Business Service Management Hub

I know I have been quiet for the previous month, I took a little vacation and started becoming more attune to the discussion surrounding data, analytics, security, privacy and the value of our technologically connected world. First we have to rewind to the end of August when I had my first opportunity to discuss and explore the privacy discussion surrounding the use of technology and data to enrich our lives and business on Huff Post Live, “Get off my Cloud:  Floating the Risks of Big Data Storage ” (previous Qmunity post, Cloud Discussion:  Data Privacy, Availability and Performance on Huff Post Live). All of this technology sits on vast amounts of data that awaits being cracked open whether it be healthcare, location & GPS, marketing attendance, safety, cellular, data services, etc. the list is endless.

When I responded to a request to be on a panel with Huff Post Live, my mind was in my usual place of availability and performance of technology, not data privacy.  As I stated during the discussion, I firmly believe if you use technology and electronically push information about yourself into the public, it is searchable and accessible.  The first conclusion is to jump directly to privacy and someone monitoring/watching our every move. This is also driven by the folks taking the first stab at using these vast stores of data for what I’ll call “tracking” purposes. This is usual technology behavior, let’s track things and manage our known environment better rather than coming at it from a side of value and a value-add services. Ok, let’s take a few specific examples.

Social Media:
The simplest is Facebook. I’ve had the discussion with colleagues and friends about the accessablity to this information, let’s say when you are seeking employment or acceptance into a program. If it is public,  why shouldn’t it be accessable and why wouldn’t you expect it to be searched? I do a regular search on myself to see what shows up as we have long expected background checks to be performed in the past, this is just part of a background check. If you have something questionable, why would you publish it? I was a late bloomer to the world of Facebook and social media for this reason of privacy, but it wasn’t because I didn’t understand the risk, it was because I didn’t understand how to secure and use it properly. However, I use my credentials and name as it is part of building my own brand and credibility very regularly when I publish and comment and thus how I end up on panels like Huff Post Live. I look at the value and positive side of participating in the conversation, managing and using my credentials accordingly. I do recognize it is on me to manage the data and thus how it could be subsequently used.

Healthcare:
While on vacation in the local paper, cayCompass.com, there was an article regarding a new healthcare facility and the technology going into it to provide higher levels of healthcare to the residents. One of the discussion points was doctors using data to better diagnose patients. Again, the article took the negative side first regarding the “must use” the technology for a diagnosis. I’m not sure I want to remove the human subjective element from my doctor, however, I would welcome the use of my history and an all encompassing view of my current condition, weighing that against a database of possibilities that no human could carry with them daily, to make a better diagnosis. Why not make use of being able to carry that encyclopedia of information around with you to deliver better patient care? Again, the value side of the equation versus the“monitoring” of the physicians side of the equation. Both are useful and valuable.

Earlier this week in InformationWeek, there was an article titled, “Healthcare Execs Must Prepare for Big Data“, where the same discussion continues as well as knowing the location of patients, doctors, equipment to insure a safer environment and getting people and equipment where it is most needed. I most enjoyed the Wayne Gretzky quote: “A good hockey player plays where the puck is. A great hockey player plays where the puck is going to be.”  We have embraced technological advances to assist in healing us faster, making surgery less invasive and remeding illnesses that just a decade ago were less treatable. Why is using the vast amounts of data for split second decisions any different?

GPS:
There are several technologies that fall into this category. The two that caused alarm and again I would suggest it is because it was hyped against the tracking feature as the initial focus versus the value it brings to the table. On Huff Post Live this week,  “Texas School District Reportedly Threatening Students Who Refuse Tracking ID, Can’t Vote For Homecoming“, with the crux of the discussion being the embedding of an RFID chip into school ID cards to be used for tracking attendance and insuring that funding continues to the schools. This is useful, but not the value to the public and causes debate. How many of you ever punched a time clock? I have on multiple occasions, well that was an early and crude form of attendance monitoring / tracking. Why is it now that we can use technology to more accurately track and rapidly assess to take action of value with the data different?

Flip the debate and think about some of the most tragic incidents that have occurred in our schools in the last decade and one that is close to home for me at VA Tech. When I was in school, we roamed campus freely including all of the buildings. We didn’t have cell phones, we knew our dormmates, we phoned each other on land lines, we had an idea of where those close to us were, we stuck together in groups and I knew I could phone one of the boys from the dorm to meet me and walk me back to the dorm in the dark if I got stuck somewhere alone and felt unsafe. So again, I challenge folks not to just look at it from a tracking standpoint, but from a ease of security standpoint. Who’s in the building? Where are my kids? Did they make it to the bus? The list goes on.

During my discussion on Huff Post Live it was more around the use of cellular data. I watched a television segment recently on the tracking of license plates and taking pictures of cars around a city with the purpose being repossession. Again, under ordinary situations, no one is tracking the ordinary. Under stressful situations, it can assist in regaining a safe situation and uncovering details that might not have been available previously.

We could go on for hours with this one as it generates the most debate, however, we all have location tracking in our cell phones and tablets. We like to be able to sound an alarm or find our device, pinpoint a good restaurant, provide directions in a pinch, the list is endless. There is great value in using the technology and data and we use it everyday whether consciencously or not.

Marketing:
In the Wall Street Journal earlier this week the article, “Big Brother, Now at the Mall“, discussed how a mall kiosk is using facial recognition software to estimate sex and age to present advertisements to those seeking information. This is using data to drive value to both the consumer and the retail organizations. This has been going on for a very long time. How many rewards cards do you carry and use? The ability to present items to you has been happening here for quite a while. If this use of data is troublesome, stop using the cards for the points / discounts and asking for assistance. However, the value is to both the organization and us as consumers in finding items that might interest us more than others and stocking retail organizations with items more in tune with the demographics of the location and patron buying patterns. Again, let’s seek the value in the technology and stop jumping to the Big Brother conclusion, but the answer is always simple, don’t use the technology.

Security:
I’ll end with this final article also from this week’s Wall Street Journal, “House Report On Huawei, ZTE Will Pose Security Questions For CIOs”. The article suggests that a manufacturer of a cellular device is collaborating for purposes of espionage. Whether the threat is true or not, it points out the very real requirements to take security and use of data and devices very seriously in our organizations and plan for it appropriately. This week Sally Hudson, Security Research Director, of IDC and a colleague of mine, Tom Crabb, Senior Product Marketing Manager, presented a webinar, “Security Access Governance and the New Normal”, on this topic of knowing who, where, why, etc. is accessing data you own and for what purpose as the perimeter has widened over night and is extremely fluid. They discuss the risks and how to best secure your data. Ensuring you have secured your data then enables you to leverage that data with analytics in powerful ways to drive competitive advantage into your organization.

This is only the tip of the iceberg of the possibilities that lie ahead in our digital world. As IT professionals, we must constantly think of security, build it into our services, use of data and the value we can provide to our customers everyday. Technology, including the use of big data, will drive competitive advantage and the next generation of innovation, but it must be used, managed and secured wisely.

Finally, “Technology without Imagination – Commodity — Technology with Imagination – Endless  Possibilities” is something I firmly believe and we have all benefited. I challenge this coming wave of technologists to not make the mistake of the past in first applying the use of big data technology as inward focused analytics, but seek how to create value first and secure / manage it appropriately.

I’m back from a couple of weeks of travel and most notably, the annual  Gartner Infrastructure and Operations Management Summit (IOM) the first week of June.  There were more than just a handful of aha moments, much churn in what has been a mature market and many great conversations on the solution showcase floor and hallways.  Let’s start with the opening keynotes on the first day:

10 Emerging Trends that will Impact Infrastructure and Operations – David Cappuccio

The trends are in last week’s InfoWorld article, “10 for 2012: Gartner’s Top Emerging Infrastructure Trends” and are as follow:

• Consumerization of the Tablet
• The Infinite Data Center
• Resource Management
• Mobility
• Hybrid Clouds
• Fabric Data Centers
• IT Complexity
• Big Data – Big Problems
• The End of Service Desks
• Virtual and Software-Defined Networks

David opens with the statistic of >75% of IT budgets are spent just keeping the lights on, operating, not driving the company forward.  IT didn’t see the (or didn’t want to see) the tablet coming to the workplace.  Just 5 years ago 1G of storage cost $7995, today it is 25 cents – that was yesterday! and I was 2 years away from my first cell phone, still had a pager!  We have LOTS of data to secure, not hardware or devices to manage, the focus must shift from the device to the information and data.  The Cloud will replace storage from the PC / Workstation to be accessible from any device, anywhere.

Even this old timer, slow adopter (me) is synching 3 devices via the cloud to share data across devices without the help of my company and I share that data with outside parties as appropriate due to the size limitations imposed by IT.  We all find a work-around!  At a minimum we each have 4 devices, yes, I have 2 phones, an iPad and a laptop, 5 if you count the Kindle I stopped using – have to keep Microsoft and Apple, Google and Blackberry all in check.  😉  I still live with the “Blue Screen of Death”, but have been seen checking the weight of that boat anchor of a Mac Book Pro.  🙂

The expectation is that no matter what we are using, it “just works”.  IT lost control of the environment a long time ago, now is the time to embrace the next generation and the self service culture.  Companies are now considering a stipen to aid in funding a device of the users choice lowering support and break-fix costs.  My bet is it happens within the year.

Another interesting statistic was for every 25% of functionality added to the current infrastructure, there is an increase of 100% in complexity.  The cloud is here, the business is subscribing with or without IT as I’ve posted previously out of frustration to deliver innovation over just operating.  We in IT are in catch up mode and need to move quickly.  With that said, we all need to be wary of the hype and focus on the value delivered and concentrate on the right delivery model for the value.

Of all the trends, the one indicating the end of service desks surprised me most from this conservative crowd and having spent the early part of my career in this market.  The more I have pondered this trend over the past week the more I agree and see it.  I have often posted and consulted that IT needs to stop turning support into a custom adventure and at 10% of an IT Operational budget, it is well suited for SaaS and/or outsourced.  Customers expect service now (no pun intended 🙂 and IT is diminishing it’s own value in the loss of productivity, especially with the next generation of workers.  IT needs to become proactive, embrace new technology and begin focusing on the right deployment options and securing the data / information, rather than device support and lock down.  This shift has occurred very quickly and the war already lost by IT.

Applications 2020:  The Impact on Infrastructure and Operations of Current and Emerging Trends in Applications – Valentin Sribar

To my surprise, an old friend presented this session, Val, and was quite an interesting topic and approach from an Operations outsider in front of 800+ Infrastructure and Operations leaders.  The first half of the session focused on the next generation worker and their expectations of technology.  I had to think about my baby nephew during this session (now 17) who grew up with a whole different view of technology and it’s capabilities.  Who, by the way, is the only person I’ll “text” with as it is his only means of communication and a communication method I dislike.  I think of one of the first applications I provided for him, a Crayola painting application.  My father and I watched a 3 year old at the time drag and drop the primary colors into his paint tray and paint a picture.  I with, my back to him, asked, “create and use purple, my favorite color”.  Sure enough he does it without question to my father’s exclaim, “how did he know he could do that?”, (dragging and dropping red on blue) I said, “because he didn’t know he couldn’t”.

This generation expects devices to just work, expects them to work together and expects to easily share data and applications across platforms and devices and communicate instantly in 140 characters or less.  My nephew doesn’t understand that if he texts me while I’m driving, what’s the delay.  Connectivity is instantaneous and global.  I travel globally, my nephew hears the action of a car race on the phone, turns on the tv to see it live, we text and IM across the globe as if I’m in his house daily and part of his daily life.  When he was born and I lived 10 hours away, I wanted to be sure we had a tight relationship.  Little did I know that in 6 short years the world would change and in a couple more years, distance would no longer be a challenge.  This is the next generation worker, not hindered by device, time or distance.

Development for the mobile world should be the default and workstation minority as an afterthought.  The user experience from these devices will be like jewelry, a microphone, speakers, cameras, gamification of applications, scoring and choice of applications, etc. etc. etc.  These workers expect an AppStore, not IT, to choose, download and just use in an instant – it just needs to work.  Apps and options are not one size fits all.

STOP what you are doing today and turn it upside down.  Reduce costs at the bottom to add value at the top and get away from one size fits all and join the value add discussion.  This is where Val provided several insightful slides and a paper (G00147079 – Application Leaders:  Stop Eating Profits and Capital with the Unnecessary Operational Expenses).

Both of these sessions set the tone for the remainder of the sessions and 3 days of the Summit that I’ll save for additional posts.  What this all points to is Change is inevitable, with Change comes Complexity and with Complexity and the need for speed comes Risk.  We all need to embrace the Change, learn to manage Complexity and mitigate/control Risk to take advantage of new technology and deploy innovation into our organizations.  As someone in the Service Management or Business Service Management market for quite some time, this was music to my ears.  The Cloud is the disruption creating the urgency for change, as well as the next generation.  Ignore the hype, focus on the value and choose the right deployment and technology options that will drive your business into the future.

The one thing that did strike me odd in most of the sessions was the use of the term “User”.  The reason this struck me odd was that the focus should be on the customer, less on the internal users, and driving the business.  Working to drive the business is about the organization in support of the customer.

As I entered the workforce, a southerner was transplanted in Boston and a year and a half later relocated to Texas with a New York co-worker and friend .  At that time our confusion was a result of different words and concepts like Round-abouts, The Green Monster, The Garden and BBQ of which I had no idea what the first 2 were, the third I thought was a botanical garden and the fourth was of course stringy pork with a vinegar based sauce and coleslaw sandwich versus steak on a bun.  We had dumb terminals and PC’s were off in the distance.  Change has come lightening fast.

I walked away from the Summit knowing it is about the service, driving revenue, embracing technology, ignore the hype and concentrate on the value, securing an unknown perimeter and creating freedom of the imagination.  Technology with Imagination – Endless Possibilities.

Thoughts?  Were you at the Summit?  What struck you the most?

Michele

In February, I had the pleasure of attending the Western Mass Pod Camp, a one-day “un-conference” held each year in western Massachusetts where among the speakers I saw was Dave Wieneke, Dave got me thinking of something I hadn’t considered before, and that’s the idea that apps on mobile devices not only provide users with valuable data (sometimes), they have the capacity to transmit data back to your company as well…if only you know what to do with it.

In fact, according to a report from analysts Heavy Reading, it’s no coincidence that large companies like IBM and Adobe have been buying in Analytics companies like they’re going out of style. Analytics, as we’ve written here are interesting to anyone following monitoring because they give you insight into your customer behavior. This in in stark contrast to a print ad, for instance, which could have some call to action, but usually you buy it and hope for the best with very little way to measure the ad’s effectiveness outside of a focus group.

The Web in general changes that dynamic by giving you the ability to gather a number of kinds of data about visitor behavior to web sites. When you have an app sitting on a mobile device, the potential is perhaps even greater. Weineke gave the example of a car maker that gave out iPads equipped with the car’s owner manual with every purchase.

This was more than a gimmick, it was a way of gathering data. The car company could see each time an owner looked up a problem. They could see which features were hard to use, what parts might be causing the biggest issues and in general follow the customer experience through their interaction with the manual. It’s a narrow view for sure, but one that certainly provides valuable insight.

Companies need to be thinking about apps more in terms of how they can use them to collect aggregate data. If you’re in a position to collect and analyze data, and you give thought to data gathering as part of your design process, you can give your company some valuable customer feedback without asking them directly for it.

Photo by illustir on Flickr. Used under Creative Commons License.

Back in September, 2009 when Adobe laid out $1.9 billion to buy web analytics firm Omniture, there was a lot of speculation about just what Adobe would do with it.

At the time, Adobe’s enterprise business wasn’t as built out as it is now. Many speculated that they would use it to help web developers test and measure the popularity of different designs, which made sense in the context of their business at the time.

Turned out that Adobe had bigger plans than that and it began to come together when it purchased Web Content Management vendor, Day Software last July. That gave Adobe the tools to build the site (Creative Suite), manage the site content (Day CQ5) and measure and analyze the site traffic (Omniture).

More recently, Adobe held an entire summit devoted to Omniture where they announced  a series of products to help designers, developers and marketers better understand their sites and what works to attract and keep customers engaged. In addition, and perhaps more important, the new tools provide insight about what customers are saying about you in social channels.

This type of data analysis gives you insight across your delivery channels, and is important in its own way as the information you get from other business systems including your Business Service Management (BSM). While BSM might give you a different kind of view of your business, the data you get from your web site could prove just as valuable because it gives you insight into your customer behavior and how to get them to take action (buy).

Ultimately, buying and selling is what any business is all about and the more data you bring to the table, the greater your chances of finding success.

Photo by hardeep.singh on Flickr. Used under Creative Commons License.

While we talk about monitoring in the enterprise a lot in this blog, we tend to think of it as keeping an eye on our enterprise systems and not very much about our customers, but today’s Web Content Management systems and analytics tools have the power to give you insight into your Web site visitors, even going so far as helping you customize the user experience based on previous behavior.

Analytics in their own way are data you can use,  just as you can use data from inside the enterprise to help you beter understand your users and systems.

The great thing about a web site is that you have that ability to collect data either in aggregate or based on individual user behavior (such as buying habits). Amazon is famous for this approach. When they see you bought a certain item, they suggest other items you might like based on your buying history. For others, it may be just understanding general patterns of customer behaviors to build different paths through the site based on high level categories.

Marketers refer to these general categories as personnas. If you’re a hotel chain, you might have several personnas around the types of guests you have such as business travelers, vacationers, event planners and so forth.

You can also learn about your visitors based on information they provide. For instance, when a visitor signs up for your newsletter, you could use that opportunity to collect other information abou them such as basic demographics about where they live and so forth.

As you gather all this information though, the idea is to make use of it, just as you do any other business information inside your organizaton. With Business Service Management (BSM) it might be more related to the operation of your overall systems. With business intelligence (BI), it might be related to your overall business performance and with analytics it’s about understanding your customers better.

Photo by yuhui on Flickr. Used under the Creative Commons License.

The Hub Commentary_

Tobin and I had the opportunity to speak with a new friend, Bojan Simic, yesterday of TRAC Research.  We shared thoughts on what is required to deliver Business Service Management (BSM) and help organizations communicate Service Performance thus Value to their organizations.

As Bojan writes in his last BSM post, there are many management tools, each has a strength and in all likelihood you have many in your environment.  In fact, we shared there are those with a half dozen, those with a dozen and those with >2 dozen.  Yes, I said 2 dozen and greater.  Each of these contributes a piece to the story, but what is really required is the integration platform that brings it all together in a single view representing Service Performance.  By Service Performance we mean, it’s availability, performance, volume of business transactions, etc.

The environment is becoming ever more complex and agile requiring the integration and automation that will bring all the data together that allows your IT organization to take full advantage of the best in breed monitoring tools.  With this end-to-end visibility in real-time you can then make sense of what you have, consolidate where necessary and potentially take advantage of lower cost open source options potentially.

The investment is in the integration and intelligent view of the infrastructure.  Where are you investing today?

Michele

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Preliminary findings of TRAC’s end-user survey show that organizations are still struggling to gain full visibility into their IT services and infrastructure. Many of the organizations surveyed are reporting that, even though they made significant investments in new IT monitoring and management tools and increased the amount of performance data that they have on hand, they are still not seeing any significant improvements in key performance indicators (KPI).  (Read Full Article…)