Communications of the ACM, June 2008: Issue theme is "organic computing" and those articles were fun to scan; clearly the days of mice, monitors, and keyboards are numbered.

David Weizner, Tim Berners-Lee and others call for "Information Accountability." I'll pay attention to anything Berners-Lee puts his name on. They are rightly skeptical of current DRM strategies, and propose some new approaches based more on accountability and less on control, calling for things like "policy-aware transaction logs," a "policy-language framework" (based on Semantic Web), and "policy-reasoning tools." Ultimately, control is still needed, and one possibility they mention is "a series of accountable appliances throughout the system"; of course, those would be key vulnerability points...

Also in this issue: risk profile for offshore-outsourced projects, and "Give Me Information, Not Technology" by Ragowsky et al - a commentary on the usual issues of IT/business alignment, that rises above the average through a critical analysis of the transition from "Information Systems" to "Information Technology," and a call for a focus on "Information Services" - a line of thinking I have also pursued.

IEEE Computer, June 2008. Number of interesting things but nothing reportable here.

IEEE IT Pro, May/June 2008. Some real ITIL-related operations research! "Restoring Service after an Unplanned IT Outage" by O'Callaghan/Mariappanadar. Focus group survey with statistical analysis. It's an interesting bit of work; with reference to ITIL, they attempted some analysis of whether technical support teams at one large Australian company had a "problem-focused approach" or a "solution-focused approach" - the former corresponding to ITIL Problem Management, the latter to Incident Management. One surprising bit was they found the teams did either one or the other; not both. The survey raises many questions, of course, and its limitation to one company is a significant weakness, as the authors admit.

Those of you who follow me over on IT Skeptic know that I have been debating matters related to IT operations research and ITPI (IT Performance Institute) specifically. One matter of contention has been a recent ITPI survey in which they first developed a survey by interviewing a convenience sample of 11 "top performers." This survey was then applied to a much broader population of 341 companies. This method has been criticized by some as falling victim to "halo effect," an assertion I think is misguided. It is interesting that this IT Pro survey followed exactly the same method: small convenience focus group to develop the tool, then application to a larger population.

IEEE Computer Feb 2008 ("The pervasive web): Nada for me.

IT Professional Feb 2008 ("Green Computing"): A number of articles on greening the data center. The articles however don't address the central issue (to my mind) for green IT: how to consolidate underutilized capacity, and the political and governance challenges surrounding that objective... 

News brief on the establishment of the IT Certification Council, which might of interest for those of you following the ITIL certification debates.

IEEE Computer March 2008 ("Software engineering"): Always interested in articles like "Determining the Impact of Software Engineering Research on Practice" by Osterweil et al... even when the conclusions are unsurprising (research is affecting practice, but it can take up to 10 years; we need to decompose the concept of "impact" and be more specific; we need to support the research community - surprise!)

Communications of the ACM February 2008 ("Alternate Reality Gaming"): Metadata professionals should definitely check out Liu & Tuzhilin's "Managing Large Collections of Data Mining Models."

That's the end of that particular pile... more to come...

-Charlie