The Norfolk Punt

Welcome to the The Norfolk Punt blog on IT-Director.com. Simply click on one of the links from the list below, or delve into the Archives for older material.

Recent Blog Posts

BCS CMSG Conference 2012
It's that time of the year again, when I remind people of the annual Conference of the Configuration Management Specialist Group of the BCS - I'm on its committee. I'm on the Committee, not because it pays me any money but because I think that...
David Norfolk, Bloor Research | 7th February '12

Business process automation - the business fights back?
Sorry if this isn't hot news, but sometimes the business really doesn't like the IT group very much. The IT group is seen as the people who say NO when the business comes up with a neat new idea. And that is one reason why things like end user...
David Norfolk, Bloor Research | 19th January '12

IBM Rational to acquire virtualised testing environment.
I am always rather concerned about the testing of large, complex, virtualised (cloud) automated business services, especially those involving 3rd-party applications such as SAP. Constraints on resources and, especially, time, may result in testing...
David Norfolk, Bloor Research | 9th January '12

Newest but not bestest?
I've just been persuaded to revisit CIX (now under new owners; the latest CIX Roadmap is here) by an old online friend I met F2F for the first time a day or so ago. For the many that won't remember it, CIX was based on an old bulletin-board-style...
David Norfolk, Bloor Research | 22nd December '11

SAM Revisted
I never cease to be amazed at what customers will put up with from IT vendors. Software licensing is a case in point. Of course, customers shouldn't assume that because software is an intangible asset, it is free and needn't be managed but some...
David Norfolk, Bloor Research | 5th December '11

Configuration Management or Versioning?
I was speaking at a Unicom workshop a week or so ago. We were exploring two new freedoms - Cloud and Agile - and wondering how the business was going to assure itself (without compromising agility) that what was going on was broadly in line with...
David Norfolk, Bloor Research | 7th November '11

The Open Group on Cloud Computing
One of the things that worries me about the Cloud is exactly what everyone is talking about when they use the term, especially when the meaning appears to change as the conversation develops. I can remember bureau computing 30 or 40 years ago -...
David Norfolk, Bloor Research | 12th September '11

Data centre schizophrenia
I'm coming down with a bout of schizophrenia. I know that IT is now taking a further lurch in its continuing journey towards abstraction, with cloud computing. The business is beginning to care much less about technology, just whether its SLAs are...
David Norfolk, Bloor Research | 10th August '11

Bribery, no longer an option
Just a heads-up about the new Bribery Act 2010 (implemented July 2011), in case IT people think this doesn't affect them, This Act creates four new offences and commercial organisations now commit an offence if a person associated with the company...
David Norfolk, Bloor Research | 3rd August '11

Stop press: mainframe finally dead...
OK, some twenty years after InfoWorld editor Stewart Alsop announced the death of the mainframe (see the New York Times article here), it's time to put the poor thing out of its misery. I declare the mainframe finally DEAD. RIP. Dead parrot...
David Norfolk, Bloor Research | 21st July '11

Versioning, versioning everywhere
Perforce exemplifies the conservative approach of Christopher Seiwald (CEO and founder of Perforce Software)-do just one thing (version management) and do it really, really well. Don't expand into ALM (Application Lifecycle Management) and don't...
David Norfolk, Bloor Research | 12th July '11

Innovate2011 - Fytte the 3rd, Keeping legacy going
Well, I'm back in the UK now and as I said in my last Fytte I was impressed by OSLC and IBM's Jazz platform and its power as an open basis for collaboration between tools, not necessarily all from IBM. I hope it begins to extend outside the IBM...
David Norfolk, Bloor Research | 11th July '11

Sybase - an SAP company
I've been at Sybase's Analyst Summit at the New York Stock Exchange. The immediate point of interest, of course, is that Sybase still seems happy with being acquired by SAP—perhaps partly because it gets to run itself as an independent company...
David Norfolk, Bloor Research | 14th June '11

Innovate2011 - Fytte the 2nd, Software Economics and Collaboration
Well, as another IBM exec says, I wish I were as energetic as Steve Mills (head of IBM's software group). Personally, I suspect it's tiring. Anyway, Millls' key point perhaps was if you still want to able to write software in future, and I guess you...
David Norfolk, Bloor Research | 8th June '11

Innovate2011 - Fytte the 1st, Complexity to Clarity
Well, here at innovate, perhaps  the first point of interest is the new General Manager IBM Software, Dr. Kristof Kloeckner, who once headed up IBM's Hursley lab and has a great track record in Rational. He spoke well and looks likely to continue...
David Norfolk, Bloor Research | 7th June '11

Governance and Cloud at IBM's PCTY, Part 1
Marc van Zadelhoff (Director, Worldwide Strategy, IBM Security Solutions at IBM) is speaking at PCTY (Pulse Comes to You), 2011, London, an offshoot of IBM's big Tivoli User Conference in Las Vegas, and his message is that security can be, should be...
David Norfolk, Bloor Research | 31st May '11

Many independent cores
I've just been at an Intel analyst/reseller/partner symposium, and it's been rather interesting (quite apart from how wonderful the marble pavements in Dubrovnik are). So, what's new from Intel? Well, HPC (High Performance Computing) developments...
David Norfolk, Bloor Research | 10th May '11

Configuration Management Event
Well, it's that time of the year again - the BCS CMSG (Configuration Management Specialist Group - I'm on its committee) annual conference on 7th June 2011 at the BCS London office. And, looking at the speakers, I'm annoyed that I'll be missing it...
David Norfolk, Bloor Research | 9th May '11

The Data-Centric World
In my opinion, the application-centric paradigm is no longer fully up to the task of implementing the world of things, the increasingly pervasive collection of connected, intelligent devices communicating in near-real-time that constitutes our...
David Norfolk, Bloor Research | 19th April '11

Governance and Cloud at IBM's PCTY, Part 2
In Part 1, I was talking about using the public cloud, with appropriate business-level SLAs, for business-critical processing. As usual, however, the devil will be in the detail and cloud services suppliers like Amazon are unlikely to want to offer...
David Norfolk, Bloor Research | 1st April '11

The need for Software Tagging
Leaving aside the software licensing problem, surely no-one reading this will have problems finding out what software they use! It's a no-brainer, people aren't allowed to run open source software; people certainly aren't going to buy their own...
David Norfolk, Bloor Research | 31st March '11

The death of applications?
For much of my working life, I've been involved with applications development. But this seems, to me, to exemplify the essential, dysfunctional, siloisation of IT in practice. Business users don't want applications they want business...
David Norfolk, Bloor Research | 28th March '11

That old spectre: proprietary systems lock-in
Recently, I've been looking at modern approaches to to automating business process by working with high-level abstractions (also called models) and wondering why the world switched to writing business systems in C++ back in the nineties—back...
David Norfolk, Bloor Research | 22nd March '11

Mainframe Knowledge Transfer
I make no secret of the fact that I think the modern mainframe offers an excellent enterprise technology platform. But there are issues—in particular, that mainframe people (and technologies) speak a language all of their own and management is...
David Norfolk, Bloor Research | 15th March '11