* What topics are worth exploring in a management world gone mad?
It’s the time of year when Enterprise Management Associates plans its research calendar – which begins and ends in the late summer months rather in the short dark days of winter. This column is really a petition to you, to ask you what you’d like us to write about – because invariably our research topics become fodder for columns. In last week’s column, I talked about one subject area already: creating a new roadmap or taxonomy for the enterprise management marketplace.
But rather than ending here with a “please send your e-mail ideas to mailto:drogseth@emausa.com” – and in so doing filing the shortest column on record (for me at least), I thought I’d grease the skids with a few general ideas of my own.
In my opinion, the enterprise management marketplace has become something of a “crazy world,” characterized in 2005-2006 by the gradual collapse of one world order and the gradual rise of another. Old habits of mind and ways of working are still struggling and persisting – and still quite pervasive – while new approaches in terms of process and technologies are coming into broader awareness and beginning to see first-phase, meaningful adoptions. These breakthrough adoptions are occurring both among vendors and among IT organizations deploying products and services.
Here are a few examples of “crazy world” phenomena that seem to cry out for research:
* Best practices and ITIL. Who can complain about the growing interest in best practices and in particular, the growing interest in the IT Infrastructure Library’s resources supporting IT service management? After all, this interest brings a more customer-centric focus to IT and enhanced business alignment – strategies that EMA advocates. What’s “crazy world” here is that too many IT shops are approaching ITIL as if it were a silver bullet rather than a demanding departure point for assessment and planning of processes, organizations and ultimately technology. This gap leaves the door open for unscrupulous services and sales, and rigid, shortsighted IT initiatives that in some instances have tripled the time taken to resolve a problem. From a topical perspective, understanding how IT really is evolving and should evolve, and how best practices such as ITIL are taking hold, is clearly one area to address.
* Market consolidation. So you think the enterprise management market’s changing? You’re probably right.
* New “structural” levels of product integration. These marketplace changes aren’t just about acquisitions. What’s really going on in how vendors are partnering, in terms of data integration, visualization and analytics? This may not sound sexy, or even very crazy, but given history, I would posit that it might have seemed nuts 10 years ago and that it may just be the single most important trend of all.
* New prominence for security. Security is cropping up everywhere in our discussions. Compliance (which is related, of course) and identity management have become especially hot. But security is no longer completely separate, isolated from mainstream network and system performance and availability management, or service provisioning, or other disciplines. How do you navigate through the multi-dimensional implications of this new, albeit enlightened, madness?
* VoIP and wireless. Both VoIP and wireless technologies typically get addressed as, well, technologies, which they are – but that approach generally misses the point. How do you find the real values (hint: people, business and organizations) of these new technologies, and what are the still-very-real technical challenges to getting there?
* Grand visions and patchwork quilts. Nothing looks more like one of Hieronymous Bosch’s paintings of hell than a juxtaposition of some of the grandest visions for “adaptive, autonomic, on-demand” computing with close analysis of the real, typical processes in many if not most IT shops for simply trying to find, identify, fix, and validate the fix for business service problems. It’s a world of homegrown software, expert opinion and a patchwork quilt of platforms and point products. What’s really afoot here, and where is it all going? This, I admit, could be the subject a full calendar year’s research and more.
Hopefully, these ideas have gotten you thinking, but haven’t limited your thinking. I’d love to hear your ideas – what would you like to see EMA examine more deeply in the next 18 months? Write to me at mailto:drogseth@emausa.com
