Archive for the ‘IT’ Category

Who’s accountable for IT failure? (Parts 1 & 2)

Thursday, April 19th, 2012

Michael Krigsman has an excellent two part series IT failure:

Who’s accountable for IT failure? (Part One)

Who’s accountable for IT failure? (Part Two)

Michael goes through the horror stories and stats about IT failures (about 70%) in some detail.

But think about just the failure rate for a minute: 70%?

Would you drive a car with a 70% chance of failure?

Would you fly in a plane with a 70% chance of failure?

Would you trade securities with 70% chance your information is wrong?

Would you use a bank account where the balance has a 70% inaccuracy rate?

But, the government is about to embark on IT projects to make government more transparent and accountable.

Based on past experience, how many of those IT projects are going to fail?

If you said 70%, your right!

The senior management responsible for those IT projects needs a pointer to the posts by Michael Krigsman.

For that matter, I would like to see Michael post a PDF version that can be emailed to senior management and project participants at the start of each project.

Posted in IT, Project Management | No Comments »

Graphs in Operations

Tuesday, March 20th, 2012

Graphs in Operations by John E. Vincent.

From the post:

Anyone who has ever used Puppet or Git has dabbled in graphs even if they don’t know it. However my interest in graphs in operations relates to the infrastructure as a whole. James Turnbull expressed it very well last year in Mt. View when discussion orchestration. Obviously this is a topic near and dear to my heart.

Right now much of orchestration is in the embryonic stages. We define relationships manually. We register watches on znodes. We define hard links between components in a stack. X depends on Y depends on Z. We’re not really being smart about it. If someone disagrees, I would LOVE to see a tool addressing the space.

Interesting post from a sysadmin perspective on the relationships that graphs could make explicit. And being made explicit, we could attach properties to those relationships (or associations in topic map talk).

Imagine the various *nix tools monitoring a user’s activities at multiple locations on the network and that data long with the relationships being merged with other data.

First saw this at Alex Popescu’s myNoSQL.

Posted in Graphs, IT, Operations | No Comments »