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All Things Old are New Again

By silentknight ·
Recently two IT buddies and I were playing golf (between the three of us we have 80+ years of IT experience...we're all under the age of 60). The topic of discussion: ITIL, SOA and other related issues.

What struck us all as funny: Most large firms had or were implementing these practices 20 years ago. These and other "programs" were born out of the mainframe era. Funnier still: while technology has advanced, the problems and challenges faced by IT Management have not changed significantly. The world of IT seems to re-invent the wheel each generation.

Three lessons learned:
1) IT Best practices are useless if they are not tied to and do not further the business strategy.
2) Benchmarking of costs or performance against other organizations is pretty much irrelevant if the other organizations don't share your goals or business strategy.
3) You can spend a lot of money implementing what is now called ITIL and SOA...and in the end, it won't save you a lot if you don't change the culture of the business and/or the IS organization first.

Any other lessons learned out there?

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Ahh, one more

by bigbigboss In reply to slight difference

You can also send out a page to a web browser which instructs it to go to another machine to get the next page. Can't do that with 3270.

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few more lessons

by bigbigboss In reply to All Things Old are New Ag ...

4) You can be successful implementing any change in business only if the management really understand the what and the why of the change, and really wants it badly and not paying lip service because it is the buzz word of the day.

5) Don't do it unless you can get it all done in a year or so.

6) If the change will not produce perceivable increase in profit in less than two years, you don't have a hope of it being maintained.

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Remember Virtual Machines ?

by bigbigboss In reply to All Things Old are New Ag ...

VM is hot now. It was hot in the early 70's too.

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