Is Self-Management a Right Buzzword for Modern Management Challenges?

Self-management is promoted as an approach to information and communications technology (ICT) systems management that will, finally, deal with the ever-increasing complexity of managed systems. Its popularization brings positive attention to the ICT systems management community and a lot of excellent research is conducted related to this topic. Nevertheless, we argue that the term ‘self-management’ is not an appropriate buzzword because it is ambiguous, potentially misleading, and not descriptive of the main challenges of managing modern ICT systems. As an alternative to the ‘self-management’ buzzword, we advocate adopting a term that better describes the main challenges of managing modern ICT systems. Our suggestion is “the 5 Cs of ICT systems management”: 1) cost-benefit relationship, 2) complexity, 3) conformance to higher-level objectives, 4) circumstances, and 5) change. Self-management is only one of approaches that should be used to address the 5 Cs and other management challenges.