Friday, July 22, 2005

Complexity in Government IT If complexity is a general expense and problem, government IT would not be immune. Boris blogged the keynote at the Gartner IT Expo in San Francisco last May.  Boris is Boris Pevzner who has advised CIOs and senior IT executives of leading Fortune 500 companies on re-aligning IT operations around service-oriented IT delivery model. He summarized his takeaways from the conference: .. the dominant line of reasoning that was threaded through the entire event: CIOs have top-priority problems (they always have, of course): insufficient Business / IT alignment, ineffective communication within IT and between IT and the Business, compliance is hard to achieve, ìI've cut as much as I can cut, and now I am asked to cut some more... now what?," etc. If you think about these problems systematically, you will realize that they all have a common root cause: complexity. Perhaps if you could ìfixî complexity, you would help to address CIOís issues?  The Gartner folks think so. So how do you address complexity in a practical, incremental, non-disruptive? ñ through the ìIT Productizationî transformation. And what is the current best-practices way to help implement IT Productization? ñ itís service delivery management based on an actionable Service Catalog. Those threads coordinate with ITIL or IT Service Management  implementation.  Removing unnecessary complexity has great possibilities. Does he or Gartner mean that by "fix" complexity? On the subject of complexity, after a Security Day recently, I was thinking about the situation that my home computer is likely more secure than my work computer. There's no doubt that the simplicity of my home IT system makes security easier. At home, I don't have "maintenance windows" or similar complexity for systems, but I hear about the urgency of certain patches, and then make a decision for myself.  But what if large systems could have some layers of complexity removed? Possible resulting security benefits. 6:27:25 PM    comment [] Weblog that covers some California IT developments Nick Mudge writes the Technology and Government Weblog. There, July 22, 2005, he wrote that in a recent memo (July 12, 2005 on the Executive Branch's IT program), California's CIO Clark Kelso mentions working on  "an approach and plan to take the Stateís web pages to the next level of services, functionality and sophistication." In the improvement of the State of California's web pages, Nick hopes for RSS feeds. I'll add another hope for better content transfer to mobile devices. Of course, RSS feeds would be first on my wish list. Tangentially, about being readable in mobile devices, that seems easier than ever with this technique: Mike Davidson: Make Your Site Mobile-Friendly in Two Minutes. Note that the first comment about this technique: "minimal overhead and maximum result." 4:36:26 PM    comment [] News about the Radio Userland and blogging tools (A technical deviation for a single entry) Today at Scripting News Dave Winer posted: Paolo releases his Theme Tool for free. That's cool. I'm thinking that Radio itself, the parts that haven't already been GPLed, should be. Christmas may well come early this year. I add my "hooray for Paolo", because I used Paolo's theme tool before, then didn't when I moved to different home machine for blogging. Paolo's tool interface well with Dreamweaver. I could see where all the constant page elements like the navigation links were displaying.  Dreamweaver provides some decent WYSIWYG editing that maintains good code (and allows you to clean up and structure various XHTML and web page things). I've been happy with Radio Userland, and can compare it with maintaining an IT Service Management site at blogger. Something to keep for reference Are you using the right blogging tool? We'll be back to Experimental Space's real subjects in a short time. If you came looking for egovernment, check back later. 4:12:26 PM    comment []

© Copyright 2006 barbara haven. Last update: 4/1/06; 10:36:10 PM. This theme is based on the SoundWaves (blue) Manila theme.