Not Because They Are Easy, but Because They Are Hard

In all of life, we try to avoid the difficult things and handle the easy things first. Sometimes, leaving the hard things is a good idea. We sometimes realize there is an easy way to deal with the hard problem, or someone else deals with it. Sometimes it’s a bad idea. Leaving a sore tooth …

You Need IT-Business Integration, Not Alignment

There are many times when I’m on consulting engagements when I ask CIOs, “How much of an understanding do you and your management have about how your company makes money, thereby having a staff that knows where the money comes from and where it goes?” One of the scariest responses that I have had to that …

Strategy for Cloud Automation

Strategy for Cloud Automation. There is a lot of post about the Cloud and Cloud Computing but have not seen to many post or articles that discusses different strategy to consider when it comes to the automation in your environment. I did comes across a nice post called Legacy Job Schedulers: 3 Effective Exit Strategies to Consider by Jim Manias from Advanced Systems Concepts, Inc. that had some interesting points and thought it would be a great topic for discussion. In this post, Jim Manias, starts old school with a reminder that the early stages of automation were managed via schedulers from the host system to kick off the scripts when triggered either manually or from an event. Actually in all practical purposes if you use PowerShell for any of your automation needs, chances are you have used the Windows Scheduler in one form or another.

Product Pare-Down: Strike 1 … 2 … 3 … You’re Out!

As we look at the number of new product announcements made by tech companies each day, we notice that a large percentage never quite achieve success. In some cases, the sizzle is better than the steak, and in others, the market doesn’t need or want a specific product.

Root Cause Analysis as We Move Up the Stack

Containers and other technologies are moving administrators, developers, and even operational folks up the stack. In other words, we have abstracted out the hardware and abstracted out the operating system; next, we will abstract out middleware and eventually everything but the code to run. However, when we do that, we no longer train people to …