“Mycroft draws four hundred and fifty pounds a year, remains a subordinate, has no ambitions of any kind, will receive neither honour nor title, but remains the most indispensable man in the country.
His position is unique. He has made it for himself. There has never been anything like it before, nor will be again. He has the tidiest and most orderly brain, with the greatest capacity for storing facts, of any man living. The conclusions of every department are passed to him, and he is the central exchange, the clearinghouse, which makes out the balance. All other men are specialists, but his specialism is omniscience. We will suppose that a minister needs information as to a point which involves the Navy, India, Canada and the bimetallic question; he could get his separate advices from various departments upon each, but only Mycroft can focus them all, and say offhand how each factor would affect the other. They began by using him as a short-cut, a convenience; now he has made himself an essential. In that great brain of his everything is pigeon-holed and can be handed out in an instant.”
[A.C.Doyle. The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans. In The Disappearance of the Bruce- Partington Plans. 1908]
Mycroft is a real time computer network monitoring aide for non-specialists which draws attention to those unusual traffic patterns in an organization-specific environment which could have serious implications for information security, control and/or profitability.
Network monitoring is not however the whole story. Substitute a myriad of other patterns (behavior patterns; application data flows; resource usage; etc.) for network traffic patterns and the suitability of Mycroft for monitoring complex and dynamic situations such as sensor networks, intelligent buildings and multiple projects becomes obvious.