Good Day,
I was asked by Peter to provide some background on IF4IT for those in the
community who might be new to it.
(Before doing so, I want to take the time to thank all of you that reached
out to me, personally, with the positive and supportive messages. Thank
you! I apologize for not responding to each of you, individually, but
please understand that it's becoming almost impossible for me to keep up
with all emails, as I'm now well over 1K per day.)
So, here's some background
The International Foundation for Information Technology (IF4IT)
<http://www.if4it.com> (often pronounced "Eye-Fit") is a small and
relatively new organization that attempts to apply the Open Source model
(that originated for software) to IT related Data, Information, and
Knowledge. Our primary goal is to enable IT professionals, their
stakeholders, and students to be successful in their endeavors by publishing
material they can openly leverage, and which originated from the experiences
of others in the industry. Such experiences are collected, cleansed,
coordinated, and published for socialization and reuse through our Web Site,
which acts as an open IT Knowledge Repository or IT Knowledge Platform.
IF4IT formally started publishing content in September of of 2010. Before
this the Foundation noticed that while many IT professionals continuously
preach best practices, such as centralization and reuse, there has always
been the perception that the IT industry rarely ever follows the same advice
it professes. This is not to blame or point fingers at anyone but rather to
highlight that there are many factors as to why it's been so difficult for
the industry to consolidate and standardize. We believe some of these
reasons include but are not limited to things like:
* Newness of the IT industry (as a whole and in the grand scheme of the
world, IT is really only just a few decades old)
* Rapid and unchecked growth of the industry, which causes great divergence
* Geographically dispersed solutions and solutions providers that are driven
by different cultures and governments
* Lack of an acknowledged single source for baseline material, learning
experiences, and industry wisdom
Over the years, we started to observe some patterns that highlighted two
classes of IT: The "Haves" and the "Have Nots." For example:
* IT organizations in some industries, like education, are typically far
more under-funded than IT organizations in large private institutions, such
as Wall Street driven financial companies
* Any enterprise whose "business" is not "IT" typically prioritizes the
funding of business core competencies over non-business non-core
competencies (for example, funding Sales over funding a modern Corporate
Intranet).
* So called standards and best practices organizations, which only covered
segmented areas of IT and never the whole picture, require payment for
content that could help improve organizations, making it easy for the Haves
to access such content and not so easy for the Have Nots to do so
* Only large enterprises could afford to train their IT Leaders and Managers
to understand what it means to define, deliver and operate big IT
organizations that need to provide many different services (even in the
cases where companies could afford to do so, training programs were often
not "standardized' across geography and industries)
* There really was no online single place to turn to, in order to learn
about big picture IT
As a result, big budget IT organizations (the Haves) can more readily afford
things like access to big name IT consulting and research organizations who
sell their knowledge for profit, while financially deprived IT organizations
(the Have Nots) struggle to make due with what they have, often forced to
recreate solutions from scratch, due to less exposure to areas of reuse and
best practices because of their limited budgets. IF4IT wanted to change
this by making what is considered to be "common industry wisdom" available
to the masses.
In the last few years, the Foundation also realized there could be very
effective global knowledge sharing through web-based platforms like Wikis
(e.g. Wikipedia), however, it was also realized that the highly unstructured
frameworks of such platforms did not meet the more rigorous needs of certain
types of content, which required far more structure and contextualized
linkage between itself and other content structures.
The above observations and the desire to improve things for the masses
eventually led to the creation of what is now IF4IT and its online knowledge
sharing platform. The Foundation takes content contributions from various
professionals in various industries and cleanses it to common
representations, documents it, structures it, publishes it, and then works
to constantly improve it, either directly or indirectly (i.e. through
supporting content).
IF4IT works hard to maintain alignment between most published content and
the controlled vocabularies that originate in our "IT Glossary"
<http://www.if4it.com/glossary.html>. This helps ensure consistency in many
different ways, across many different working domains.
While the Foundation is small, content is making its way onto our platform,
quickly, and in addition to industry professionals using our material, more
and more professional authors, colleges, and universities are now pointing
to our content for reference.
I ask, if you believe in and like a model of centralization and open
sharing, that you please help socialize the Foundation and its materials to
your peers and associates, either through email or through the social links
located throughout our site. It's only through the support and scrutiny of
a wide network of qualified professionals that we can accomplish our goals.
Anyhow, I hope this helps clarify things.
My Best,
Frank Guerino, Chairman
The International Foundation for Information Technology (IF4IT)
http://www.if4it.com
1.908.294.5191 (M)
From: Peter Kurilecz <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Mon, 25 Apr 2011 08:27:41 -0400
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Gentle Reminder was Re: [RM] Records Management Taxonomies
Welcome to the list Frank and thanks for the items you've shared with the
list
could you also provide some background information about the Foundation, how
long it has been in existence, who supports it etc.
thanks
peterk
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