Outsourcing Requirements Facilitation

Understanding and gathering requirements is a discipline and a process. An external professional requirement facilitator is a power resource for driving out complete requirements and building consensus in a relatively short period of time without running the risk of political backlash.

IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL)

A series of publications giving guidance on the best practices for provision of quality IT services

IT Service Support Processes:
Service Desk
Configuration Management
Incident Management
Problem Management
Change Management
Release Management

IT Service Delivery Processes:
Service Level Management
Availability Management
Capacity Management
IT Financial Management
IT Service Continuity Management
IT Security Management

Other online resources:
http://www.itlibrary.org/
http://www.itilcommunity.com/
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ITIL-Service/

Certificaiton:
Foundation (26/40 questions in 1 hour)
Practitioner
Manager

buzz words:
order
predicatable quality
optimization
define -> control & stabilize -> measure -> improve
(similar to plan-do-check-act)

Attackers Shift Exploits to Applications

Applications at special risk are backup, recovery, anitvirus, and a variety of other security tools which are supposed to keep users safe from attacks and from loss of data.
- SANS

News: CA sold Ingres open-source database business

lessons learned
- don't spread yourself too thin in the areas outside your core business.

Microsoft encourages the use of agile development methodologies

Scrum
- teams meet once a day for half an hour to figure out what they're going to do, then go off and do their work very quickly

Extream Programming
- two people working on a given piece of code