Cfengine founder and CTO Mark Burgess considers devices and information to be personal tools. However, in order for those personal tools to remain viable, up-to-date and competitive, he says the business infrastructures need to lose their bulky inertia and become fluid and creative.
Initially focusing on the issues IT management face, Burgess talks about different types of change: intended change and unexpected change. Instead of agility, creativity, and success, current management structures tend towards minimal liability, or safeguarding against unexpected change rather than creating intended change. He emphasizes the problems of a static and unwieldy infrastructure that leads to changes and fads passing corporations by.
Burgess promotes the idea of a management style he calls a 'fighter,' which takes risks, has human diversity, and is able to change without massive overhauls and delays. Adaptation, he says, is a key quality for management dealing with any technology.
Throwing in literary references from Alice in Wonderland to Isaac Asimov’s The Bicentennial Man, real-world rhetorical questions and a few humorous remarks, Mark Burgess explains the immediate need for new infrastructure that is agile, competitive, and not too risk-averse.
Mark Burgess is the founder, CTO and principal author of Cfengine. He is Professor of Network and System Administration at Oslo University College and has led the way in theory and practice of automation and policy based management for 20 years. In the 1990s he underlined the importance of idempotent, autonomous desired state management (“convergence”) and formalised cooperative systems in the 2000s (“promise theory”). He is the author of numerous books and papers on Network and System Administration and has won several prizes for his work.
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