Certainly, telling tales out of school - even if the names have been changed - is unacceptable, as would be any specific discussion of products, vendors, budgets, strategies, etc.  Anything resembling a case study is a heavily fictionalized composite of my experience at several large shops, plus what I'm reading and hearing in the industry.

So what's the point? 

If my employer and position are known, it is also clear that I am involved with some of the largest scale corporate ITSM problems on the planet. A recurring thought of mine recently has been "welcome to the bleeding edge."

How does one survive on the bleeding edge? A perpetual interest in principles and emergent structure. Ideas. 

But this is risky. Seductive ideas can be misguided. The research analysts, consultants, and vendors are all self interested, and once again, this is the bleeding edge. Do their ideas scale? Are we talking to their best A+ players or receiving filtered wisdom? Are there structural conflicts of interest, to the point where increasing my organization's efficiency would impact their revenues? (That's the one that scares me.)

So, I blog. I blog about concepts and principles. I blog about language and semantics. I blog about distributed systems architectures and classes of products. And I do this as a reality check. First, simply the act of writing helps me to develop the ideas. And writing publicly allows me to benefit from others in my position, who may also be constrained on the specifics but able to discuss principles - and perhaps warn me away from any pitfalls I may have overlooked. I think the reward outweighs the risk.

I appreciate everyone's participation to date. I apologize for the fact I am often late in approving comments, and often leave good material unanswered. I don't have the bandwidth to handle the spam that results from anything less restrictive, and sometimes the choice is between responding to a good post, or working on my next one. So don't take non-answers personally.

Thanks again,

Char