Okay, fair enough. To me, the risk involvement is so obvious (to any serious business function!) that I find the management/reduction distinction a more important point. But I can see it your way too.
I don't know how long you've been in the business, but the change seems a relatively recent one, one that wasn't manifestly obvious to me, and one that has pretty much always seemed difficult to communicate to management.
Whether that's because business management is often about ignoring risks or treating it as inconvenient, or if I've just had a long string of bad bosses, I'm not sure.
I did make a point of looking through several of the books that were formative for me (mostly 1990s and 2000s publication dates), and there's little addressing the point. Limonchelli's book on time management for sysadmins was a notable departure from the standard when it came out, in 2008. I'd say that marked the shift toward structured and process-oriented practices.
That was about the time of the transition from "pets" to "cattle" (focus on individual servers vs. groups / farms), but pre-dates the cloud transition.
The stuff I've read that touches on this idea is almost all from 2006 and onwards, mainly 2010s. The earliest example is a bit of an outlier: Douglas Hubbard's 1985 How to Measure Anything -- but it's also only tangentially related.
The other real exceptions are books on statistics (where the idea of risk management -- at least in my collection -- seems to have gotten popular in the 1950s, probably as a result of the second World war) and financial risk management (which seems to really have taken off in the 1980s, probably in conjunction with options becoming a thing.) Statisticians and finance people (and by extension e.g. poker and bridge players) have known this stuff for a while.
Of course, hydrologists have been doing this stuff since the early 1900s at least, but extreme value theory has always been a kind of niche so I'm not sure I should count that.
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That said, I did mention it was obvious to me. I still find it hard to convince management and colleagues of its importance...
> The stuff I've read that touches on this idea is almost all from 2006 and onwards, mainly 2010s. The earliest example is a bit of an outlier: Douglas Hubbard's 1985 How to Measure Anything -- but it's also only tangentially related.
I didn’t keep good track of such things but a lot of my early reading in the 70’s was in operations research and decision support systems, mostly sort of what we call operational analytics these days with a big helping of statistical process control too. World War 2 logistics practices and ‘50s and ‘60s “scientific management” fads generated a lot of material, some insightful. Many medium-sized businesses could afford significant R&D then, so you’ll find e.g. furniture factories developing their own computer systems from PCBs to custom ASIC components, just to manage statistical process control and decision support systems.
> That said, I did mention it was obvious to me. I still find it hard to convince management and colleagues of its importance...
I think the reason I keep having to justify this every few years is the tendency towards abstractions in management which try to simplify things into “anecdotal analytics”, e.g. preferring a persuasive narrative over reality...for a good cynical perspective from the ‘50s I recommend C.M. Kornbluth’s “The Marching Morons” (<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Marching_Morons>).
