Notes from the Consultant’s Jungle

I’ve spoken often about the promise of Web 2.0 technologies for the enterprise (and society in general) and the potential of rich collaboration that these technologies facilitate.  Recently, I’ve been working on a concept that applies a social networking layer on top of ITIL processes.  Let me elaborate on that a bit.

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In a recent interview with CIO Insight, Kenneth Brill of the Uptime Institute posits that the growth of demand for data processing is likely to cause enterprises to repeat data center construction projects every four to eight years. What?! Do it again?

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I’ve written before about how the various aspects of our lives drive us to use multiple online personas, and that this is a shortcoming of social networking sites today. What I’m referring to here is that we all wear multiple “skins,” and to represent these personas online one needs separate profiles on separate social networking [...]

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We’ve become fairly comfortable with the structure of our IT organizations, but new trends in technology product development are increasingly challenging these traditional models.
In the traditional (i.e., over the past 10 years or so) IT organization we have roughly aligned the organizational chart with a logical stack corresponding to our data processing footprint. We [...]

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Over the past year, the European Commission has been sponsoring the development of a Data Center Code of Conduct to address the increasing energy consumption, environmental, economic and supply security concerns of the data center community.  If you’d like to read it for yourself, it can be found here.
This is an interesting endeavor, especially with [...]

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I learned this morning that Jayshree Ullal has decided to leave Cisco to pursue other opportunities.  Given that I find myself often working with the folks at Cisco on strategic technology initiatives, it makes me sad to see Jayshree move on.
On several occasions I had the pleasure of working with Jayshree on forward looking technologies under [...]

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In many discussions about Web 2.0 technologies’ role in the enterprise, it’s interesting to me to notice the skeptical voice and contrarian opinion. These are valuable points of view, and essential for one to properly vet the application of the technology in terms of value delivered to the Business.
Many times, the contrarian voice represents the [...]

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That was quick.  Just this morning HP admitted it was in “talks” to acquire EDS and a few hours later it’s official.
HP will acquire EDS for $13.9B and brand it, “EDS- an HP Company” (creativity evidently didn’t get in the way of announcing the deal).  The new business unit will maintain its EDS centricity… with [...]

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The OSI Stack is a subject about which I’ve written and spoken numerous times over the past couple of years. I think there’s some opportunity now to be creative with the notion of a new, contemporary, business-driven, systems stack. This will be the subject of several posts, but let me begin by recapping my idea [...]

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How much thought do you give to your company’s corporate core values? Are you able to say (without looking them up on the website) what they are? Once you look at them again, to what extent do you think those values reflect the behavior of the company to its Customers? What about to its employees?
It [...]

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