The desire to be different in strategy is what creates sustainable competitive advantage.
Borrowing Michael Porter’s thinking from ‘What is Strategy’, (1996), successful IT departments will be those that can capture a unique competitive position. Porter goes on to say that “A period of imitation may be inevitable in emerging…
In the world of IT management, strategy is important. Constantly changing circumstances requires iterative thinking to address the vision, objectives, capabilities and culture of the organisation. An emphasis on process and feedback mechanism, often dictates that the ‘doing’ of IT strategy is a mechanical process, procedural and quite possibly driven…
A couple of months ago I became the proud owner of an Apple Macbook Air. The little geezer immediately transformed my relationship with a laptop in a whole slew of ways. One way that it particularly seduced me was the delightful combination of my Macbook Air with TV Shows downloaded…
As I gear up to attend and blog from this year’s SIFMA Technology Management Conference , I thought I’d take a moment between trips to the shops to find something comfortable to wear in this 100 degree heat to blog about some of the trends and top-of-mind issues I…
Virtualisation in the data center clearly requires management…and in particular it heightens the importance of clear and precise technology or business service context – see for example Does B-hive Acquisition Make VMware a Cloud Vendor? in which James Staten, principal analyst with Forrester Research, “lauds another feature of B-hive’s…
It’s often hard for people outside of the slightly specialised world of distributed computing and data centres to get their heads around quite how critical and complex they have become. So it was a bittersweet moment to find this article in The Economist last week – Buy our stuff, save the planet.
Artificial intelligence (or AI) has had a bad rap for since the rise and fall of companies in the 1980’s such as Thinking Machines. Google’s mission to answer all questions posed by anyone at anytime around the world such as: “Where shall I go on holiday this Easter?” or “What…
Back in the early 90’s only 10% of the operational expenditure involved in running a data centre was people , by 2001 it was 30% and today this has risen to around 50% driven both by escalating numbers and scarcity and hence cost of skilled staff.
That’s a significantly increased number of expensive, skilled folk filling war-rooms whiteboards with application topologies and system behavior diagrams in an effort to fix outages faster, plan for safer changes and remove configuration time bombs from their environment.
And what happens to all that work?
It is best practice to test any change in a development/ safe environment prior to implementation. The development environment should simulate the production environment so that the impact of the change can be accurately assessed. But how many IT organisations have a second development IT Organisation? They may have a…
My boss, when our team was building the architecture methods (see Enterprise Architecture), was involved with the UK Government’s development of ITIL. Because I became aware of both the ITIL documentation and the analysis that we used in developing architecture methods, I think that there’s a significant issue that’s…
