Strategies and Trends for Information Technology Leaders
Despite the overall decline in IT spending, companies are still investing in technologies that help control costs and enable businesses to work smarter. This according to an Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) report, At the Edge of the Storm: IT Investments from Jan/08 through Feb/09. The findings suggest that while IT spending overall is on the…
Business service management (BSM) is a relatively new term in the IT management community. Over the last few years it has become a sort of buzzword – many vendors are adopting the term and using it to market their products and services. The average executive is now inundated with vendors and products all claiming to…
Here’s what the vendors say … One vendor says that “BSM is all about managing the health of services.” A third focuses on “real-time service health and integrity.” Telecomm service providers have known for decades that five-nines of availability in the data center or central office is meaningless if the customer doesn’t have dial tone…
Fear can come in many forms. Sometimes it comes from a loud noise, or else from a scary image – I just heard about a pharmaceutical company trying to get college students to respond to the picture of a spider with fear by giving them electric shocks (they wanted to test medication that could help…
In a perfect world, the implementation of a service oriented architecture (SOA) in your organization will help better align IT services with those day-to-day business processes in which your colleagues, customers, and partners engage. Yet, in order to reap the promise of SOA, the prudent CIO must wrangle both organizational and technology oriented challenges—keeping an…
Last time, I suggested that the obvious analogy between IT architecture and real building architecture was potentially flawed, because of the dramatic differences in their medium of expression, and that another analogy (with music) might be more appropriate in some ways. The real lesson, though, is that all such analogies have serious limitations. While these…