Thinking problem management!

  These are articles that I published during the course of the past year on one of the popular international Internet of Things publishing sites, iot for all .  These are articles that I published during the course of the past year on one of the popular international Internet of Things publishing sites, iot for all . Improving Data Center Reliability With IoT Reliability and availability are essential to data centers. IoT can enable better issue tracking and data collection, leading to greater stability. Doing the Work Right in Data Centers With Checklists Data centers are complex. Modern economies rely upon their continuous operation. IoT solutions paired with this data center checklist can help! IoT Optimi

"Failure is not an option" and "Houston, we have a problem" are phrases from the movie Apollo 13 (one of my greatest movies ever, review it here). Lovell, Kranz and Liebergot have a close association to the Apollo programme, especially Apollo 13, and these great leaders are central to the story of "Failure is not an option." Lovell is the spacecraft commander Kranz is the flight director Liebergot is Apollo EECOM The following provides great insight into the Apollo 13 flight. The leadership displayed during the Apollo 13 flight is commendable. It is also the perfect example of virtual teams. Kranz, in charge of flight operations in Houston, and Lovell, commander of the lunar mission are separated by thousands of miles of space. They were required to display their leadership skills, especially those of communication, when an explosion occurs on the Apollo 13 spacecraft. Ably assisted by Liebergot, and through teamwork, ingenuity, and ratio

  All network management products miss the point. Their primary focus is on monitoring uptime. This is often referred to as a RAG tool. Red, Amber, Green where Red signifies down,Amber signifies intermittent connectivity problems and Green signifies good connectivity. This serves no business purpose and cannot justify any return on investment. All the development is in looking at when the situation is acceptable but none when you are in dire straits. How is this monitoring? All it does is give you a comfortable feeling. With this approach there is no difference in the value proposition of 'ping' or a network management framework product worth a million bucks. What is required is to monitor downtime. Outages require a special view that is serialized and has the outage time. However, it is not the length of time of the outage that is important but the crucial time periods within the outage the provide the metrics. These metric times are aligned with the expanded in

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.

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

  I have previously written about RIRA, also known as the Meerkat Method . Information Technology (IT) risk is a measure of the extent to which the IT landscape is exposed based on the exploitation of vulnerabilities by a potential threat. Risk is composed of two elements: the consequence that an exploited vulnerability would have on the organization’s mission or operations the likelihood that such an exploitation would occur. A risk assessment is the process of analysing and then interpreting risk associated with potential threats and vulnerabilities. The risk assessment acts as a means to help evaluate the efficiency and effectiveness of various security controls and countermeasures. RIRA (Rapid IT Risk Assessment) is a methodology that been been defined to create and complete and initial assessment with minimal effort and is suitable for project management and even problem management. It defines the IT landscape as follows: The primary IT landscape domains are peo

  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

  Why would any one want to change from legacy wide area networking to software defined wide area networking (SD-WAN)? See the above infographic for more details about the technology. There needs to be a business reason for it and not a technical one. Techies, the type who don't create documentation , tend to solve problems bottom up. The technology is chosen first, then there is a retrofit of underlying processes to fit with that technology, and finally the business is coerced to wave the wand at the newly acquired widgets. This engagement model is the reason why so many projects around technology fail to deliver on business value. Simply put the problem that is being solved is not one underpinning business.  A man a million times smarter than me explained it perfectly above.  "Starting with the customer" does not mean you double down on your app when 70% of your target audience simply do not use it ...

  A CV does not really record your work experience. It doesn’t tell about those unforgettable moments… I was called to a motor car factory where the paint shop was reported as having intermittent network problems. When I went to the network cabinet at the paint shop it was covered in pigeon poo. The poo was corroding the network chassis. That was a moment of being in sh1t. A colleague used a desktop fan to cool the telecommunications equipment. The bearings failed and the resultant smoke caused the gas to be dumped in the data centre. All this on 31 December 1999. That was when the sh1t hit the fan. Someone installed equipment in a cabinet and did not put the tops on the electrical power plugs. I reached in to reset a router. It was a shocking experience. An air conditioner iced up in the DC and over time, unnoticed it created a small pond underneath the flo