EMA Research Blog: Navigating IT and Security Horizons

Maybe the 21st Century is the Age of Ecosystems.  I suppose the largest for now is our planet.   Taken abstractly, the term “ecosystem” can apply well beyond natural and manmade interdependencies, to political, religious and business- and organizational-driven ecosystems.  And while the concept is a good one, and in some senses a cause for optimism— [...]

The notion that the CMDB is now entering a “mature” phase
is naïve, and in many respects refuted by the high levels of innovation
attested to here. We are admittedly looking at toddlers learning
to walk, but what a transformation they may bring to the market, and to our
whole view of service management, as they take their first few steps!!

Welcome to The Systems Café!  Those who seek refuge herein will have the dubious honor of experiencing my stunningly opinionated ramblings on systems management topics, issues, news, rumors and general agita.  Don’t be intimidated by the topic – I’ll do most of the talking.  So, grab yourself a double-shot mocha latte and a blueberry scone and meet me at my favorite table for our discussion.  It’s the one over there under the lamp shaped like Rear Admiral Grace Hopper’s hat.  Go on, I’ll wait…

EMA consulting once did an analysis of why strategic service management initiatives fail.  These ranged from cross-domain performance management initiatives, to configuration management initiatives with CMDB/CMS enabling foundations,  to company-wide asset management initiatives to name a few.    Of the top ten reasons for failure, only the bottom two (Integration and Discovery) were technology-related.    Three of [...]

I had originally intended to make this blog about mental health.  A supportive article for those of you trying to support change in your own environment wrestling with the stubbornly persistent caricatures and silos still so dominant in many IT organizations. It was inspired by a rather nasty line in a novel my one of [...]

EMA conducted four research studies during Q4 2010 with over 400 respondents in total.  While the topics of these studies varied from two cloud computing topics and two asset management topics, we always include a standard set of demographic questions and budget questions.  I asked our Survey Production & Research Analytics Manager, Sylvia Rimmington, to combine the budgetary data from these four studies into a single analysis and compare this data with similar data from Q4 2009.

EMA has been both predicting and advocating a more service-centric model for asset optimization and planning for nearly a decade. This is also, in itself, not a new idea with EMA either. The telecommunications industry and best practices such as the Telecommunication Management Forum’s eTOM guidelines support the logically obvious assumption that if a technology [...]

When designing the EMA Radar Report, I was unaware of this video of Gideon Gartner answering a question about the Gartner Magic Quadrant.  I only learned of this on twitter last week. Gideon is asked what he would do different if doing the Magic Quadrant today. His answer…he would use spider diagrams.  This is exactly what we do in the EMA Radar Report. First published in December 2009, we have published five reports to date with five pending for the first half of 2011 (see the list at the bottom of this post).

In the research I mentioned in my earlier blog on “Operationalizing Cloud,” we looked at a lot more than technology adoption.  We looked at organizational and process requirements as well. And we also looked at change. As it turned out, 70% of our respondents said that once begun, their cloud initiatives needed rethinking or redirection!! [...]

EMA has just collected some new data regarding how IT organizations are seeking to assimilate cloud services from a top-down, service management perspective. The data gathered in December of 2010, spanned 155 global respondents with high percentages of executives (better than 50% director and above) – as the goal was to understand how senior management and cross-domain organizations that usually have senior executive leadership are leveraging cloud computing.