Tech Latinas: Latin American Women for Technology

Aim/Purpose: The directors of Tech Latinas were happy with what they had created and the impact their company had made in Ecuador, Peru and Guatemala. Now that they had seen their vision come to fruition in ways that were astounding to them. They wanted to take the next steps in growing their business so Tech Latinas mission could spread beyond its current bounds. Before working out the logistics, the Tech Latina team expanded their vision. They wanted to scale Tech Latinas throughout Latin America. They hoped to find the best talent among the 37 million young women in these countries who were currently either unemployed or informally employed. They estimated that 1.2 million web developers in Latin America would be required that by 2025. Background: The entrepreneurial tech wave has hit Latin America hard, and it appears to be gaining momentum. A new generation of millennials and post-millennials, led by a group of early entrepreneurs in their late 30s to early 50s, believes that it can improve lives by creating new and better solutions to everyday problems. One such area is teaching coding and tech skills to women who live in middle to low-income Latin American households. Despite the advantages and opportunities, there are also great obstacles to make it all happen in Latin America. Some cultural and some systemic. Culturally, Latin Americans are very averse to risk, and most only invest in “secure” ventures such as real estate. The lack of financial education is a key factor that does not allow potential entrepreneurs to thrive. On the systemic side, corruption, lack of institutional trust and impunity are probably the biggest hurdles to surpass in the next few years. Companies need to think globally and compete against global competitors. Methodology: Data was collected through a qualitative approach with several in-depth interviews Contribution: In following trends of Latin American growth and development, the main opportunities will end up being in the technology sector as advances in education and know-how disseminate. The hope is that this knowledge gap will provide jobs for millions trying to lift themselves out of poverty. Findings: That nascent ventures in Latin America face different and unique challages. The ability to scale and the lack of capital that would invest in social causes is unfortunately scarce in the region. This makes it difficult to Recommendations for Practitioners: This case could be used for discussion around lessons from emerging market entrepreneurship. Many strategies of the struggles and triumphs of Latin American entrepreneurs are worth noting as practitioners due to the acute necessity-driven approach to many Latin American entrepreneurs toward venture success. Recommendation for Researchers: Maybe employing a scale of some sort to differentiate net impact socially and economically these tech educational training facilities Impact on Society: That there is a need to support organic entrepreneurial efforts in not only gaining returns but supporting social causes that lift societies. Also, it is a wise investment to invest in women and in emerging economies. Future Research: It would be interesting to further follow the Tech Latinas and other initiatives in this area of knowledge transfer and economic development. It would be interesting to do a study or a scale of results of impact between countries not only in Latin America but other women coding and IT training efforts around the world.

COST ESTIMATING – MAKE OR BUY?

Determining how a corporate real estate organization estimated its project costs was a big decision that impacted budgets, customers, and the bottom line. What recommendations should be made for improvement of cost estimating at our upcoming management meeting?

Standard Bank: The Agile Transformation

South Africa’s largest bank has recently completed a transformation from traditional systems development to the scaled agile framework. The individual leading the transformation is now considering how to keep the momentum going and possible new directions. Josef Langerman, Head of IT Transformation for Standard Bank, reflected on the extraordinary transformation that his organization’s IT group had recently experienced. Over the past three years, Standard Bank’s IT group had changed from the relatively well accepted systems development lifecycle/waterfall model to a revolutionary large scale agile approach. The results had been gratifying. But it left a question unanswered. Now that things were starting to stabilize, what should be the next steps? The 154-year-old Standard Bank was the largest banking group in Africa, and the 5th largest company headquartered in South Africa. The bank offered a range of corporate, business and personal banking as well as financial services. Its 49,000 employees served over 15 million customers, in 20 countries across the continent of Africa, as well as other countries scattered around the globe. Standard Bank’s IT group, located within the company’s Johannesburg headquarters, had over 6000 employees. The group managed the bank’s technology infrastructure–including a network of nearly 10,000 ATMs, its applications development, testing, deployment, maintenance and operations. By 2014, the bank recognized that its IT performance was lagging industry benchmarks in productivity, turnaround time and employee satisfaction. Employing a “do it in-house” philosophy, it embarked on a major transformation. Abandoning traditional highly structured approaches to project management and development, it had adopted an agile philosophy that was most commonly seen in much smaller organizations and technology startups. The results had been impressive–productivity, cycle time and organizational health indicators had all risen dramatically. The group had also achieved substantial reductions in its budget. Even skeptics within the organization could not fail to be impressed. Now, however, Langerman wondered about the future. He had been cautioned by his group’s HR Culture Transformation Guide that rapid improvement could easily be followed by disillusionment. What could be done to keep the momentum going forward? Should the bank double down on the types of changes to culture, practice and training that had led to its success, or was it time to let things settle? And who should be guiding the change? Should the implementation continue entirely in-house, or should outside consultants–that were working in other areas of the bank–play a significant role? In the near future, he would need to present his recommendations to the group’s CIO.

THESE MODELS NEED ENTERPRISE DATA MANAGEMENT!

The current data management systems for the life cycle of scientific models needed an upgrade. What technology platform offered the best option for an Enterprise Data Management system?

Table of Contents of Journal of Information Technology Education: Discussion Cases, Volume 6, 2017

Table of Contents of Journal of Information Technology Education: Discussion Cases, Volume 6, 2017

Behind Enemy Lines

A client of a security services firm has received an email from the dark web demanding a ransom or it will start selling data it has stolen from the client. The client as asked for the firm’s assistance in paying the ransom. How should the company proceed? It was late on a Friday afternoon. The ReliaQuest Security Operations Center was busy as usual, but nothing was out of the ordinary. ReliaQuest Chief Technology Officer, Joe Partlow, was in his office working on a new technology innovation when his cell phone rang. It was the Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) for ABC Company, one of ReliaQuest’s clients–a company with millions of customers across the United States. ABC Company’s CISO had a crisis on his hands. He had just gotten word from his public relations staff that a journalist had called asking for a comment about a supposed leak of millions of customer records containing personally identifiable information (PTT) that could potentially be used to steal identities. Apparently, the data was listed “for sale” on the “dark web” portion of the Internet by an anonymous hacker. The CISO wanted ReliaQuest’s help figuring out whether the data had, in fact, been stolen. If so, who stole it, and how? And what could be done now to re-procure the data lost? The journalist had given the company a 24-hour window before he said he would post a story. There was also the question of whether the supposed data leak was legitimate at all. ABC Company’s security team had not been able to verify that any of their systems had been breached, and there seemed to be no way to inspect the supposed stolen data without purchasing it from the anonymous hacker–something the company was not comfortable doing on its own. The situation was urgent. The prospect of alleged customer data floating around the dark web was deeply troubling to the CISO and to Joe, yet he knew that finding the underlying cause of the situation could require members of the ReliaQuest team to use tactics outside the scope of work formally agreed upon by ReliaQuest and ABC Company. Joe also knew that if the breach was real, any tactics to identify and secure the data that ReliaQuest used could be subject to discovery in a criminal case. Moreover, Joe worried that if the breach was real and had somehow happened while under ReliaQuest’s watch, the incident could create a public relations crisis not only for ABC Company, but also for ReliaQuest. Joe was at a high stakes crossroad for making a decision and time was of the essence. ReliaQuest prided itself on team members’ willingness to do whatever it took to make security possible for customers. Nonetheless, Joe needed to decide: How far should ReliaQuest go to verify the breach? How would they find the underlying cause of the breach? How would they recover stolen data? And who should he consult with both within and outside of ReliaQuest to solve the problem while protecting stakeholders?

A Digitally Enabled Strategic Sourcing Process to Mitigate Risk

A South African insurance company is considering how to automate the process of handling home insurance repair claims in order to make the process more efficient and improve the customer experience. Should they stick with the status quo, develop their own system, purchase existing technology or employ a hybrid solution? ABC Insurance was a leading short-term insurer in South Africa. The FSB (Financial Services Board) of South Africa defined short term insurance cover as indemnification secured by the insurance purchaser over their fixed and movable assets (FSB, n.d.). Such insurable assets could be one’s home (the actual building) or motor vehicle (https://www.fsb.co.za). The purchased insurance cover protected the policyholder (customer) against total loss or accidental damage, as a result of insurable events like fires or floods. In exchange, payment for insurance cover (referred to as the “premium”), was collected by the insurance company from its customers. Andrew Cohen, commodity manager for the Non-Automobile Property and Casualty procurement division at ABC Insurance, was faced with the choice of either digitizing the day to day claims fulfillment procedures within his portfolio, or to continue his business unit’s activities “as is.” The main function of Cohen’s business unit was to ensure that home owners (policyholders) who purchased insurance cover over their fixed assets (i.e., buildings insurance) could access and receive the required repair services as per the provisions set out in their insurance policies. In delivering these services to the policyholders, Cohen’s immediate challenges were that he had to increase efficiency within the claims environment, meet customer demand and enhance operational processes while concurrently accelerating daily business operations. In opposition to maintaining the status quo, his options were to either build an in-house solution, or purchase an existing tool and customize it to his organization’s requirements. His preliminary cost benefit analysis showed that choosing to remain “as is” would cost the firm nothing in terms of immediate cash outflows, but in the long term would expose management to the risk of not capitalizing on opportunities to service their customers quickly and efficiently, infuse transparency into the appointment procedure of suppliers on repair claims, and gain line of sight of interactions between the firm, its service providers, and its customers. He furthermore surmised that whatever the solution was it might require the firm to make initial investments of time for the re-organization of internal processes and new information technology competencies to acquire. To select an ideal solution, he would need to weigh the risks of remaining “as is” against the benefits of infusing mobile technology such as a mobile app into his portfolio, and ultimately, into the core day-to-day operations of the firm as well.

Virtualization Footprint: Why Re-Invest?

Mark Dumas, a Systems Specialist at a Telecommunications Company located in South Africa needed to make decisions regarding the current virtualized infrastructure platform. These decisions also involved the renewal of hardware that had reached the end of its maintenance period and the latest virtualization platform software. Dumas further needed to formulate a plan to ensure that there was enough capacity for systems to meet current and future growth.

A Cybersecurity Executive DBA?

After the successful launch of a DBA program for working executives, the program’s academic director ponders whether or not there might be an opportunity to create a cybersecurity doctoral program based on the existing program’s research core. Grandon Gill, Academic Director of the Doctorate of Business Administration Program (DBA) at the University of South Florida’s (USF) Muma College of Business pondered the email he had just sent to Moez Limayem, the dean of the college (see Exhibit 1). In that email, he had raised the possibility of developing a version of the college’s highly successful DBA program specifically targeting cybersecurity professionals. He also noted the possibility of funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to help cover the costs of launching the program. The idea of starting the program sparked when Gill had attended an NSF principal investigator’s meeting earlier in the year. A key area of discussion in the meeting involved the serious shortage of terminally qualified faculty candidates to teach cybersecurity-related graduate courses at universities across the United States. These discussions were confirmed by subsequent research. Recent surveys by the U.S. Department of Labor found that the demand for cybersecurity graduates had increased by 27% in 2016 to reach a record high, and increasing number of data breaches and cyber-attacks highlighted the need for trained security professionals. Although there was a lot of practical experience out there in the cybersecurity arena, when a research university like USF wanted to hire faculty, candidates needed to have a terminal degree such as a PhD or DBA. These were much less common among the security experts that would be a good fit with business schools or MIS departments. Indeed, there were few doctoral programs in cybersecurity that focused on researching the human side of cybersecurity—increasingly important in the worlds of business and government. The Muma College of Business has experienced many challenges in its own efforts to hire cybersecurity faculty. What Gill also recognized was that much of the research content of the DBA program that he led could be quite applicable to nontechnical cybersecurity research. The possibility of initiating the new program was not a decision to be taken lightly. Indeed, it raised a series of related questions and decisions: 1) Would such a program be viable in the first place? 2) Should the launch of such a program be contingent on the acquisition of external funding to cover startup expenses? 3) Could the DBA program faculty and staff, already stretched thin by the DBA program’s larger than expected cohorts, support such an additional program? 4) At a university where responsibility for cybersecurity was spread across three colleges, what type of support or opposition could be anticipated for such a program?

Employing Dynamic Logic in Cybersecurity

A physicist who studies the human brain has adapted dynamic logic, a machine learning algorithm he developed, to run on a test database of network traffic. The algorithm has proven surprisingly adept at identifying malware traffic. Now he ponders how the project might move forward, given that cybersecurity is entirely outside of his domain of expertise (and interest). Dr. Leonid Perlovsky, distinguished physicist and cognitive scientist, pondered this question, which could have a significant impact on his research direction in the years to come. Over the past few decades, he had developed and refined algorithms for distinguishing objects in images, an approach that had found its way into various classified U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) applications. Now he was looking for new potential opportunities to see his research applied, allowing it to evolve further. One of the most interesting aspects of Perlovsky’s approach was that it was very similar to that taken by the human brain in processing sensory information. It began with a very vague model of what might or might not be present in the data being examined. Through successive iterations, analogous to the layers of processing used in human sensory systems, the patterns in the data corresponding to objects would grow more and more distinct until, finally, they became recognizable. Unlike most statistical techniques, this approach—termed “dynamic logic” by Perlovsky—did not require that a model be specified in advance. As such, it was well suited for contexts that required discovery. One application of dynamic logic that particularly impressed him involved the detection of malware in network packet data. Using an externally provided database of this traffic, his algorithm had successfully identified the presence of malware with almost eerie precision, and with substantially less processing than competing techniques. This suggested that dynamic logic could well become a powerful tool in the arsenal of IT professionals seeking to protect their systems from hackers. What other possible cybersecurity-related opportunities might be well suited to this tool? Identifying potential opportunities represented only part of the challenge of putting dynamic logic to work. After letting the project lay dormant for several years, he had recently been approached by an energetic Brazilian master’s student who had identified ways that DL (dynamic logic) could be used. The student had also established a DL open source project on his own initiative. If that project were to move forward, Perlovsky would need to provide some encouragement and guidance. But he had his own set of questions. Was the open source path the right way to proceed? What potential application should be given highest priority? Should government or commercial funding be pursued? And the big question… Perlovsky readily acknowledged that he was no cybersecurity expert. Given that he was already actively pursuing grants from the DoD and National Institute of Health (NIH), would it really make sense to split his attention further, and look towards tackling an entirely new class of problems?