Movie Magic Made Real: My Favorite Office Life Movie

April 8th, 2008 by David Link

What is my favorite “office life” movie?

Apollo 13 with Tom Hanks, Ed Harris and Kevin Bacon. I think that there are so many parallels between Apollo 13 and an innovative technology company creating magical solutions to very complex problems that are currently unsolved, under unrealistically tight deadlines, with limited resources each and every week/month.

You have it all in that movie, the project starts off with great ambition, drive and high expectations, as the movie (or your technology business) begins to flow through the flight, you start to realize how hard your initial dream is to achieve.

Then in the midst of continuing on in the spirit of finishing the mission, an unexpected crisis occurs that has no real fix, where 1 or 2 engineers have to quickly find a brilliant solution to the problem. Drama unfolds and then the light bulb goes off and with the magical combination of hard work, good luck of having the materials and high intestinal fortitude to persist, you achieve a positive outcome.

Of course this example of my favorite “office life” movie brings up other fine examples and specifically some parallels between what NASA has to do for every flight mission and monitoring systems. Last week the Space Shuttle completed a perfect mission and a rare night landing.

Floating down after 155 spins around the globe – is there no better example of how detailed and just how FAR monitoring solutions reach to achieve a flawless mission? Can you think of any set of systems that may need to monitor so many millions of bits with so much hanging in the balance? It is hard to imagine just how much monitoring is in place for NASA to complete such a perfect mission, but I am thankful that they pulled it off!

Touching on the lighter side of life, recently Rob England aka the IT Skeptic, posted a very funny April Fools Joke on one of my favorite blogs.

We at ScienceLogic especially loved the part where EDS has been given the contract for combining technology from BMC, CA, HP, IBM – aka, the Big 4 – and seven other vendors into a fully integrated package that will drive off a single CMDB to fully automate control centers in Houston and every one of the five other NASA data centers around the planet, bringing them to lights-out status for the first time.

“Mock” NASA spokesperson April Witling said,

“The staff savings alone in having zero operators, reduced support staff and almost no network or server engineers will go a long way to paying for the $2 billion cost of the project.”

Expect even more thoughts and comments about the IT Skeptic blog, ITIL and my take on CMDB’s in future posts!

Popularity: 47% [?]

April 8th, 2008