Talk:Diversity
Cost of Diversity in Information Technology
--Norbert 23:07, 20 December 2006 (EST)
"CIO Online Resources" <[email protected]> 18/12/2006 11:59 PM
Subject: Strategies for CIOs
- In a never-ending search for the best of the best, CIOs have built heterogeneous IT infrastructures consisting of multiple storage servers, multiple software tools, and multiple operating systems – resulting in serious challenges in the delivery of high-performance applications.
- IDG Research, in a recent survey of CIO Magazine subscribers, discovered that this trend is draining IT resources. And CIOs are now systematically working to reduce the number of vendors within their infrastructures – thus lowering costs and complexity."
Key findings:
- high cost of maintenance in a complex environment
- operations and administration draining funds from innovation
- excessive training costs
- drive to reduce number of vendors
Recommendations include:
- simplifying but retaining some degree of multi-vendor support for hardware (avoid getting locked into one vendor)
- standardizing on common software infrastructure (no surprise: white paper was written by Symantec)
- focus on common interfaces across platforms that are flexible and can growth
Comments: An example of the costs of diversity. I haven't thought through whether the drivers towards less diversity have analogies in natural systems. However, it suggests that systems impose limits on the degree of diversity, possibly through some sort of a pruning process or through disuse.
Redundancy
--Eileen 22:10, 18 January 2007 (EST) Hi folks, I didn't see any mention of redundancy on this page - do you think it fits? I think that in a diverse community many organisms serve redundant functions to one another - "backup", so to speak, which makes the system less brittle (less likely to fail even if a few of the organisms drop out).
--Norbert 12:38, 24 January 2007 (EST) Eileen, I suspect redundancy is one of several ways in which diversity works. Diversity seems to cover a broad range of actions:
- doing the same thing the same way (redundancy at the agent level)
- doing the same thing a different way (redundancy at the function level)
- doing different things that accomplish the same result (redundancy at the ??? level)
- (I am sure there are more levels)
- doing different things (in the sense of multiple plant types in the tall-grass prairie, or the multiple systems in John Todd's 'Living Machines')
Technical systems designed for high availability often have multiple devices of the same type in a failover or load-balancing configuration. These systems handle internal (device) failures well, but are prone to problems caused by external changes (failover occurs to the redundant device, which then fails). Some systems implement devices from different vendors to increase resilience - this can protect against vendor-specific coding bugs). Some systems implement geographic load-balancing, where separate services are connected through a high-level control structure but without necessarily imposing functional redundancy.
The highest level of diversity seems to imply a capability for self-organization through a more loosely-coupled, co-operative network of agents. It is unclear how you 'design' such a system - I suspect the best you can do is to structure the environment and the control/feedback systems. Examples are more from the domain of human interaction, such as building cross-functional teams. See Open Space Technology: A New Perspective for Organizing and Perceiving Change for a discussion of Newtonian/machine models of organizations that thrive on certainty and predictability. The article proposes an alternative based on self-organization and describes the "open space" approach for 'structuring' meetings. I will have the pleasure of seeing "open space" in action on February 23 at a Design Exchange/Toronto and Region Conservation workshop on ecological design.
I think I am seeing a few sub-patterns emerging...
