Size of an Elephant: Why the Ability to Scale Is Important in Design

When I was a small child, I used to enjoy watching a Japanese language program. Called Monkey, it was all about a disruptive monkey with a massive ego. The monkey was turned into immortal being that could shrink and grow and travel on a flying cloud. Punished by the heavens for its transgressions, it was traveling with a …

Breaking the Purchasing Cycle

I once received a valuable piece of advice about responding to a changing economy: “Start giving away free what you used to charge for, or start charging for something you used to give away free.” In other words, be prepared to change economic models, which can completely change the way customers buy. There is a real challenge …

Goodbye 2015, and Here We Go, 2016

Goodbye 2015 and here we go 2016. Since this is my first post of the New Year, I wanted to start the year with a post on one of my current favorite topics for discussion and that topic to start the year right is automation. For this post, let’s concentrate on the second day operations type of automation. Second day operations is really quite a different beast from the build and decommission automation in that second day operations incorporate several different approaches to the automation. It is these approaches that I discuss a little further.

Failure of Imagination

After the Apollo 1 disaster, astronaut Frank Borman told Congress that the tragedy had not been caused by any one company or organization, but by the entirety of all those involved with the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo missions. The problem had been a failure of imagination. They knew that at some point there would be a fire in a space …