IIM Newsletter - March 2020

PRESIDENT'S MESSAGE
Dear fellow information professionals.
With a sincere hope that you are safe and healthy, your IIM is providing you with the latest choice of content related to our profession, interest and passion.  As we all are overwhelmed with the flood of information about the current pandemic situation, your team at IIM has prepared some carefully selected articles that will hopefully spark your interest and assist in your dealing with the current situation.

With May fast approaching I encourage everyone to participate in the Information Awareness Month (IAM) events.  IAM is a collaborative event between various bodies within the records, archives, library, knowledge, information, and data management communities.  We collectively plan several events that will take place in the safety of the cyber-space, well at least from the biological virus perspective.

As one of many consequences of the COVID-19 outbreak, all IIM events will be held on-line until further notice.  In this newsletter you will find a link to a survey that will assist in the planning of events.  The survey should only take 5 mins, and I would ask everyone to complete this.  It will help us structure our events and activities and aligned them closer to your needs, aspirations and interests.

In this month's newsletter we will focus on pandemic information, system integration and inter-operability. Integration being the processes of integrating existing information technology systems (such as proprietary-based systems and wireless communications technologies), as well as the important role that standards play in improving the ability of systems, services or software to exchange and make use of information and portability through greater inter-operability of components.

I hope that you will find the content of this IIM e-newsletter issue useful.  I welcome your feedback, ideas, suggestions and content contributions.

Wishing you the best of health.
Vladimir Videnovic
National President

Securing work-from-home arrangements at scale
A McKinsey & Company Article
Authors: Jim Boehm, James Kaplan, Marc Sorel, Nathan Sportsman, and Trevor Steen

The rapid, widespread adoption of work-from-home tools has put considerable strain on security teams, which must safeguard these tools without making it hard or impossible for employees to work. Conversations with CISOs in Asia, Europe, and North America about how they are securing these new work-at-home arrangements highlight the changes these executives are making in three areas: technology, people, and processes.

MIT Technology Review: “How Facebook Uses Machine Learning to Detect Fake Accounts”

Last year, Facebook discovered and took down close to 2 billion fake accounts per quarter. Fraudsters use These fake accounts are used by cheats, hoaxers and fraudsters around the globe to spread spam, phishing links, fake news, fraudulent activities or malware. It's a lucrative business that has devastated many innocent Facebook users.
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/615313/how-facebook-uses-machine-learning-to-detect-fake-accounts

The Virus that Stopped the Planet

A comprehensive overview of the Novel Coronavirus 2019 Disease (COVID-19) 
provides details what we deal with, including predictions by Bill Gates after Ebola outbreak five years ago, how containment helped China to contain the outbreak, key steps to avoid infection and/or spreading the virus, important facts and statistics, as well as how to deal with misinformation related to this pandemic.

COVID-19 Strategic Intelligence

We are constantly bombarded with news and information related to the COVID-19 outbreak.  This article describes one of the most comprehensive sources of detailed information about various aspects of the COVID-19 pandemic and its global impacts provided by the World Economic Forum (WEF).  WEF publishes Strategic intelligence, which explores and monitors various global issues, including COVID-19 pandemic.

Data Integration for Dummies – By Brian Underdahl – Compliments of Informatica
Data integration refers to an industry category and a technology designed to make it easy for you to combine different sources of data together to produce useful business information. 
 
This book shows you what data integration is, how it works, and how you can use the technology to become more competitive as you combine your existing data sources with new data sources to provide the business intelligence your organization needs to compete effectively.
 
This book was created with and for Informatica.

Interoperability for Dummies - IHE Edition, InterSystems - By Anita Samarth
Interoperability can be a daunting concept for any industry. In healthcare, it’s even more complex, given the number of stakeholders: patients, doctors, nurses, staff, hospitals, nursing homes, payors, and vendors.
 
What does interoperability really mean for you? This book was written to help explain exactly that. Health information integration and interoperability aren’t just for IT departments, CIOs, and informatics people anymore. Clinicians, patients, consumers, and payors all need to know that the right people are getting access to the right information at the right time in the right place in the right way.

Big Data Analytics Infrastructure - Barry Schoenborn – Compliment of IBM
The Infrastructure for Big Data and Analytics (BD&A) is the combination of components that produce an architecture that delivers business outcomes. While developing this architecture isn’t rocket science, it is computer science. You can’t build a house without a foundation, right? It’s the same with BD&A. The finest software in the world won’t run without optimal processing power and storage capacity as a foundation. So in developing a BD&A solution, you start with the foundation, which is the infrastructure. Infrastructure must be an early part of your planning. Infrastructure matters. Don’t leave it for last.
 
The book talks about companies of different sizes in different industries. Almost any business can benefit from a BD&A implementation.