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

Continuous deployment at BCS CMSG 2013
If there is one thing that drives agile delivery of automated business outcomes, it's continuous deployment. Automation of error-prone manual procedures reduces errors and increases efficiency - as long as you build on configuration management best...
David Norfolk, Bloor Research | 21st May '13

The Intel Software Conference 2013 in Chantilly
The Intel Software Conference was in Chantilly this year and, once again, James Reinders' keynote set the agenda - see his blogs here. It's all about parallel programming from few to many cores with consistent models, languages, tools, and...
David Norfolk, Bloor Research | 17th May '13

Intel's HTML app development environment
An interesting innovation at the 2013 Intel Software Conference was its free HTML5 development environment - a packaged set of programming tools, including cloud support. The approach is different to that adopted for its C++ tools and perhaps deals...
David Norfolk, Bloor Research | 17th May '13

New platform for the Internet of Things
I've been thinking for some time that the Internet of Things (IoT) is the next big technology disruption - what we're doing now may simply not scale easily to this new world. Nothing new there but I was listening to an Analyst teleconference...
David Norfolk, Bloor Research | 15th May '13

BCS CMSG Conference 2013
It's almost here - The BCS CMSG Conference 2013 is on 4 June 2013, and you can register here. Configuration Management is about a lot more than just delivering software code and the BCS Configuration Management Specialist Group (BCS CMSG) is very...
David Norfolk, Bloor Research | 15th May '13

More than a DevOps story
It's not often that I review fiction in here, but I think this book is worth a read - both by IT professionals and by the business managers who (hopefully) manage them. The book is The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your...
David Norfolk, Bloor Research | 15th May '13

Enterprise apps for sale
Salesforce.com is about a lot more than customer relationship management these days. Perhaps one of the most interesting facets of the product is salesforce.com as a trusted platform for enterprise cloud computing; together with Salesforce...
David Norfolk, Bloor Research | 3rd May '13

CA World 2013 Fytte 2 - Mainframe Application Virtualisation
Talking with Michael Madden, General Manager, and David Hodgson of CA's Mainframe group, I was touched by their infectious (and, in my opinion, justified) enthusiasm. It's also a good sign that if Mike Gregoire (CA Technologies' new CEO) is teaching...
David Norfolk, Bloor Research | 2nd May '13

Huddle impressions: some features
I've just had a hands-on demo of Huddle (which describes itself as an enterprise content collaboration platform) with Jonathan Howell (its CTO) and James Pipe (one of its product managers, focused on mobile and desktop). As I've said before, there...
David Norfolk, Bloor Research | 1st May '13

News from CA World 2013 - Fytte the First
So, CA Technologies has a new CEO at last (see management team bios here) and Michael P. Gregoire looks as though  he may be what the company needs. Talking to people at CA Technologies, he seems to have gone through its somewhat diverse and...
David Norfolk, Bloor Research | 29th April '13

Huddle impressions: collaboration pain-points
The trouble with collaboration software is that it is really hard to assess without using it in a real community - with real pain points that collaboration can help with. However, a good demo can give you a feel for a product and the attitude of...
David Norfolk, Bloor Research | 25th April '13

The dark path - how does it operate in 'failure mode'?
I'm at CA-2013 and CA Technologies is telling a good joined-up story around advanced technology and mobile solutions. It has feedback loops around the user experience and so on. The devil may be in the detail but it really is sounding...
David Norfolk, Bloor Research | 24th April '13

Achieving CMDB accuracy
On Tues 9th April 2013, the BCS-CMSG configuration management specialist group held a very useful presentation on maintaining CMDB (Configuration Management Database) accuracy, from Michel Delran of Unisys. This prompted several thoughts, including...
David Norfolk, Bloor Research | 19th April '13

Free BCS-CMSG CMDB event
I'll be going along to hear Michel Delran from Unisys describing a simple way of understanding the lifecycle of the CI attributes-letting you stay in control of your CMDB. You can expand his analytical concept to manual or automated update of...
David Norfolk, Bloor Research | 8th April '13

Tom Wolff's Newsletter
I've noticed that some people seem to assume that if you talk about technology as being important in organisations today, and (I believe) it is, then you are also saying that everything should be looked after by the IT group. Not true; technology...
David Norfolk, Bloor Research | 5th April '13

Social Collaboration Technology - an emerging checklist
Social Collaboration always strikes me as more about people and organisational behaviour than technology - although once an organisation has a vision for social collaboration at all levels, technology is a real enabler. So, now I'm going to get an...
David Norfolk, Bloor Research | 3rd April '13

News from Pulse: Fytte the First
My up-front impression from the Tivoli's Pulse conference in Las Vegas is that Tivoli is now a lot more than just a collection of Operations tools (in fact, it probably has been, for some time). It's becoming a new business automation development...
David Norfolk, Bloor Research | 11th March '13

Changes at IBM System Engineering
I've just had a very interesting online analyst roundtable with the Systems Engineering wing of IBM Rational. The latest news is that Meg Selfe is moving on to start up a Smarter Physical Infrastructure Group, which (I guess) means another step...
David Norfolk, Bloor Research | 8th March '13

Call for Papers for the BCS CMSG 2013 Conference - deadline 11th March
It's that time of the year again - the Call for Papers for the premier UK event on Change, Release, Asset and Configuration Management for ITIL and Service Management and throughout the application lifecycle. This is the BCS CMSG 2013 Conference -...
David Norfolk, Bloor Research | 22nd February '13

Qualitest acquires TCL and inspires some thoughts on testing
The UK TCL independent Software Testing Consultancy has just been acquired by the Qualitest Group, which claims to be the world's second largest pure-play testing services provider - so, I presume, it tries harder. As you might expect, it offers the...
David Norfolk, Bloor Research | 8th February '13

Configuration Management Resources
Configuration management is important - and if you implement ITIL or CMMI you know that. For everyone else, it's about knowing what you have, where it is, what it does, what impacts it has if it goes wrong or changes, when it was last checked, who...
David Norfolk, Bloor Research | 5th February '13

Understanding Infrastructure Configurations In an Enterprise
Wednesday 6 February 2013: Understanding Infrastructure Configurations In an Enterprise - Configuration management isn't just for software! Presentation lead by CMSG Committee Member David Cuthbertson, at BCS HQ, London. It is not easy to understand...
David Norfolk, Bloor Research | 4th February '13

Some thoughts on the Internet of Things
The Internet of Things is the world in which every device is an Internet server and the complete system of systems of systems...of devices works by means of of devices and systems talking to each other and making autonomic decisions (see this paper...
David Norfolk, Bloor Research | 31st January '13

Some thoughts on C++
I've always been a bit nervous of C++ - I learned about writing efficient code with IBM 370 assembler and I learned about objects with Simula. When I first met C++, my boss presented it as an easy way to claim an Object Technology win - by just...
David Norfolk, Bloor Research | 7th January '13