Cameron HaightLast November, IBM announced their latest "Five in Five" listing of innovations. These are to be breakthroughs that will dramatically shape our lives and world over the next five years. Their listing included:
- Energy saving solar technology will be built into asphalt, paint and windows
- You will have a crystal ball for your health
- You will talk to the Web . . . and the Web will talk back
- You will have your own digital shopping assistants
- Forgetting will become a distant memory
What was I writing? Oh yes … whew, glad that the last innovation listed will materialize (and not a moment too soon for me)! I wish the IT operations management market was as exciting as some of these but that shouldn’t prevent us from developing our own list. Here are my "Five in Five" predictions (but not necessarily innovations) for the IT operations (and enterprise) management industry:
- We’ll still be playing catch-up in trying to manage the "new, new" thing in terms of infrastructure technology innovations
- Overall, our management tools will remain too expensive and difficult to support
- There will still be a continuing struggle to straightforwardly link many of our management product investments to improved business performance
- Operational best practices frameworks will continue to be easy to conceptualize but hard to implement
- The organizational structure to optimize the management of an increasingly complex environment will remain elusive
A bit pessimistic to be sure, but given that we often seem to be only focusing as an industry on the "low hanging fruit" reinforces my less than sunny perception. Anyone else care to provide their predictions?
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4 responses so far ↓
1 Cameron Haight: Five in Five January 12, 2009 at 5:38 pm
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2 Saeed Khan February 24, 2009 at 2:53 pm
Cameron,
For #2, why do you think that won’t change? That’s really a market dynamics issue, and it’s clear that the current price/value arguments for large frameworks are far from compelling (to be polite). Infrastructure management is becoming less expensive as innovative solutions are found to the “million dollar problems”.
Yes, there will be new problems in the future but the gap between the ability of existing technology to solve problems created by new immature technologies is rapidly narrowing.
Saeed
3 Cameron Haight February 25, 2009 at 12:58 am
I’m not sure I agree, Saaed. Most management technology (framework-based or not) still often targets the \low hanging fruit,\ i.e., monitoring versus say, root cause analytics. Also, I would say that as an industry we still struggle to manage the \new, new thing.\ Take for example SOA-based architectures – we can monitor some of the layers …. but putting them all together in a cogent view is still challenging. And my one of my latest focuses – virtualization, that too is an area of evolving management tool capability due to it’s dynamics, often temporal attributes and increasing scale. I hope I’m wrong .. but so far the track record in the systems management world does not seem to advanced that far from the time when I used to work with NetView on a mainframe in the mid-80s.
4 Cameron Haight February 25, 2009 at 1:00 am
My apologies for mispelling your name, Saeed. Also, not sure why the punctuation looks odd.