In this post, I explore the discipline of application management, which is an IT management process with tools focused on the availability, performance and manageability of applications. Applications that have files, databases and other resources distributed over multiple OS images can be a challenge to manage. When suddenly some part of the application isn’t working, what’s wrong?
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Posted: December 4, 2017 |
In this post, I explore the current state of network management, a powerfully mature discipline that emerged after going through many changes as networking evolved to its present state. Network management is still growing and evolving. That’s because network environments are still developing in sophistication, built-in support and changing device implementations like virtualized firewalls, switches and routers.
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Posted: November 27, 2017 |
In this post, I explore systems management as a comprehensive discipline: What is it, how has it changed and what are the latest innovations to emerge. Systems management has developed into a mature and vibrant network of activities that are key to keeping systems available and useful. Let’s consider it as a model with categories and activities.
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Posted: November 20, 2017 |
This is the first in a series about IT management. You might think of this as system, network, application and cloud management, but definitions and practices are changing and expanding. Or, you might think of this as IT Service management. That’s certainly part of it as well. IT service management creates context so it is useful to include a framework like the ITIL because management categories like application management map to it. ITIL isn’t the only framework that gives context.
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Posted: November 13, 2017 |
This is the sixth and final post in a series about things they never taught me in school. Over the years, I have taken many different computer classes in schools, through IT companies and by self-study, but nothing prepared me for the rigor of leading a team in the design and development of a large-scale system software product that was expected to be used by many hundreds of customers. Let me explain.
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Posted: November 6, 2017 |
This is the fifth post in a series about things they never taught me in school. When I took computer courses at a university and from in-house training programs, I never learned anything about the steps to install and make system software ready for test then production use. For the first 10 years that I installed products, I learned just about everything from the product manuals and IBM Redbooks. I am sure there were courses about aspects of the products that I installed and supported, but there was little education funding and most of the skills that I discovered were perhaps best learned through practice. Let me explain.
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Posted: October 30, 2017 |
This is the fourth post in a series about things they never taught me in school. Attending classes, I never learned how to create an IT offering. In fact, I never heard of an IT offering until I was 20 years into my IT career. At that time, elements like professional or support services were available in the industry but not yet mature. Let me explain.
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Posted: October 23, 2017 |
I studied to be a computer application developer. After five years of being an application developer, I was invited to join the system programming team where I stayed for a long time enjoying the many challenges of the work. One of the most challenging kinds of projects was automating systems by using a thoughtful method to automate the start up, shutdown and recovery of an entire software system. Let me explain.
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Posted: October 16, 2017 |
I spent three months studying COBOL, wrote eight challenging batch programs, and then took my first assignment, which involved writing online transactions that I learned nothing about before taking the assignment. Since I had no training in real-time programming (i.e., online transaction processing (OLTP) applications, I needed some tutoring by the analyst assigned to be my mentor. Although he never called it pseudo-conversational that is a good label for the constraints I was asked to operate within. Let me explain.
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Posted: October 9, 2017 |
Over the years, you’ve probably spent a lot of time reading and studying computer topics. I have attended many classes and even taught a few and never came across the topics of polyglot persistence and programming. If somebody taught me about polyglot anything, I am sure that I would have remembered it. These are topics, polyglot persistence and programming, discussed by IT practitioners and opinions are on both sides—good idea and not so good—let me explain.
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Posted: October 2, 2017 |
