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On March 27, 1977, two Boeing 747 passenger aircraft collided on the Spanish island of Tenerife, one of the Canary Islands, in the deadliest accident in aviation history. 583 people perished. Like the Titanic, a multitude of causes converged into the disaster. A terrorist bomb at a another airport, an overstretched small regional facility, a [...]

I spent three great days last week with Kaseya and its user community. The experience was eye-opening in many ways. A bit of background: EMA considers Kaseya a systems management provider, and as such they are usually covered by my colleagues Steve Brasen and Torsten Volk. However, this year for a couple of different reasons [...]

Recently, I was invited to give a talk at Troux Directions on the evolution of enterprise architecture (gulp). I think it went pretty well, judging from comments and some of the tweets. The centerpiece slide was this two-dimensional view: (click on the graphic for a better view) EA is not evolving in just one dimension. [...]

Attended the Troux Worldwide event last week as an invited speaker. It was a fantastic event, over 300 attendees from all over the world, and the discussions were consistently deep and thoughtful. It felt very much like a homecoming – while I have been working in the trenches of IT portfolio management, ITSM, ITAM, and related [...]

Spent some time today writing up Serena’s new Demand Management offering; look for an Impact Brief shortly. Along these lines, I’m tracking a number of what I call next generation IT management vendors, which by my definition must incorporate both project and service management capabilities on a common platform with integrated resource management. It’s still [...]

My survey on IT demand management just came in, and it’s fascinating. I could get used to this research thing… As I’ve discussed here, here, and here, trends like DevOps and Lean IT are challenging the traditional silos of technology management, and spurring interest in more unified approaches to IT demand and execution. Until I [...]

I spent a few days at IBM Pulse last week, the IBM conference associated with infrastructure management and the Tivoli product line. It was an enormous event at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas – 8,000 people as announced at the conference. IBM is of course in a class by itself in terms of its [...]

“Too many tools!” That’s how IT managers feel. The systems needed just to run IT can cost millions to acquire and operate. Yet without appropriate tools, how can you run a service desk, IT operations center, or a project management office? Undoubtedly, it’s critical that your IT management tools approach be well thought out. You [...]

Here is my yearly prediction column, a bit delayed. Topic of the day is next generation IT management. (Not next generation IT; plenty of folks are covering that!) The tools market for IT service management is glutted. My friend Jan van Bon has been curating a list.ly list of “ITIL tools” that is now up [...]

So, I’ve implemented a couple CMDBs. One even before I’d heard of ITIL. We called it a metadata repository, but it was essentially a CMDB. Making the business case for such systems is never easy. ITIL and the various CMDB authors provide a number of what I call “motherhood and apple pie” justifications: Reduce downtime [...]