The Collapse of Complex Infrastructures What Science Tells us About IT,  Part 2

Consumer IT services continue to grow in scope and variety, and the infrastructure for bringing them to life is exploding in scale, speed, and complexity. History shows that all collaborative systems eventually fail because of the law of "diminishing marginal returns". What does this mean in IT, and how do we ensure that technology scales to meet society´s needs with a minimum of overhead? What does it mean for competitive advantage, for agilty, quality and time to market? In this talk, Mark Burgess explores more of the ideas from his latest book In Search of Certainty: The science of our information infrastructure, and explains how we can cope with necessary and sufficient complexity.

About Mark Burgess

Mark Burgess is the founder, CTO and original author of Cfengine. He resigned as Professor of Network and System Administration at Oslo University College in 2011 where he 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.