Insurance is one of those funny things. It’s really all about risk and your attitude towards it. For example, personal injury is something you rarely think about, however when it happens it’s always nice to have some sort of compensation. Bit it really depends on which end you are really. If you’re on the paying end, it’s pretty important to have some sort of indemnity insurance to cover you from this sort of risk.

The question is, are you covered?

Take lead management for example. AimPromote is a package in this area that is highly focused on the specific need of managing and organising your leads and keeping them on track for your organisation’s aims. There are a number of CRM packages out there that have a module that can do this job, however they aren’t dedicated to the task and this can be seen when you look at AimPromote’s feature list (which has a comparison against Leads360 and SalesForce.com). You can see that there are a number of features that aren’t offered by their competitors and this is the advantage their package brings to play. Leads Management is just one aspect of crm and this package is highly focused in this area.

It’s an interesting idea in that choosing the same package that everyone else uses reduces your exposure to risk, but also reduces your competitive differentiated advantage. This applies not just to crm software, but also other software and processes that your organisation uses. Goes to show how true my Risk Management text is: Risk is good, as it breeds opportunity!

1. The network is reliable.
2. Latency is zero.
3. Bandwidth is infinite.
4. The network is secure.
5. Topology doesn’t change.
6. There is one administrator.
7. Transport cost is zero.
8. The network is homogeneous.

Great aren’t they? If you’ve worked in IT for any measuable amount of time, you’re bound to has assumed, or seen someone assume, one of the fallacies above. But they will always come back and haunt you!

Nigel, one of my colleagues, is a firm believer that things were better in the mainframe days. Things were simpler, more controlled and infintely more reliable. His favourite anecdote recounts a speaker at a conference who went up on stage bouncing a basketball. He compared this to a mainframe, easy to control. He then pulls out a bucket of ping pong balls, throws it into the audience and then asks them how then can control that. It think that comparison is a bit harsh, however, it does outline the non-linearity that distributed computing suffers from when it comes to issues of control, manageability and fault control.

Personally, I think it’s a matter of market/technology granularity. Yes, a mainframe may seem more dependable, but that’s mainly because you’re dealing with one supplier who? gets called in when there’s an issue. The end-user never sees the individual components that make up a system, it’s a black-box that someone else manages, so yes, it’s surely going to look like an easier environment. Distributed apps are likely to be running on disperate hardware, across multiple operating systems, supplier and supported by different vendors, all with their own support procedures. And this is where non-linearity steps in. In mathematics, a nonlinear system is one whose behavior can’t be expressed as a sum of the behaviors of its parts (or of their multiples.) (more on Wikipedia). The challenge software/system/technical architects? today face is expressing this non-linearity in terms of risk so that the business can understand it. It still is a thorny issue though.

Do you come across these problems in your day job?

How is political risk assessed? The author recommends a four-dimensional approach around measuring: the strength and stability of government,? social trends, security within the country and economic factors.
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