This blog entry was originally posted on: The Imperative Blog
I recently attended a GCIO/OMG event in Washington, DC titled “Green Awareness Information Day”. I helped to facilitate one of the round-table discussions on sustainability which I found to be rather interesting and energizing. We had some amazing speakers from the federal government who explained the direction that the current administration is going in with regards to green & sustainability and that is where I once again recognized that simplicity is again at the center of our desires & efforts. This gentleman was explaining how the federal government is in need of the IT community to help it with reporting on green / sustainability metrics. The problem is that there aren’t any good models established to do so and that because the data is either non-existent or dispersed all over the IT environment, the task to report on green progress is far to complex for them to accomplish alone.
I am working with some of the thought leaders at OMG to help design and promote a Green Business Maturity Model (GBMM) so that the IT community can deliver a solution that is being sought after by the federal government and many other publicly traded organizations. It didn’t take long for me to see that there was tremendous opportunity to leverage the same concepts of a CMS/CMDB design to address an implementation of GBMM. Once the GBMM is defined, the implementation effort comes down to the aggregation and federation of data from disparate sources very much like those demanded by an IT Service Management implementation. We are hopeful that we will be able to leverage the principles of a CMS structure to address the sustainability needs of the IT industry at large.
Stay tuned and please contact me if you are interested in working with me on my effort of creating a Sustainable Service Management Model based on GBMM.
This blog entry was originally posted on: The Imperative Blog
What I’d like to touch on in this blog entry is sort of the underlying reason for a CMDB/CMS. I’ve commented on it over the years while working on CMDB/CMS efforts but this weekend, I came across two separate things that prompted me to do this blog entry. The idea or notion that has been rattling around in my mind for year is that of convergence, similarity, connectivity and simplification. I’ve argued for years that many of us have designed & built CMSs many times over but never actually called them that. Most, if not all of us have been required at some point to aggregate data from disparate areas and make sense of it, and ultimately, that is what the CMS helps us do. It helps make sense of the data.
The two things that happened were first, I noticed a book that has been on my night stand for over 4 months which is called The Laws of Simplicity by John Maeda. I really had no desire to read anything while working on the book to be honest so it sat there until now. The second was an episode on The Science Channel I watched last night called “Connected: The Power of Six Degrees”. Yes I know, what else would you expect from someone who has an Electrical Engineering degree to be watching but this station.
Both of these things reminded me that regardless of our professional or personal aspirations, we are all seeking to simplify our lives and make sense of the confusion. Interestingly enough, we reference this topic in the summary of Chapter 9 when we quoted the founder of Kayanta. “We’re inspired by the plethora of opportunities offered through the Internet but bewildered by the amount of personal effort required to extract even the modest benefit” ( Click here to read full text )
So, why have we not been able to simplify our business processes? Why haven’t we found a way to consistently, across industries and/or companies deliver value in a more streamlined and efficient manner? Is technology doing more harm than good in this area? Will Software as a Service (SaaS) help? Virtualization promises to simplify life for some, but won’t it complicate it for others? Maybe that’s the balance, maybe it’s the Yin and Yang of the equation where some take on the complexity in order to deliver simplicity to others. Maybe only time will tell.That’s it for now…….I’m sure I’ll have more on the topic as I get deeper into the book and do more research on Simple Networks…… Carlos