie as quoted in The Canadian who holds the key to the Internet

Today’s WhatIs.com Word of the Day is keys to the Internet

Business Rules Management System

“The appellation Business Rule Management System (BRMS), after all, is merely a rebranding of the lesser named Business Rule Engine (BRE); in most cases the vendor simply made the change to reflect the fashion of the times rather than provide a specific set of tools that reflect the grander moniker. Now, it is quite true that the modern BRMS sports some niftier capabilities than the BRE of yore; but these are mainly extensions to the capabilities of the BRE in the field of rule execution.”

Barbara von Halle and Larry Goldberg, A BRMS is not a BDMS: Ten Ways in Which Dealing Business Rules Vendors can be Frustrating for Business Analysts

IT Chargeback

“Chargeback is based on the premise that if CIOs make the cost of IT visible to people, they will buy less. They will naturally control their own demand. What we have seen out of chargeback is that all people do is wind up arguing about the price.”

Mark McDonald, as quoted in Supply demand IT vs. IT chargeback

Prince says the Internet is outdated

“The internet’s completely over. I don’t see why I should give my new music to iTunes or anyone else. They won’t pay me an advance for it and then they get angry when they can’t get it.  The internet’s like MTV. At one time MTV was hip and suddenly it became outdated.”

Prince as quoted in Prince - world exclusive interview: Peter Willis goes inside the star’s secret world

Overheard talking about business intelligence

“Business intelligence (BI) applications offer the promise to be the focal point to customer intelligence across multiple data sources. But, BI efforts often highlight how poor customer data quality really is — leaving users scrambling to fight a losing battle to keep customer data clean and updated.”

William Band, The Top Eight Customer Management Trends For 2010

Overheard talking about ITAR and EAR compliance

Organizations in certain industries will not tolerate the incursion of iPads and iPhones into their IT infrastructure because of compliance reasons. Kevin McDonald, iPads force their way into corporate IT

Today’s WhatIs.com Word of the Day is ITAR and EAR compliance.

“On the HIPAA side and in ITAR, [customers] were booting iPhones,” McDonald said. “We’re removing them in favor of the Blackberry.” (ITAR refers to the U.S. State Department’s International Traffic in Arms Regulations, which outlaw the export of critical technologies that could be used against the U.S.)

“You can’t centrally manage them or control the apps,” McDonald said. “You can’t remote-delete with any assurance. And in an environment where you absolutely must prove where the data goes and where it’s stored, if it’s encrypted, you cannot do that with an iPhone or iPad.”

In short, the strength of the iPad and iPhone — the availability of thousands of apps — is also their weakness when it comes to security. To be fair, Google’s Android phones fall into the same trap, McDonald said.

Overheard talking about noisy text

Text analytics — also known as text mining or text data mining — helps organizations identify and understand what people think about them, their products and their services. The software, which combines advanced search techniques with speech-pattern-recognition capabilities, allows users to quickly scour mountains of unstructured or free-form text in the hope of identifying trends in customer sentiment that will ideally lead to positive change. Mark Brunelli, Text analytics tools require serious devotion to customers

Today’s WhatIs.com Word of the Day is noisy text.

Overheard talking about N+1 UPS

Modular systems let you plug in UPS capacity as you need it. Incrementally enabled systems provide the same end result, but are shipped with the extra capacity already installed, but disabled. It’s activated via software or firmware when you’re ready. These systems all grow differently, but the principles are the same — add capacity and pay for it when you need it. Robert McFarlane, How to choose the right uninterruptible power supply for your data center

Today’s WhatIs.com Word of the Day is N+1 UPS.