I’m here in Izmir (formerly Smyrna), Republic of Turkey, and this is one of the regions that is home to the birthplace of Western philosophy. On a previous trip, I visited Assos - the site of Aristotle’s first school. Now, my sister-in-law is studying philosophy at Aegean University and is a big fan of Kant. Last year, I had helped her with understanding some of the advanced English usage in her philosophy text books and picked up some basic understanding of Kant and Leibniz and how they decide and define what any particular object is.

Meanwhile, at OM Software and as part of my consulting in Madison, WI, we are thinking of the new possibilities that configuration management database products offer. We were thinking about how to track deployments of Java applications and how “deployment” meant different things to different groups. To the SCM team, a deployment was considered successful when the files were transferred to the runtime environments and in the context of JBoss, loaded by the application server. To the application development team, a successful deployment meant the planned changes were working as expected. Two different perspectives on the same thing. So, if we are to track Java application deployments, the company has to agree on what a deployment is by agreeing on what attributes it has and will be tracked in the CMDB. Since this will undoubtedly be a social process involving perception by different groups in the company (and not just a set of cut and dried technical parameters) this kind of decision making hearkened back to my introduction to Kant and Leibniz.

So,  that begs the question: Is there a practical application of philosophy that can help more effectively implement a  CMDB? I’ve proposed to her that we explore co-authoring an academic paper on the subject. Hopefully I am not being too cynical when I suggest that finding any modern, practical application of philosophy will make waves in academia…