The federal government is not pushing to recover hardware that some USAID staff members received before the agency was effectively closed in February, a perplexing decision that raises concerns about security.

Two USAID staffers currently on paid administrative leave, who spoke with IT Brew on the condition of anonymity, said that their devices are still in their possession. The administration has not given clear instructions on how to return the hardware, they told IT Brew, leaving them in limbo. Complicating things is the ongoing legal wrangling over the constitutionality of the administration’s shuttering of the agency in the first place.

Without clarity, the devices remain in the sources’ homes. However, one source told IT Brew that they were told in a meeting their government-issued devices should be treated as “hot mics,” though they emphasized that it was unclear where this information came from originally.

Read the rest here.—EH

At the Hershey Company, innovation spans beyond exotic SkinnyPop flavor variations and alterations of its eponymous chocolate bar.

For the past several years, Hershey has been transforming its digital and IT strategy across its business. In 2023, the company hired its first-ever CTO—a move that Steve Hendrie, VP and CISO at the snacking company, told IT Brew represents the company’s understanding that its technology is a key component of its competitive advantage. He added that the 131-year-old company is also actively working to modernize its supply chain and increase automation and agility in its manufacturing process.

“There’s a huge focus right now for us on automation, AI, [and] basically anything that’s going to help speed decisioning within the organization,” Hendrie, who has held the CISO title at the company since 2017, said.

However, a digital metamorphosis is never easy. According to Boston Consulting Group research, 70% of digital transformation projects “fail to deliver on their objectives.” IT Brew caught up with the CISO of the chocolate manufacturer to decode the elements that make for a successful digital transformation.

Read more here.—BM

According to David Lareau, Medicomp’s then COO (and current CEO), everyone was pretty calm at midnight, despite the worldwide anxious buildup preceding the date: January 1, 2000. The year known as Y2K.

Stefan Weitz, on Microsoft’s IT team at the time, left his network operations center around 1am West Coast time, feeling like the turn of the century had been “a little anticlimactic.”

Bill Huber, then a chief procurement officer at a big bank, was home with his family. He didn’t get any worrying calls.

Not a bad evening for the IT practitioner, considering some economists and corporate execs had warned that widespread computer failures could lead to a recession or even fatal catastrophes when machines mishandled the approaching date. The fear was that a two-digit formatting decision made during computing’s early days would lead to machines misinterpreting the year “2000” as the year “1900,” and disrupt any payroll, aircraft, power-plant, or other technologies that relied on accurate calendar data.

Keep reading here.—TK