Business Service Management Hub

The Hub Commentary_

The time has come to re-think IT, the assets, sourcing options and management with the focus on growth, sure cost cutting is still in the balance of things too.  Opportunities to re-think the routine, automation, leverage lower cost tools for the commodity and apply the shift in that spending toward growth.

One side effect to increased spending is the spending only on new technology without reimagining the whole picture of managing and operating on the day-to-day as well.  In another article posted today from the Cloud Computing Journal, downtime costs $100,000/hour.  Reimagining IT is the whole operational picture – this is exciting for those who embrace it and make the most of it both from new services and operations.

Michele

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Last week Gartner announced the results of Gartner’s 2011 CIO Survey and Agenda under the theme of reimagining IT. The idea behind this theme is that CIOs and IT leaders have an opportunity to use new business priorities and technologies to create value in new ways.  (Read Full Article…)

The Hub Commentary_

The article references the cost of a single cost of downtime as approximately $100,000 and the risk of downtime increases as systems and infrastructures become more and more distributed and complex.  Now more than ever, services must be service enabled from a proactive monitoring perspective before it goes live into a production environment. Management cannot be an afterthought and also keep in mind, not all services are created equal.

Service enabling and creating adequate redundancy comes at a cost and has to be weighed against the value the service contributes to the business.  Managing the infrastructure as services is an imperative in 2011 to balance cost and value, while insuring service quality and availability.

Integrating the metrics from various technologies and make sense of them as an end-to-end service becomes critical in proactively managing services in real-time and taking action based upon leading indicators that illustrate risk of an outage is rising.  Mitigating risk and reducing downtime must be a factor of service enabling the infrastructure as it goes live in production.

As the article states, the cost of down time is high, catastrophic and the scavenger hunt that ensues to solve and restore service leads to lengthy downtime and is costly to your organization.  As technology professionals, leveraging new technology and deploying agile infrastructures is just a piece of the puzzle, management and service enabling the infrastructure is equally as important.

This is the year of investment in IT technology as well as it’s management infrastructure to service enable the infrastructure to insure it continues to execute in market time.

Michele

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North American businesses are collectively losing $26.5 billion in revenue each year as a result of slow recovery from IT system downtime according to a recent study. The study also indicates that the average respondent suffers 10 hours of IT downtime a year and an additional 7.5 hours of compromised operation because of the time it takes to recover lost data.  (Read Full Article…)

Business Service Management can provide a single pane of glass across any environment:  public/private cloud, virtual and physical – How important will this be as we move to the cloud?

I heard a great quote a couple of months ago: “Every company in the IT industry with revenue of less than $100m is currently changing their strategy to focus on the cloud.” If you combine that assertion with the fact that every company in the IT industry with revenues over $1 billion is modifying their strategy to make it “cloud-enabled” or “cloud-ready”, it becomes difficult to support the naysayers who are claiming that the cloud is just a fad. It’s here to stay whether or not you want to accept it.

So the question for this audience becomes “What does that mean for Business Service Management?” From my experience with a very large service provider who is aggressively moving into the public/private cloud space for their internal operations as well as their external customers, Business Service Management becomes a necessity instead of a nice to have. Adoption of the cloud exacerbates the technical challenges that spawned the BSM industry in the first place: namely IT heterogeneity, physically/geographically dispersed data centers and the need for IT organizations to provide higher levels of service at lower costs. At the most simple level, the ability to co-locate two virtual machines on one physical server cuts costs in half. However, this cost savings brings along complexities in terms of resource sharing, how the virtual machines got provisioned to the box, how they are being independently and jointly monitored and how they will be managed moving forward. Additionally, cloud adoption may very well increase the number of systems management tools that an IT organization needs to deploy, manage and monitor.

The ability to provide IT operations and management a single pane of glass view into all of these complexities, focused on the most critical business services, becomes necessary to ensure that the costs of these complexities do not overcome the costs savings enjoyed through virtualization.

How are you measuring your services in the cloud?

Kevin

The Hub Commentary_

Management instrumentation required, service enable during development.  New technology getting ready for production, but not ready for production creates the virtual stall.  Service enabling, instrumenting and an integration strategy will keep management on track.  Old management tools are no going to provide the data required for virtual infrastructures.  It will be a combination of the virtualization and traditional management tools that will provide the end-to-end view through an integrated strategy that will break the stalemate of the virtual stall.

Michele

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We’re hearing a lot about “virtual stall” these days. Supposedly, this is what happens when too many virtual machines clog up both physical infrastructure and traditional management systems, bringing productivity to a halt. This places an artificial cap on the amount of virtualization the typical enterprise can handle, and, by extension, its ability to leverage cloud technology.  (Read Full Article…)

The Hub Commentary_

Interesting we swing to virtual stall over management tools and the year ahead holds data centers being designed with integration, systems management, hardware, end-to-end views in the planning and implementing.  Good summation of trends in the market and keys to success.

Michele

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What will be the big trends in data center design and operations in 2011? We surveyed some of the leading thinkers in the field, and got their thoughts about the trends that will make news this year. Their predictions cover a lot of ground. But a key theme was the emergence of a holistic approach to the data center, that integrates the many technologies, departments and processes that historically have created challenges for the industry.   (Read Full Article…)

The Hub Commentary_

It’s that time of year for Gartner’s updated CIO Agenda and survey.  2011 promises to be a year of change for the brave that reach out and embrace it.  On my personal blog I used the phrase, Technology without Imagination is Commodity – Technology with Imagination has Endless Possibilities!

I find change exciting, budgets are loosening, new technologies and approaches to business are available – now what are you going to do with it?

Michele

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Its time to reimagine IT as business and technical changes require CIOs to answer new questions rather than just find new answers to old questions. That is what Dave Aron and myself found as we completed a worldwide CIO survey from September to December 2010. The survey includes responses from 2,014 CIOs representing more than $160 billion in corporate and public-sector IT spending across 50 countries and 38 industries.  (Read Full Article…)

The concept of Business Service Management and why it is good for IT (and the business) is reasonably understood by most people.   The reality is that people tend to buy BSM solutions for the features it provides not just on the definition of BSM.   For some organizations, a BSM product is purchased within some type of internal project like ITIL or a Dashboard project.  When it comes down to it, those projects have requirements and they tie to specific features needed in the end solution such as;

• Console consolidation
• Root cause analysis
• Impact analysis
• Service Level Management
• Dashboards
• End to End visualization of Services

The list tends to go on and on.   When it comes down to it, BSM is something that you do within the solution (Managing to the Service, not the technologies), the features and functionality tend to be part of the BSM solution and where the purchasing focus should be.   One of the core features required for BSM is the ability to integrate to many sources.   There are many upon many tools within a large enterprise and many opportunities to pull in specific silo’s of data in order to provide a more complete view to the end users.  Large enterprises need the luxury of swapping out underlying tools/application in the future due to over priced maintenance renewals, bad support, acquisitions, poor software and numerous other reasons.  If the BSM solution is limited or not highly flexible in the ways in which it integrates to third party products, you may be stuck with some of those underlying technologies.

When evaluating BSM solutions, ensure that the solution has a robust integration feature.   Some BSM solutions are only good with integrating with their own companies products, this is a bit limiting.   Ensure that the are a few different options, ie: more than an SNMP trap or CSV import.

Tobin

The Hub Commentary_

IT, what are you waiting for?  Compete with the Service Providers today!  This is the year to re-tool and invest in your data center of the future.  The Service Providers are – Are you?

Michele

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New equipment purchased in 2011 is eligible for 100% bonus depreciation as part of 2011 tax legislation.  (Read Full Article…)

The Hub Commentary_

Computer Technology Industry Association just released results from their latest survey indicating that:

• Global IT spending up 4% in 2011
• 45% of US IT firms are increasing spending on new products and business for the next six months
• 43% plan technology related investments

All great news!  IT time to line yourself up as a service provider and compete for your data center business.  IT can do it cheaper than the service provider who has to build in margin, however the question remains, can IT do it faster and better than the service providers?

Is your data center competing with the Service Providers effectively?

Michele

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IDG News Service — Members of the U.S. IT sector are more confident now in their business prospects than they have been in the last year and a half, according to a new survey released by the Computing Technology Industry Association.  (Read Full Article…)

Earlier this year I suggested a prediction regarding the waning discussion of ITIL and this week I expanded upon that prediction in a post, “ITIL will be the end of ITIL”. The same day I posted my discussion, I received my brochure for the HDI Conference where Malcolm Fry is set to speak on “What’s up with ITIL?”.  The description starts with questions regarding the dying of ITIL, what’s going on, etc.  Defense – first indication that a wave is starting to swell in the market.

I received many great questions and discussion, which still says ITIL is alive and well in the ranks of IT organizations, trainers, consultants, certifying organizations, etc.  I do want to mention again, I do not see the practices and advice dying, going away or becoming replaced, just that the outward facing conversations will and need to stop being about ITIL and need to start being about the business service, value and performance.  ITIL is merely advice on how to manage your internal operations efficiently.

The catalyst in the market is the cloud and the explosive growth of service providers.  They need to have good operational processes in place or they are one outage away from being out of business.  However, the difference is they are not talking about ITIL, they are talking about the benefits to the business and the simplicity of running and subscribing to services in The Cloud.

The business leader has an internal organization  talking about justifying a CMDB project and a cloud provider talking about monthly subscriptions to online purchasing systems at a monthly or usage fee and here is a rate card, use it like a credit card.  Did I just see that leader walk away from the project justification discussion table and walk off into the sunset all googly eyed with the cloud service provider?

Last night I pulled another article from CIO regarding the innovation expectations the business has for its IT organization.  Embrace the development of innovating services and automate the commodity, routine, mundane that merely powers the lights – free yourself to drive growth.

I had a discussion with a very large and mature cloud service provider organization this morning on just the topic of providing the value add transparency on top of their services – the dashboard view that will communicate service performance to their customers.  The providers know that the business wants transparency and the providers want to insure that there isn’t a perception challenge regarding service delivery and the ones that will be most successful are baking it into there infrastructure and services from the beginning.  IT, are you or are you still talking about ITIL?

I’ve digressed, but the example is clear.  Those that sell technology services for a living know how to speak to your business leaders and how to bake proper service monitoring, management, measuring and communication into their services.  Steal a play from their playbook – implement and deliver the communication of service performance and service value into your services and sell your services, not the process of building services.

Are you communicating Service Value by selling the car or are you still selling the parts and directions as to how to build the car?

Michele

he Hub Commentary_

Ok, I know you are asking, Michele what does this have to do with BSM?  It’s one of those fun articles I just couldn’t pass on as an old COBOL programmer.  The previous news has been about driving innovation into the data center and focus on company growth, even COBOL is going to the Cloud!  I love it!

COBOL – To The Cloud!  A new marketing slogan born!

Michele

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IDG News Service — Micro Focus has updated its developer platform for the Cobol programming language, adding the ability to run Cobol applications on Microsoft’s Azure cloud service.  (Read Full Article…)

The Hub Commentary_

The theme of driving growth, innovation and value based upon the customer experience continues.  2011 will be a year of innovation and next year’s Fortune 500 list will see organizations swap places for the lead of their industry.  Very refreshing to see focus on technology again for innovation over back office automation.

My post of yesterday regarding ITIL generated many questions both in the Twitter and on The Hub regarding what replaces it and why did I post such blasphemy.  This article again solidifies the opinion.  The focus is the customer you sell goods and services to, not the end user in your company, technology for growth and innovation will be king in 2011.  Those focused on justifying ITIL projects will be left behind.

Again, I’m not against process for efficiency and there is a balancing act as this author states at the end of the article.  For far too long IT has been inwardly focused and thus turning up the heat of frustration by the business to drive to focus on services that your business offers to the market and driving growth.

I find this curious as technologist or maybe I’ve been on the software development side for far too long.  I thought most of us liked to work on new, cool, gee whiz things rather than just keeping the lights on.

Are you just keeping the lights on or driving innovation?

Michele

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Most of the CIOs I speak with are looking at the year ahead as an opportunity to drive innovation within their organizations, usually by automating back office activities. That’s a good place to start.  (Read Full Article…)

In order to understand the overall health of a service, it requires several management tools such as network monitoring (device up/down, switches, etc), device (CPU, Memory, disk) monitoring, application (logs, SNMP, etc) monitoring, etc.  The common approach is to use more than one tool such as EMC SMARTS, IBM Netcool, BMC Patrol, home grown monitoring tools, etc.   Since there are now multiple tools and multiple consoles with health and availability information, the next common approach is to set up some type of cross product integration like forwarding SNMP events out of SMARTS and Patrol into Netcool.   This is a great approach for integrating management tools into a single console, but the problem is, not everything fits (IE: Network Maps in SMARTS, Knowledge Modules from Patrol).

SMARTS does a great job discovering the network, it provides more than up/down events, but most of that information is not sharable to Netcool via an SNMP forwarding mechanism.  Patrol has the same challenge, not everything is going to fit inside of Netcool.  This is not a negative against Netcool, this is the common challenge with all event managers.  Netcool is providing a lot of value around things it is monitoring directly as well as event correlation, de-duplication, etc.

Forwarding events from one management system into another tool provides value, it should not stop there.   A single unified console with a Service Catalog type of view into the infrastructure with direct and indirect feeds from the management tools is the approach for end to end management.   In the end it places all of the important details at the tips of the Operators fingers and in turn reduces the complexity, knowledge required, multiple tools, etc and in turn you should be able to reduce downtime.

Forwarding events from one system to another is not integrated.  Bi-directional interaction (IE: able to receive alarms/events and perform actions such as Ack and Close on them) between the tools as well as an ability to leverage more than just the alarms/events is important.  Don’t settle on event forwarding, leverage the investment you made with the other tools.

Tobin

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…)

The Hub Commentary_

Ahhh the yin and yang of new technology.  The short sided cost saving and time saving view, we don’t have to buy and configure hardware and the longer term view of operationalizing the workloads by service enabling them to be supported.  Virtualization should be embraced and deployed as a cost saver, absolutely.  As with any techno gadget, it should be evaluated for good use and enabled to be supported to reap the greatest rewards.

Technology for the sake of technology and the short cut returns, never gets anyone anywhere very fast.  Measure twice, cut once and you will reap even greater cost savings.

Michele

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While the delivery of virtual machines is indisputably faster than deploying physical machines, it is often assumed that this also streamlines the process of deploying IT Services (applications).  (Read Full Article…)

Service Value is the Next Generation!

Time for ITIL.  Year-end is always a good time to watch the predictions fly and I too had to add 4 to my friend Richard Whitehead’s post with his top 10.  In my post I made a prediction that this would be the year that ITIL begins to wane as a topic of conversation for a couple of reasons.  Last week reinforced one of those beliefs with a CIO article I commented on, “ITIL versus the Cloud:  Pick One”.  Even this week, I still cannot wrap my head around this article and this is where my reasons for ITIL waning is deeply rooted.

First, I will mention I have been ITIL Foundation certified 2 times (version 2 and version 3) and was around in the service desk world during the days of all the little books for version 1.  Yes, I started working when I was 12.  Seriously, ITIL is prescriptive, not a remedy.  It is guidance about processes, not a mandated set of principles by which to govern an IT organization to the point of suffocation.  I have done my fair share of consulting and once folks get past the hurdle that it is merely advice, adapt it to what makes sense in their environment without suffocating, then the sessions are more successful.  However, I find that ITIL is one of those topics I would rather not discuss in mixed company, much like politics or religion, as it brings out very passionate debates and you need to know the party lines to consult.

Why do I believe it is really waning, it’s an inward facing operational process that is expected, it is a consulting and training industry.  Business doesn’t want to hear about how you do your job, just that you do it, do it well and do it efficiently.  It’s like this, as consumers we take our cars to the shop for routine maintenance and fixes when things break and what we are most interested in is how much will it cost and when will it be done.  We don’t really care what processes and procedures the mechanic follows or how many certifications he/she has to perform the job, we just care he/she can do the job, do it well and cost efficiently.  So why is it as IT professionals we go to work everyday and speak jibberish to our business colleagues?

I would find it a safe bet that your business would love to hear you come in and tell them exactly how implementing an updated service, a new technology, or automating a process will reduce XYZ cost, will drive XYZ additional revenue and this is how we will monitor Service Performance mitigating risk of service impacting events.  Just as this article implies, ITIL is very silo focused still.  Sure version 3 speaks of a service lifecycle, lifecycle not so much on the service performance and value to the business.

Here is a picture to help explain, click on it to enlarge it.  ITIL is going through a process maturity as well.  Here are the stages:

• version 1 – Processes Identified as individual processes
• version 2 – Processes Integrated
• version 3 – Process Lifecycle
• version 4 – still to come and already too late

I’ll end with this, I’m not against ITIL if it is taken as a prescription, training, examples.  However, when it becomes the way we speak to our business and customers and our sole focus, I find it like new technology for the sake of technology.  When I read articles about How to Justify an ITIL Project to the Business, I know the service providers are knocking on your door to take over your data center because they speak in terms of creating efficiencies, saving money and driving revenue.

We have lost all focus when we start speaking in terms of a new technology not fitting ITIL and choose one.  In that situation, I’d leverage new technology and work to service enable it to manage it, control it and communicate the value it is delivering to the organization over ITIL as it is, again, merely training, prescription and examples

The only thing I can guarantee is change and technology evolution are sure things.  As technology professionals, we must be seeking automation, technology and methods by which we can start communicating to our business in their terms.  Communicating Service Performance, Growth and driving Value into our businesses is the focus of those that lead their industries with technology.

I believe the explosion of cloud computing and the service provider market will be the catalyst described by Nicholas Carr’s article, “IT Doesn’t Matter”.

I know this controversial, give me your thoughts!

Michele

The Hub Commentary_

What does the midsize market know that the enterprise ignores?  Nimble, think like a start-up, how do we we better serve our customers and how does IT communicate service performance and use technology to create great customer relationships.

Time to think about the revenue generating services and customer touching services.  It’s not about the end user within the organization.  Think about it, who else in the world outside of IT even knows what end user means.  It’s about the customer that buys your companies products and services, focus on service enabling and communicating service performance and value of those services.

Quality of the customer experience is king, what are you doing to enhance it?

Michele

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70% of midsize companies are actively pursuing analytics technology to better understand their customers and make better decisions.  (Read Full Article…)

The Hub Commentary_

Here we go IT – another chance to redeem ourselves and service enable our infrastructure and take advantage of new technology.  The business has cracked the door to invest in technology that will transform the business and new systems management tools to communicate service performance and value realizing that new technology will take new approaches, all I can say is – Wake Up and Smell the Coffee and take advantage of the opportunity to drive your business forward!

Our businesses get it, learn to speak business language rather than ITIL language and use technology to grow your business to the next level.  We’ll talk ITIL in another post, but communicate service value because the service providers are and will eat your data center for lunch given the opportunity.  This is the catalyst that will make or break your data center, reach out and take it back!

Michele

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Intel (INTC) and SAP results and various forecasts issued this week suggest that while 2010 was a recovery year for just about all sectors of IT, enterprise software and accompanying services will be the main drivers for technology revenue growth over the next few years.  (Read Full Article…)

The Hub Commentary_

Another great post by my friend Dennis.

Michele

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A lot comes to mind with a title like this one.  So, let’s start by wiping away areas like politics and finances (except as they relate to IT), births, deaths, marriages and celebrities.  In fact, there’s still a very long list of possibilities by just focusing on IT and everything that goes into managing and optimizing services – let alone all of the trends around cloud.   (Read Full Article…)

The Hub Commentary_

Great post by my friend Dennis.

Michele

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EMA has just collected some new data regarding how IT organizations are seeking to assimilate cloud services from a top-down, service management perspective.   (Read Full Article…)