Due to the growth of complex IT related problems good FOSS tools are needed to assist us with complex problem solving. For years I was doomed: Only proprietary tools existed for problem solving. But thanks to a few smart people and many supporters on Kickstarter a good FOSS tool now exists.
Business IT Problem solving is not an art. Everyone can learn how to do it and many universities provide courses for learning problem solving using scientific methods.
A great scientific method for solving complex problems with the use of compute power is system dynamics. Great progress was made 50 years ago with the use of system dynamics software for problem solving. But despite this knowledge: The turbulent dynamics within IT projects still hits many of us every day. IT projects still fail. We still see unreal expectations, budget overruns, malfunctioning systems, users that sabotages systems, sites still not working on GNU/Linux, unhealthy amounts of technical dept in projects, and even administrators and developers with burn outs due to unsolved problems and too much stress.
FOSS applications for solving these problems will encourage reuse of knowledge and will prevent solving our typical IT problems over and over again. A FOSS tool alone will not solve your problems. But using a good FOSS tool will definitely help! Problem solving should always start by defining and modelling the problem you want to solve. Using system dynamics for solving business IT problems is very powerful. System dynamics is a computer-aided approach for analysis, designing better systems and solving problems for real.
Within this talk we will focus on why you should prefer using FOSS tools for system modelling for solving your problems. I will explain what the key elements of system dynamics are and how these elements can be used in one of the most used system dynamics FOSS tools available today.
With the help of system dynamics and a FOSS tool we dive into some typical IT problems we are all familiar with. This to experience the power of system dynamics and the use of this FOSS tool.
Outline of the talk: