Mark Lynd (CISSP - ISSAP, ISSMP, PMP, CE|H) is the President of FireScope, Inc., a revolutionary Business Service Management company dedicated to simplifying IT operations for businesses of any size. Mark is the originator of the FireScope solution and began developing it nearly three years ago and continues to architect and drive innovation into the FireScope line with the FireScope operations team.
During Mark's 20+ years in technology, he was named an Ernst & Young’s "Entrepreneur of Year – Southwest Region" Finalist, presented the Doak Walker Award on ESPN and has been covered by numerous publications including Wall Street Journal, Information Week, eWeek, CIO Magazine, CSO Magazine and numerous others. He also served honorably in the United States Army's 3rd Ranger Battalion and the 82d Airborne. Read Mark's full biography.
It is always interesting to see how BSM and other technologies impact a business. It is great to see how BSM and some related technologies are becoming strategic even to old school businesses like the automotive industry. It is funny that i say Old School...aren't they using robots to assemble their cars...well thoughts for another day. :) Anyway....the article is called IT: Driving The Auto Sector from CXOToday.com and it is a good read....enjoy!
Caught this article from CIO Magazine through a post on Doug McClure's Blog titled "Defining the next generation data centers", in the article is discusses how data centers are changing and redefining their approach. One area of the article that leaped out at me though was the author's thoughts on consolidation and virtualization. We continue to hear more and more about these two IT drivers but I have also been hearing from many is the confusion on how to make them work for them sand provide value into their organizations. The article mentions using frameworks such as ITIL and ITSM to organize their approach, but for any of us that have been through consolidation and virtualization efforts, we know it requires more than frameworks and good efforts. I think it requires two things more than anything else from the top layer of abstraction and those are:
1. Strategy - Frameworks can assist in deploying the strategy, but the IT management must come to grips with ensuring that a cohesive strategy that incorporates input and feedback from the functional areas and their leaders within the organization are incorporated into the strategy. So many IT teams choose to move forward without doing this and the results suffer greatly from it. Yet those IT organizations that work hand in hand with the business disciplines within their organizations continue to help their companies perform better and build momentum in the marketplace....repeat after me "IT can be strategic and profitable". Sorry....couldn't resist. :)
2. Commitment - From the Executive Suite through the Support function all employees, stake-holders and leaders must come to a consensus and then support the rollout of the strategy, otherwise as many organizations have found out...the results will be mixed at best and mor elikely disastorous. Remeber it has been reported that more than 60% of all IT projects have sub-par results or completely fail. Usually you will find a lack of commitment is one of the reasons for this.
These two items when done correctly can have a profound effect of the strategic results of the organization. Hope this helps....
The battle continues between Microsoft and IBM over the right open standard approach to service-oriented architectures (SOA). This article from CNET discusses the continuing struggle to agree on a open SOA format. Both Microsoft and IBM are major players in ECMA, each one supports a different format, IBM favors
OpenDocument Format (ODF), an ISO-certified, open-source standard. While Microsoft
favors Office Open XML (OOXML), which was originally developed in-house at
Microsoft. Hopefully they will find acompromise that will provide a open approach to SOA. The interoperability would be a great boon to numerous vendors and enterprises going forward. Doesn't it seem like we have been here before. :)
