Tech of the Week: Google Drive

In-browser access to files, automatic syncing to your desktop and mobile devices, third party application authorized access to your files - Google has joined the cloud game and their premier is nothing short of impressive. Not that we expected anything less. 

How will your Google applications in the cloud enhance collaboration and sharing in the workplace? How can services like Drive essentially be an enterprise application all on their own? I think we're going to find out. 

Click here to learn more about Google Drive  

Tech of the Week | The Big Data Initiative

As information technology professionals struggle to saddle up Big Data and tame it into their systems, the White House's Office of Science and Technology is launching an initiative to help out. 

"A media advisory indicates that the initiative is focused on addressing the issue of big data in scientific research across multiple fields. 'To capitalize on this unprecedented opportunity to extract insights and make new connections across disciplines we need better tools and programs to access, store, search, visualize and analyze these data,' according to the advisory."

The government hopes to use the resources at their disposal to help professionals across industries analyze and sort through universal sets of data and make them available in the most useful format to all. They've already launched a Data.gov website with their efforts so far. 

"The idea is to create data sets in common formats which allow consumers to access information and let software developers create custom applications."

This could have very positive results for service providers and end-users alike. 

Click here to read more about the government's big data initiative

Tech of the Week | SmartCompliance | The Google Knowledge Graph

It seems the search results displayed before us become more intuitive by the day. It's easy to overlook the significance of those improvements, afterall, it's just 'Google improving the algorithm." But there's a lot more to it than that. This week we'd like to highlight the importance of search engine technology and where it's headed - because let's face it, it's probably the technology we use most every day. 

Google has traditionally read your query and found any instances where that query was replicated, related or not. Now they are working on improving not only the quality of those results, but the understanding. 

"Eventually Google transitioned from examining keywords to meaning. “We realized that the words ‘New’ and ‘York’ appearing next to each other suddenly changed the meaning of both those words.” Google developed statistical heuristics that recognized that those two words appearing together is a new kind of word. However, Google really did not yet understand that New York is a city, with a population and particular location. "

"Google now wants to transform words that appear on a page into entities that mean something and have related attributes. It’s what the human brain does naturally, but for computers, it’s known as Artificial Intelligence.

It’s a challenging task, but the work has already begun. Google is “building a huge, in-house understanding of what an entity is and a repository of what entities are in the world and what should you know about those entities,” said Singhal."

"In 2010, Google purchased Freebase, a community-built knowledge base packed with some 12 million canonical entities. Twelve million is a good start, but Google has, according to Singhal, invested dramatically to “build a huge knowledge graph of interconnected entities and their attributes.” 

So we're looking at a future of search that includes not just reading but interpreting our questions. Combining such a "knowledge database" of technology with things like software, social media, and even robotics would mean a whole new era of interacting with the world and its information. Trust us, this could be big.

Click here to read more about Google's Knowledge Graph 

Tech of the Week | SmartCompliance | Field Enrollment iPad App

A health insurance provider in Bethesda, Maryland has managed to decrease application processing by at least a day for all Medicare clients registered by field agents. 

“The DRX iPad Mobile Field Enrollment application provided a compliant and easy-to-use enrollment solution for our in-field Medicare sales agents. We experienced significant cost savings, even during this brief pilot,” Armando Luna, VP of Medicare marketing and sales for Coventry Health Care, says in a statement. “In addition, because enrollment applications were submitted completely and correctly, our clients enjoyed faster approval of their applications.”

The mobile application offers: electronic submission of information, offline availability to show plan comparisons and gather enrollment data, input error detection, and reporting on all enrollment transactions completed via the app. 

"The company also says the app is in 'full compliance with Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS).'"

We imagine more and more insurance companies will see the efficiency in innovative apps and mobile devices being used for day to day operations. 

Click here to learn more about this application  

Will cloud computing be your best option? Make sure you answer these questions first.

Cloud computing, cloud technology, cloud services, “in the cloud”, in whatever context, you’ve heard of it. And by now you could probably recognize it by this definition “a type of computing in which "massively scalable IT-enabled capabilities are delivered 'as a service' to external customers using Internet technologies" or by the services you’ve used personally for years that already employ the technology: Gmail, YouTube, Google Docs. Now that cloud technology is transforming corporate IT infrastructure, it’s being used in collaborative areas such as file storage and sharing, web and video conferencing, web-based project management software and online education and training. Many predictions are being thrown around involving billions of dollars saved as IT budgets expand the “Cloud services outsourcing” item, but the decision to use or not use cloud services has not come lightly, especially where sensitive monetary, employee, and client data are involved...

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What technology trends are having a huge impact on risk management?

The latest trends in information technology have a huge impact company-wide, from the IT department implementing new resources to the managers and executives who utilize them. Each office, person, and device add a dimension of risk, cost, storage, and compliance. I’d like to focus on the risk component, and how the information technology trends we are seeing today are challenging risk professionals, more than ever, to know what they are dealing with. And like Charles Tremper once said, “The first step in the risk management process is to acknowledge the reality of risk. Denial is a common tactic that substitutes deliberate ignorance for thoughtful planning.” So let’s get to acknowledging...

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