Archive for January, 2007
It’s that time of the year again. Superbowl is a few weeks away. The playoffs are well underway, people are arguing about the Patriots, Chargers, Colts … winning it all. GoDaddy’s co-founder has been talking about how his ads were rejected by the ABC censorship committee. People almost expect something dramatic after the Janet Jackson wardrobe malfunction shocked the country in 2004. That it was broadcasted to millions of homes in the US was a big “control” failure.
One of the important things about controls is whether they are pro-active and reactive. Reactive is do something after it happens: like MTV & CBS apologized for Janet’s failure. Pro-active is what is done before … a system which would have not aired the snafu. The Janet Jackson’s control failure highlights that in some cases having reactive controls is just not good enough. The damage has been done.
Yet if we look at the IT world most of the process inside organizations to control change are reactive. They do-stuff after the change has happened not before it. They are waiting for a Janet Jackson control failure?
Should you control change pro-actively on some of your infrastructure?
January 14th, 2007
from moneyball …
” Lately in a wreck of a Californian ship, one of the passengers fastened a belt about him with two hundred pounds of gold in it, with which he was dound afterwards at the bottom. Now as he was sinking — had he got the gold or the gold him?
– John Ruskin, Unto his Last
VP of IT Operations at a Fortune 1000 company mentioned that the way he figures out whether there is going to be downtime after a change window is to look at the pattern of change events during a change window (using Solidcore). He says good change windows have the pattern of a lot of change in the begining and then nothing. Bad change windows have two peaks: a lot of change in the begining, then a lot of change in the end. I know at that point Has he the change? Or the change him?
January 12th, 2007
I was recently driving down a deserted highway in Texas when something on the dashboard of my car began blinking red. I called the service center and the technician (quoting as much as I can remember) said, “ Pull over, turn off the car, and start it again. If that doesn’t work, there is a service station about 10 miles away that can download the latest software. This is a known problem.”
Read the article at the data center journal.
January 12th, 2007
Companies employed 450,000 workers, generated $52B in sales in 2005
By Rachel Konrad
Updated: 7:08 p.m. PT Jan 3, 2007
SAN FRANCISCO – Foreign-born entrepreneurs were behind one in four U.S. technology startups over the past decade, according to a study to be published Thursday.
Read the article at MSNBC.
January 4th, 2007
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