Carla Rudder writes in The Enterprisers Project, "Each month, through our partnership with Harvard Business Review, we refresh our business library for CIOs with five new HBR articles we believe CIOs and IT leaders will value highly. The curated pieces below are available now through the end of September.

• How to lead your team past the peak of a crisis
• Why criticism is good for creativity
• Create a productivity workflow that works for you
• Don't let teamwork get in the way of agility
• Build a culture that aligns with people's values

Read on for details..."

"Digital business transformation is classically built around organisational elements like processes, policies and technology," writes Apoorva Chhabra in InformationAge.

"However, what gets little attention, but that may be the most fundamental, is the characteristic of effective leadership.

Uncertain events not only disrupt business; they disrupt leadership as well. Digital transformation demands digital leaders who can anticipate opportunities and threats and adapt to changing conditions..."

Shashin Shah writes in Business 2 Community, "Those who embraced it in the past years seem to be winning the war against COVID-19 without fighting, and those who haven't are fighting without winning.

A recent poll by Gartner has revealed that plans of nearly 60% CFOs factor in a scenario that includes a second wave of the pandemic.

Going forward, procrastinating agile working won't be a choice, and making decisions on impulses instead of real data analysis won't be less then hara-kiri. Isolated teams, overdependence on legacy technologies and processes, siloed data must give way to transformation in operations, experiences, and tech ecosystems. The only way to deal with this massive disruption is by adopting cost-efficient digitalization strategies and focusing on delivering uninterrupted value to customers.

A digital-first approach focussed at achieving nimbleness, developing lean operations, exploiting technology to your best advantage, and freeing up your people for more analytically inclined, complex tasks-remains at the heart of this change..."

"Customer relationship management (CRM) software tracks interactions with sales prospects and customers. CRM systems can provide many benefits, but not every business needs one," opines Jack M. Germain in CRMBuyer.

"Customer experience management (CEM or CXM) is a more extensive information collection process to track, oversee and organize every interaction between a customer and the organization throughout the customer lifecycle. It goes deeper into the customer experience and focuses on insight from their unique perspective by listening to customers, analyzing their feedback, and understanding their viewpoint to optimize the customer experience.

In short, both tools optimize customer relationships. How they do this makes all the difference. CRM facilitates relationship building for the organization. CXM focuses on monitoring and improving the experience for the customer..."

"Securing a company network the 'traditional' way is no longer viable, thanks to budget constraints and the meteoric rise of remote working," writes Sead Fadilpaaic in ITProPortal.

"This is according to a new report from Juniper Networks, based on a poll of 1,000 senior IT networking and security professionals hailing from various industries.

According to those surveyed, legacy networks have too many performance issues and, as such, IT professionals spend much of their day firefighting, leaving almost no time for innovation and upgrades..."

"Storage sharing has been an important aspect of storage cost control and performance optimization for more than two decades," writes Marc Staimer, in SearchStorage. "The goal has been to squeeze the best performance for the lowest cost out of the shared storage.

"There are essentially four types of shared storage -- block, file, object and parallel file -- commonly found in high-performance computing (HPC) environments. And while each approach must solve multiple storage bottlenecks to achieve its optimal performance, this article focuses on issues related to external interconnect performance to client endpoints..."

Broadcom Inc. (NASDAQ: AVGO) announced the availability of the industry's first Gen 7 64Gb/s Fibre Channel switching platforms- the Brocade X7 Directors and G720 Switch, that are foundational infrastructure for the on-demand data center. Additionally, the company today announced the industry's first 64Gb/s Fibre Channel optical transceiver, that is being qualified for use in Brocade switches and Emulex adapters, for end-to-end Gen 7 performance.

Brocade Gen 7 Fibre Channel combines unmatched performance, powerful analytics and advanced automation capabilities to enable an autonomous SAN. New 64Gb/s speed and 50 percent lower latency, powers the network for storage innovations like NVMe flash arrays. Gen 7 also adds new self-learning, self-optimizing and self-healing capabilities to automate SAN management. With the launch of Gen 7 Fibre Channel switching platforms, Broadcom is demonstrating its commitment to develop innovative Fibre Channel technology for the most trusted network for storage.

Mark Gazit writes in TheNetWeb, "The first generation of AI was 'descriptive analytics,' which answers the question, 'What happened?' The second, 'diagnostic analytics,' addresses, 'Why did it happen?' The third and current generation is 'predictive analytics,' which answers the question, 'Based on what has already happened, what could happen in the future?'

While predictive analytics can be very helpful and save time for data scientists, it is still fully dependent on historic data. Data scientists are therefore left helpless when faced with new, unknown scenarios. In order to have true 'artificial intelligence,' we need machines that can 'think' on their own, especially when faced with an unfamiliar situation. We need AI that can not just analyze the data it is shown, but express a 'gut feeling' when something doesn't add up. In short, we need AI that can mimic human intuition. Thankfully, we have it..."

"The announcement was from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the US Department of Energy (DOE), in a release issued from the Brookhaven National Laboratory of Upton, N.Y.

The $1 billion will go toward NSF-led AI Research Institutes and DOE QIS Research Centers of five years, establishing 12 multi-disciplinary and multi-institutional national hubs for research and workforce development. The goals are to spur innovation, support regional economic growth and advance American leadership in strategic industries..." - aitrends

"Other than sometimes pedants like myself," notes Gordon Haff in The Enterprisers Project, "most people don't use Moore's Law in its literal sense. That sense being Intel co-founder Gordon Moore's 1965 observation that each year saw a doubling of transistors in an integrated circuit. This doubling in turn meant that transistors kept getting proportionately cheaper and smaller.

But it's the performance increases - the speed gains that come from denser integrated circuits - that most people focus on when it comes to Moore's Law. The process shrinks enabling those density increases are only part of the overall performance ramp-up story of microprocessors and other integrated circuits, yet they've mostly overshadowed other engineering advances..."

Zeljka Zorz writes in HelpNet Security, "Deepfakes - photos and videos in which a person is replaced with someone else's likeness through the power of artificial intelligence (AI) - are already having an impact individuals' lives, politics and society in general. Wielded by those who have an interest in spreading easily-believable disinformation, the technology is expected to wreak even more havoc in the long run.

The existence of deepfake technology became more widely known in 2017 when a Reddit user showed that it's easy to create relatively realistic porn videos of celebrities. The technology has been perfected since then and will surely continue to evolve and go on to produce ever more difficult-to-spot deepfakes..."

"It's 1984, and the small law firm where this basically non-techie pilot fish works has finally agreed to his suggestion to get computers and inkjet printers for all the secretaries.

Fish's stock rises when productivity soars, so he doesn't mind that he'll be in charge of fixing any of the machines that start to act up.

And the computers do have their moments and require constant hardware and software tinkering. Fortunately, the printers never fail. In fact, things are going pretty well, until one computer starts rebooting itself, for no apparent reason, several times a day, costing the secretary who uses it to lose all her work in progress..." - ComputerWorld

"Flashback to 1988, when this pilot fish's IT experience is limited to work at computer stores on standalone PCs. But then he's hired to work in a real data center - raised floor, glass walls and full of Wang minicomputers.

'I was given an introductory walkthrough by my boss, then shown to my cubicle just outside the glass wall and left there,' says fish. 'I was awestruck. A real computer, on a network!'

Fish reads through his employee welcome packet, then logs into his terminal for the first time. Up pops a menu of choices. Gingerly, fish begins exploring. One menu option is WSNSTART. Fish selects that and presses Enter..." - ComputerWorld

"In the IT business, as in most businesses, options are always good," notes Chris Preimesberger in eWeek.

"Hybrid cloud systems, which combine elements of both public and private clouds, are now the standard choice for enterprises seeking cloud providers, and they offer plenty of options. Data management systems that can combine control of public cloud services and on-premises applications on a single screen is the nirvana that all IT administrators want to achieve. It's all about choices and having the ability to make them on demand, if necessary..."

Michael Graw writes in techradar.pro, "Choosing the best email provider is critical to the success of your business. Your business email service plays a huge role in determining whether messages will make it to your employees in a timely manner. Plus, it controls what email client you can use, whether your inbox will be filled with spam, and whether you can get help when something goes wrong.

For many businesses, the choice of top business email comes down to two tried and true platforms-Google Gmail and Microsoft Exchange. Both of these providers have a lot to offer, but which one is the best professional email for your company? In this guide, we'll compare these two platforms head to head to help you decide..."

Alex Woodie notes in datanami, "That's why we carefully curated these 10 mind-blowing facts about today's data-geist, and how it's projected to grow in the future.

1. The Global Datasphere will grow from 33 Zettabytes (ZB) in 2018 to 175 ZB by 2025, a 26% annual compound growth rate (CAGR), per IDC's DataAge 2025 report. However, only about 9ZB of that data will actually be stored, up from about 0.9ZB in 2015. Only about one-third of the data that's stored will actually be used, the analyst group says..."

"In 2013, McKinsey's director Tim McGuire said: 'Analytics will define the difference between the losers and winners going forward,' and he certainly wasn't wrong. Since then, we have seen companies across the board leverage data capabilities to execute smarter decisions, drive accountability, improve their financial health, and keep a closer eye on their performance.

According to a recent study, the data analytics market is expected to grow at an annual growth rate of 30% until 2023, reaching $77.6 billion in annual spend. Such numbers show just how important data capabilities have become, hinting at a future where embracing digital business without data will be simply impossible..." - insideBIGDATA

"If you're a developer, whether you realize it or not, you've probably experienced 'decision fatigue' at one point in your career," suggests Derek Lee Boire in ITProPortal.

"Decision fatigue occurs when the quality of the decisions we make deteriorates due to the mental fatigue of having already made a lot of decisions. While some people may want to believe that they have infinite willpower, our mental energy and focus has a limit no different than our physical bodies do. You can train long, or you can train hard - either way your body will tire eventually..."