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"Chaotic Architecture" At NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory

Posted by samzenpus on from the +1-vs-lawful-technology dept.

New submitter CarlaRudder writes: NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL) is ditching old, rigid, legacy tools and adopting a much more flexible approach that allows people within the company to pick and choose the technologies that help them do their jobs better. CIO Jim Rinaldi and IT Chief Technology Officer Tom Soderstrom are calling it "chaotic architecture," and they are using it to better prepare for change and to attract the next generation of IT talent to JPL.

1 of 69 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Sounds scary, but it makes sense. by vux984 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I agree with everything you said. However, there is the other side of it too:

    'chaotic architecture' could just as easily be the state where users are given control and IT has to support whatever nonsense users want. We've all seen it. Company goes "BYOD" and "chaotic architecture" follows... every piece of crap random consumer grade device gets brought in... half of it doesn't run the business critical apps properly, centrally managed A/V isn't possible, virus infections run rampant and IT finds itself working on some twits $300 Sony Vaio with 1GB RAM and Vista Home Basic... torrent software consumes all bandwidth. Some nimrod installs an inkjet color printer that's only compatible with XP, then buys a Windows 8 laptop and wants IT to make it work...

    IT needs to facilitate users getting the tools they need, WITHOUT letting it get TOO chaotic. :)