Business Service Management Hub

Did you take advantage of the investment opportunity to grow your and reform your data center? Loosening of budgets and increased spending should be leveraged not just for your new toys, but should keep in mind that the new toys need to be managed and the management factors that service enable your data center should be baked in from the start and not an after thought.

This is the second offering like this I’ve seen in a week. The first was the British Airways announcement with the software and service provider vendor. This is a classic example of a shift in the market andcommoditization of some back office functions. Great examples of business service management functions and knowing which services are commodity for cost versus those that are value and differentiate your services in the market place.

Business service management practices are about understanding your costs and the value of services to the business so that IT manages as services appropriately. I can hardly read an article these days that isn’t cloud or as-a-Service related. I enjoy these and the transformation it is driving as it is long over due for most IT organizations. When I wore an analyst hat and I would field inquiry calls regarding outsourcing, I would always start by saying you don’t outsource for cost savings. I find these days with the flexible payment and contract options that we are being short sided and seeing these offerings as the low cost option.

Open Source is gaining in adoption. I find this part of the business service management swell and transformation trend to evaluate the automation and driving down of operational costs to focus on the use of technology to drive business growth. Just look at “Watson” on Jeopardy, powered by SUSE Linux. It’s the Watson analytics that is relevant, not the cost of an operating system to drive it.

Social platforms in IT have actually been there, just as prevalent in the business. Most of us use a Wiki or some sort of shared collaboration and we update it with information as we come by it and correct information others have posted, etc. Most of us have been to Wikipedia at least once. The ability to manage massive amounts of data about devices in the work place becomes challenging as they become mobile, connected and disconnected through multiple forms of connections. Self service and social platforms are accepted forms of keeping many sources of the data up to date and accurate.

The title caught my attention as I can relay a very similar story and entered the job market the same year as well. Yikes! However, I didn’t aspire or become CIO as Diane has done. The one aspect of the article that I would debate is supporting any device in the organization. The article describes a business service management approach at Intel in understanding the business and knowing how technology supports and drives the business growth, however, then takes a left turn with the roll your own approach.

SaaS as the article describes is followed with a ton of hype in these days of the cloud and transformation to business service management versus the commodity at the lower level. The short term cost appeal with the subscription model and ease at which you can subscribe generates a lot of the hype. I believe in the model and again always suggest first going back to basics and identify your services and classify them giving you a sense of what you need to service and support.

Consolidation can have short term gains and costs with longer term gains when approached as Arthur describes in his post. Its all about balancing operating and growing the business and business service management practices.

I would agree that IT is commoditizing and the role of IT leaders is evolving much like my good friend Siki indicates where commodity services can be done elsewhere and which then frees the evolved IT resources to sit at the table as Diane describes to apply technology to business choices. This is the practices of business service management in action.

I read this post by a friend of mine and I couldn’t agree more wholeheartedly. Cloud computing by the nature of it screams heterogeneous environment versus a single vendor framework homogeneous environment. I also screams requirements for an integration platform and business service management practice to manage the services consuming the technology.

Starting any project is daunting and Business Service Management as an initiative is often thought of as big, hard and complicated. My personal opinion is that stems from the fact that it cuts horizontally across the data center and does not reside in one sphere of influence. However, as a long time product marketing / product manager I find it can be quite simple. One service at a time, one service team at a time approach rather than boiling the ocean all at once. Let’s start at the top, the service, and work our way down and back up again in a series of posts.

For the folks that know me best, they are snickering at how this pains me to write and not only post once, but twice about Texas Stadium. My featured post on Friday was also about Texas Stadium and the Super Bowl and the Business Service Management opportunity facing those companies buying 30 second ads at $3M each. I believe the might Pug stole the show!

This headline caught my eye as I will be the first to debate that IT is not a profit center. However, this is a prime example of IT realizing and classifying based upon Service Value and Business Service Management practices. In an effort to first cut support costs from old systems, right sourcing decisions and partnerships were established for industry must haves.

Business service management, service levels and management of the cloud from the experts at IDC – Mary Johnston Turner.

I can already hear you asking and scratching your heads, “Michele, what do those 3 things have in common – cmon, get real”. Yes, I’m a long term IT nerd and tremendous football fan that remembers everything. Heck, I fessed up to crashing a data center for 7 hours in an earlier post. My motto: go large or stay home or as we say in the south: ” if you can’t run with the big dawgs, stay off the porch”!

The author points out great security points in making the leap to the cloud and part of those warts not mentioned is the management of those VMs in the cloud from an end-to-end business service management perspective to manage against the risk he points to. How risky is it to have that VM in the cloud? How secure should you make the data and management of the VM? What business services are at risk?

This article inspired me to write a full blown feature on the subject of vendor management, service level measurement/management/communication and basic business service management practices. The net of it, IT you own it – no shifting blame to others and no government intervention to set up terms and conditions. This is outsourcing, plain and simple – manage your provider.

Today I’m writing an article instead of just sharing the news having spent a little time consulting and reviewing major sourcing contracts for customers and being trained in the Ross Perot bootcamp of outsourcing early in my career. What I always find amazing is how much trust a subscriber puts in the provider during the contract negotiation. On one hand there is trust (I call it naivety) and the provider was successful in creating a relationship, playing on emotion and expertise in the market. On the other hand it is a recipe for disaster, a lose – win situation for you the subscriber. Know your rights and deploy business service management practices.

Today is the topic of integration in Business Service Management land. The nature of taking advantage of cloud and dynamic resources will require open connectivity. The subscriber maintains the responsibility for overall management of services to their customers. This in and of itself screams of open systems and integration platforms.

I feel like changing things up here in Business Service Management land today. This blog caught my attention as it describes the leap of going from an independent software vendor (ISV) to aSaaS offering. It has challenges in how the software is architected so that it can then later be hosted and ultimately used by many customers in a single, multi-tenant environment to take full advantage of the economies of scale. The fact is most are run in dedicated environments to short cut this challenge.