I’m recently back from IBM TechXchange in Las Vegas and thinking about the many systems of systems that made my trip possible: the airplanes, ground systems, air traffic control, crew scheduling; the rideshare that took me to my hotel; the conference and hotel apps I used to navigate my way through the event and open my room door; the ubiquitous credit card processing system that seems to have made cash redundant. All together: a great choreography of things, software and human social systems, complex beyond any one person’s understanding.
It brings to mind Randall Munroe’s https://xkcd.com/1741/: “Sometimes I get overwhelmed thinking about the amount of work that goes into the ordinary objects around me”. Even for a simple lamp the intentionality and care in design and engineering are so much greater than we might think (if we think about it at all).
Scale that up a thousand or million times to the effort involved in creating the many software mediated systems of systems that made my conference trip possible, where failure creates harm, and many components from many suppliers need to work together flawlessly. Sometimes I get overwhelmed thinking about it.
Teams (and teams of teams) need tools to manage the myriad engineering data, the relationships among the data, and the inevitable changes that occur during design and development. That’s the mission of IBM Engineering Lifecycle Management. And that’s the motivation behind IBM Engineering Lifecycle Management V7.1, released today, which improves efficiencies for practitioners and ELM tool administrators.
Sign up for the ELM 7.1 launch webinar on November 13th and watch out for the product managers' "what's new" posts on the Jazz.net blog in the coming week. If you are new to ELM, see also the product landing page www.ibm.com/elm where you can book a live demo.