April 20, 2023

How to succeed as a fractional CIO

A fractional CIO is typically an experienced IT leader who is external to the enterprise yet acts as an accountable leader and extension of the executive team, says Dave Hartman, president of IT management consulting firm Hartman Executive Advisors. “A fractional CIO thinks beyond technical needs and considers the needs of the organization from a strategic business perspective.” ... Beyond expertise and management skills, a fractional CIO can provide an independent point of view to enterprise leadership in critical areas, such as emerging technologies and IT security, as well as updating or building a technology roadmap. “This can help key decision-making and can sometimes segue into providing more hands-on help in executing on the chosen path,” says Amelia Tyagi, co-founder and CEO of Business Talent Group. In some cases, an enterprise may turn to a fractional CIO to serve as an interim executive, assuming the leadership role for a fixed period of time. “Fractional and interim CIOs are particularly effective solutions for companies that are undergoing rapid change, or those that have an unexpected leadership gap” Tyagi explains.

AI Heightens Cyber Risk for Legacy Weapon Systems

Artificial intelligence's nascent centrality to offensive weapons development means the United States should take bold steps to ensure that adversaries are unable to develop their models, said Rand Corp. CEO Jason Matheny. "These AI models right now are very brittle," Matheny said. "We need to be thinking about ways that we can slow down progress elsewhere by doing things like adversarial attacks, data poisoning and model inversion. Let's use the tricks that we're seeing used against us and make sure that we understand the state of the art." Data poisoning - in which adversaries alter the data used to train AI models in order to distort the resulting algorithms - is already a risk for the United States, said Shift5 co-founder and CEO Josh Lospinoso. "These are real problems," he said. "We need to think clearly about shoring up those security vulnerabilities in our AI algorithms before we deploy these broadly and have to clean the mess up afterwards."

TUC says government is failing to protect workers from AI harms

While AI-powered workplace surveillance offers greater control to organisations over worker behaviour, Pakes said the increasing datafication of employees is also a “profit centre” for employers, which can sell the data on to third parties. “Not all of us, but many of us, can take our work just about anywhere now with technology, but it also means our work and our bosses can follow us just about everywhere, into our private lives, into our homes,” he said, adding that AI-powered surveillance is no longer restricted to the “canary in the coal mine” of logistics and warehouse workers. “It doesn’t matter if you’re blue collar or white collar, doesn’t matter if you’re in a factory, in the office or at home – this software can check us and track us and invade us, and we really need to talk about it.” Gina Neff, executive director of the Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy at the University of Cambridge, said that as part of her research she has interviewed numerous economists who only offered a “collective shrug” when asked what they think the overall, long-term impact of AI will be on work.

ENISA’s Threat Landscape and the Effect of Ransomware

According to ENISA, cybersecurity threats continued to grow during the COVID-19 pandemic.?The pandemic increased cybersecurity threats and attack surfaces. It also provided attackers opportunities to exploit the new normal, partly because of the growth in people’s online presence (e.g., social media), hybrid working models and the transition to more cloud-based solutions. The boom in the transportation industry’s courier, express and parcel (CEP) business was also a factor because, during the pandemic, CEP delivery services became a critical infrastructure. The acceleration in new artificial intelligence (AI) technology and advanced features (e.g., AI adaptability through machine learning [ML] and automated phishing email distributions) also spurred the growth of the cybersecurity threat. These cyberattacks become more mainstream, leading to more targeting of enterprises through home offices. In addition, state-backed or state-sponsored groups have taken advantage of the pandemic to conduct cyberespionage and implement COVID-19–related social engineering lures.

This new technology could blow away GPT-4 and everything like it

Known as Hyena, the technology is able to achieve equivalent accuracy on benchmark tests, such as question answering, while using a fraction of the computing power. In some instances, the Hyena code is able to handle amounts of text that make GPT-style technology simply run out of memory and fail. "Our promising results at the sub-billion parameter scale suggest that attention may not be all we need," write the authors. That remark refers to the title of a landmark AI report of 2017, 'Attention is all you need'. In that paper, Google scientist Ashish Vaswani and colleagues introduced the world to Google's Transformer AI program. The transformer became the basis for every one of the recent large language models. But the Transformer has a big flaw. It uses something called "attention," where the computer program takes the information in one group of symbols, such as words, and moves that information to a new group of symbols, such as the answer you see from ChatGPT, which is the output.

Skills-first hiring can increase talent pools by up to 20x

Generally, employers are looking for candidates with transferable in-demand skills such as leadership and specific technological abilities, Duke said. “In nearly all cases, employers will find that candidates always have skills that can be applied to a position, even if the candidate is coming from a vastly different industry. This increases the talent pool and makes it easier for employers to find good candidates,” she said. As an example of how the skills-first approach works, Duke said that when employers looking to hire digital marketing managers use this method, the available talent pool increases by almost 22x. “That’s because many of the skills associated with this job are common across other jobs and industries,” she explained. “In this case, about 30 separate job titles across the U.S. have relevant skills for this job, but most companies would overlook those candidates.” Every role at an organization can be broken down into a set of skills needed to do the job well. Every person has a set of skills, whether they’re an existing employee or part of an external talent pool, Duke said.?

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