Modeling and System Management

Modeling standards can be a great resource for System Management. Field Engineers often are more oriented towards “practical” tecniques, underweighting the help that a good model can contribute to a successful management practice.

While I was managing Information System, I have worked with the Tivoli suite – from IBM – and developed some modeling tecniques to represent system events and to analyse the requirements for monitorning consoles. There is a paper, describing this, not updated, but perhaps interesting. I published it online after receiving a lot of requests from the Tivoli mailing list.

Another approach is described in my recent KISS project – described in another post – where I tried to build a knowledge model of the Information System and the related security and compliance issues.

KISS – a Knowledgebase for Information Security System

The project uses a Description Logic-based approach for the conceptual modeling of the information system.

During the project I have used several new (form me) technologies, like the OWL language, DL reasoners, and I found this approach really fascinating.

I had confirms that

• the adoption of XML-based standards allows a great level of interoperability among different stuffs,
• open source technologies allow innovation with smooth investment curves.

The project deliverables are a fundamental tool, in my Company, for Compliance Risk management (according to the Basel Committee definition), and the conceptual models were used as a design input for a commercial application for Compliance management.

There is a web page dedicated to the project. You can find also another working paper, on conceptualization of norms, in my website.