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If, This, Then, That… Wow!

by | Aug 24, 2013 | Blog, Web/Tech

I’ve wrestled with the whole “how do I most efficiently get posts to all of my blogs and social feeds thing?” So I’ve been playing around with IFTTT for a few weeks now; and I gotta tell you; this is one of the top 5 web services that I would pay real money for to use on a subscription basis.

Basically IFTTT acts as a event triggered engine that monitors the happenings in your web 2.0 world (say twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn posts, or updates to email, Google docs, or Dropbox files) and will perform an action.

Your source and destination web applications, e.g. Facebook are called ‘channels’ and putting an activity together with your channels is called a ‘recipe.’ So for example, one of my recipes activates when I create a Twitter post; IFTTT takes my Twitter post, and adds it to an excel worksheet in my Google docs, boom, I now have a log of all of my twitter posts with time and date stamps.

Another recipe takes my blog posts from blog.ross-sivertsen.com creates a link and posts a message on my Facebook timeline.

The service is still in beta, so I’m sure somewhere along the way they’re going to monetize it, and I’d actually pay for this service. This has the chance of automating so much of my activities. And will simplify web use for a lot of people in NPOs who don’t have the technical staff to facilitate or have the bandwidth for upkeep of their social media campaigns.

Take a look, and I’d be interested in your comments:

http://ifttt.com/

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The Two Biggest Lies Told During an Audit… Part Deux

by | Aug 11, 2013 | Blog, Information Security, Web/Tech

I wrote this original post over four years ago before I was hired for my current position at Peerless; you can find the link to the posts HERE and below. Having completed a recent, now called ITGC for SOX, audit, the content is as relevent today as it was then.

I find it facinating at how increasingly prescritive the PCAOB (Public Company Accounting Oversight Board) is becoming in the assessment over internal controls. If you were to read over the AS5 guidance, there is a fair amount of flexibility built in to an auditors ability to make judgements on their client's engagements.

But over the last several years, I'm finding that internal controls audits are becoming increasingly more about form over substance. I'm not being critical of any one professional services firms, I'm making my judgements as a matter of general observation…

That said, it's interesting that Grant Thorton published a survey early in 2013 of 243 Corporate General Counsels, that specifically citing increasing pressures of regulatory compliance and corresponding litigation, rather than competition, are the biggest threats to growth in US companies.

Here's a link to the survey:

In house counsels more concerned with regulators than competitors.

Link to the original post:

The Two Biggest Lies Told During an Audit…