It started with a GBIC and ended with a Chivas Regal

While I was working at Investec, the dealing room in London was experiencing slow performance problems. Hours of troubleshooting remotely could not identify the problem. Eventually, I climbed on a plane to London to try and troubleshoot on site.

Read the rest of the article here on LinkedIn's Pulse.

Peat, not really!

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Why Madge Networks, the token-ring company, went titsup

There I was shooting the breeze with an old mate. The conversation turned to why Madge Networks which I wrote about here went titsup. My analysis is that Madge Networks had a solution and decided to go out and find a problem. They deferred to more incorrect strategic technology choices. The truth of the matter is that when something goes titsup, its not because of one reason only, but a myriad of them all contributing to the negative consequence. There are the immediate or visual ones, which are underpinned by intermediate ones and finally after digging right down, there are the root causes. There is never a singular root cause for anything but I'll present my opinion and encourage everyone else to chip in. All of them together are more likely the reason the company went titsup. As far as technology brainfarts go there is no better example than Kodak . They invented the digital camera that killed them. However, they were so focused on milking people in their leg

Flawed "ITIL aligned" Incident Management

Many "ITIL aligned" service desk tools have flawed incident management. The reason is that incidents are logged with a time association and some related fields to type in some gobbledygook. The expanded incident life cycle is not enforced and as a result trending and problem management is not possible. Here is a fictitious log of an incident at PFS, a financial services company, which uses CGTSD, an “ITIL-aligned” service desk tool. Here is the log of an incident record from this system: Monday, 12 August: 09:03am (Bob, the service desk guy): Alice (customer in retail banking) phoned in. Logged an issue. Unable to assist over the phone (there goes our FCR), will escalate to second line. 09:04am (Bob, the service desk guy): Escalate the incident to Charles in second line support. 09:05am (Charles, technical support): Open incident. 09:05am (Charles, technical support): Delayed incident by 1 day. Tuesday, 13 August: 10:11am (Charles, technical support): Phoned Alice.

The best social media requires no batteries

Today it is all about social media such as whatsapp, facebook, twitter or even LinkedIn. However, the best social media is Craic. No, it is not to be confused with substance abuse. Let me explain. Often when people meet around a braai , dinner table, or share either a pot of beer, bottle of wine, a cup of tea or a mug of coffee a conversation is likely to happen. This conversation is invariably about things and is referred to as Craic. And it is best reinforced with a good bottle of whisky (typically an Irish one, which would be known as a whiskey). Now talking about why some people call it whisky, and other whiskey is good Craic. Craic is often a discussion about things that spark a debate or lead to an extensive and prolonged engagement. Things in our world are objects that exist or have existed for a long time period. We typically assume that things in our modern world have only been around a short time period but invariably many

Thinking problem management!

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