PM-Professional Switzerland - Programs and Projects for Innovation

Source Pixabay Digital transformation is the change in business management with the support of digital technologies. One of the consequences of this change is the removing of paper-based processes, another is the re-design of the value chain. Approaching the digital transformation means embracing a journey that is made by several steps, for example: Understanding and documenting the requirements; Processes mapping; Defining the To-Be status; Evaluating solutions and trends available in the market; Making the architectural choices, e.g., on premises, XaaS, or hybrid; Planning and executing the changes.  Main risks and issues are, for example: Support from sponsors and key stakeholders; Performance of the new system; Change management, therefore, the user's adoption.  To manage and reduce the risk linked to the last point, an important step in the digital journey is the design of the user experience  through a user-centric approach. Design think...

Microsoft Solution for chocolate Nestle Supply chain management and traceability are pain points in today global business. These problems affect almost all the industries, like electronic devices, med tech, pharma, and food. I have been attending the meeting organized by the Microsoft blockchain meet-up in Zurich. They have presented the use case that has been developed for Nestle in order to control the supply chain of their chocolate. An interesting point to see is how multiple technologies (e.g., the blockchain, IoT, cloud, communication) concurred in solving the problem. This solution delivers several benefits, for example, limited operating costs, good scalability, and high security. Cloud Security Alliance has released a white paper about the architecture of  IoT solutions with the blockchain technology. I believe that can be applied to such use cases.

Bitcoin has been the start of a revolution in the digital age. The coin was made because of the failures in the bank system (e.g., financial crisis in the past 10 years). The systems were designed to be free from intermediaries (e.g., the banks, the exchanges). Is it still the case? If you want to start playing in such market you need to utilize exchange platforms, in many cases ruled by individuals or companies that are located in fiscal heavens. As an alternative, if you have already your wallet, you might use one of the exchanging machines (e.g., SBB ticket machines). In both cases, you will be charged a fee, for example, SBB originally charged 6% . Hence, the answer to the question is not:  you need an intermediary . Most of the exchange platforms are not secure, meaning that you should check their reputation first, and you should not hold your wallet, nor your private key, online. In fact, there have been many cases of security accidents . At the end of 2017, we have se...

The recent issues with Facebook and Twitter highlight that building a strong cyber resilience management system is not easy. We have seen that such system involves both technical aspects and as well as human behaviors. The scope of this article is to provide a short overview of cyber resilience management in private organizations and public offices. Let's take a step back and start with the basics. Definition Some years ago, we could have thought about cybersecurity like something related to preventing unwanted accesses to information within the fence of a company. Hence, prevent not authorized people to access company information system has been historically a “job” for the IT personnel. In today world the situation is more complicated. Think about BYOD (Bring Your Own Device), or the possibility to cooperates with partners and suppliers. The borders are so extended that the decision makers should not ask the question "if" an accident may happen but ...

The 25th of May is an important day for all individuals living in Europe. The new law for data protection will enter in force therefore companies holding personal data are running to align their systems with the new law. Below there is a video posted that introduce this law.

    The market of the EV (Electric Vehicle) is growing every year, Bloomberg  reports  that by 2040 the 54% of new cars will be EV.  For this market, the main problem is still the infrastructure. In fact, the number of charging stations is limited and prevent a potential buyer to make the decision to enter the club of EV owners.   Echarge  is a startup company based in Zug (CH) that will roll out the charging stations in hotel parking lots. In this way, the customer can recharge the car while using the parking place. Echarge has designed the infrastructure has a smart-grid, therefore every EV can trade energy (buy/sell). The basic technology is the blockchain and its associated cryptocurrency (ECHG). Every customer uses an app to book the place and his/her wallet to “trade” energy. The first rollout will start in May 2018 at Dubai.

SONO Motors is a young startup from Munich (Germany). They have developed the Sion, a 5 seats electric car with a range of 250 Km and that cost only16 KEur, battery excluded. Like some other competitor, the user can buy the Li-Ion battery pack (35-45 KW) for 4000 Euros or lease it for about 100 Euros a month. Till here nothing special, however, there are some interesting items to underlining: There are 7.4 square meters of solar panels mounted on the body of this car, they can provide up to 30 KM of charge per day;  The car is a power station, in fact, it is provided with plugs to provide energy to another car or to other electrically powered objects (e.g. a PC, a pump, ... ). This “power-sharing” feature is controlled by the user through a mobile application; The car is manufactured with standard components (e.g. some parts of the interiors are taken by the BMW i3); The maintenance concept is quite interesting: user manual, tutorials, 3D models are all av...

from pixabay Professionals are interested in the growing business of the IoT. This month, PMI-Switzerland has published my article on this subject. You can read more here . MXCHIP IoT DevKit If you want to experiment IoT and make your first application, you may want to try MXCHIP  and some examples provided by Microsoft through its cloud platform Azure .  

From "Using Blockchain Technology to Secure the Internet of Things paper" Two weeks ago the CSA has released the white paper that should help companies in the IoT business to understand how to secure their IoT devices through the adoption of Blockchain technology. With this paper, CSA intends to suggest an architecture that overcomes the limits of these devices and solve their security problems. As you may know, IoT devices have limits in terms of memory, power consumption and CPU. Hence, they cannot be (as per today) nodes of a blockchain. With the proposed architecture these limits are bypassed. In fact, the blockchain nodes are maintained in the clouds, while the devices are provided by capabilities to secure enroll them in the network and to secure machine-to-machine communication. With this architecture, the IoT device manufacturer can assure a clean bootstrap into the blockchain network, and subsequently, other services like identity management, software update, ...

Paige Bailey on AI The second day at the Tech Summit has been quite intensive. Microsoft, like the competitors, invests a lot in AI and today the development life-cycle in Azure is straightforward. The application of AI in the industries is quite common for example to solve clustering problems. One of the interesting business cases is to use AI for recognizing defects in PCB assembly production. Paige Bailey has demonstrated this case with Jabil, a giant EMS (Electronic Manufacturing Service) provider. Another valuable point has been the support of Azure for IoT Devices. Here you can see how the platform and the related services can support enterprises that operate in the IoT space. The platform supports device twins and massive data exchange (e.g., 2 Million devices that send telemetry data every 2 minutes). Azure IoT Device Hub The last presentation that I find important to mention is about blockchain support in Azure. Stefano Tempesta made a good presentation...