I read a discussion today in an ITSM-focused group on Facebook in which the inital poster sought to define the difference between “network incidents” and “security incidents”. “I have been asked to explain the difference”, the poster stated, wondering whether a cybersecurity incident such as a ransomware should be considered…

In July 2022, I saw an interesting and lively Twitter discussion in which a number of people debated how architecture impacted the burden of being on-call. Is the alert response workload heavier when working in a microservices-based environment, or a monolithically architectured one? The originator of the thread, @GergelyOrosz of…

Probably not. On Tuesday 8th June, at roughly noon in mainland Europe, the impact of a major outage swept across a number of the world’s most significant websites. The issues resulted from a failure of Fastly’s content delivery network service. …

(This is part two of a series exploring Complexity Science and the concept of complex adaptive systems in the context of ITSM. The first article, a primer for ITSM on these concepts, is here) In my previous article, I explored the core characteristics of complex adaptive systems. Now, I am…

The UK’s Times Newspaper recently broke a story (paywall) alleging personal data breaches by members of the country’s new and hurriedly-assembled COVID-19 contact tracing workforce. This is obviously a significant story, but one particular line caught my eye: “Thousands of (contact tracing) workers have joined social media groups that act…

The increasing complexity of digital systems necessitates new perspectives and practice. — As an airline customer in the modern era, it is possible to open a mobile app, and swap to a different flight with a few simple clicks. For the end-user, this operation has never been easier than now. However, the reality of this apparently simple action is that a huge…

It was interesting to read recently that TSB, the British bank which made headlines for the wrong reasons with a cataclysmic IT migration failure in 2018, has now effectively thrown in the towel and outsourced its entire IT banking systems operation to IBM. In this article, I’m going to walk…

By the time Axelos released the foundational level of ITIL 4, in February 2019, a major change to the framework was long overdue, given that the third version dated back to 2007. Twelve years is a long time in a relatively young industry, but this twelve years had been hugely…

I presented yesterday (June 27th 2019) at the excellent DevOps Enterprise Summit, in London. The presentation is here and I’ll link the video when it is published. One thing that was particularly interesting to me was the view from the venue, over the Thames, to the Isle of Dogs. This…