Business Service Management Hub

The Hub Commentary ___

In a previous post (Accidental Cloud Leaders – Stealth Cloud Followers – Which Cloud is your IT On?) I wrote about these practices and cited a couple of industry articles.   My advice has always been that you outsource the commodity, why do in-house what everyone else has to do as well?  Why re-invent the wheel, accept a process and tool set that works for the rest of the world.

Focus on that which is unique to your business and is the value add to drive growth.  Unique and custom are seldom good candidates for outsourcing unless you are outsourcing the whole of your IT function and have a service provider also developing your value add innovations in the market.

This will bring a shift in the roles and skill sets in the data center as we know it today.  Service providers managing services with business savvy.  There will be requirements to focus on monitoring and managing the vendors and the requirement for an integration platform that brings the picture together as an end-to-end service regardless of where it is operating.

By all means, embrace the Cloud and as-a-Service providers for the commodity.  Learn how you will monitor and manage it on the commodity.  Apply those learning for the move to the more dynamic IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service) to provide agility and on-demand capacity to your mission critical services.

Michele

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Companies looking to go down the SaaS route will find that IT service management is a good starting point says Ovum.  (read full article…)

Are you leading your organizations cloud roll-out or are you reacting to it? It is happening, better to lead than follow!

The WorkloadIQ post and the article Richard references on the Stealth Cloud from a CIO article reminds me of a previous article about the Accidental Cloud Leader from a Networkworld article.  Both of these articles point to the cloud is coming, the choice facing IT organizations is whether to lead, control costs, mitigate risk, deliver quality service and manage costs or to follow with rising costs, reactive IT, high risk and poor service quality. Richard hits the nail on the head, IT is traditionally change averse and insecure with the concept of outsourcing services. Technology is evolving faster and faster and the very organization that should adopt, deploy and lead with technology continues to lag.

In almost all cases when it comes to sourcing decisions they are done to create change that an organization has difficulty bringing to the organization, not for cost reasons. Commodity functions are best suited for outsourcing, driving standards and managing costs. However, outsourcing the service does not remove accountability for managing service delivery.

Cloud providers are popping up faster than service providers during the dotcom boom days of web hosting, application hosting, etc. There are several key factors to consider as pointed out in these articles and blog posts:

• Availability of service
• Risk of a secure service
• Reliability of the service provider
• Cost of support

Availability of Service and Reliability of the service provider
The dotcom bust of service providers in the early 2000 era came down to lack of mature management processes. Many providers today are one significant outage away from being out of business. Is this who you trust your services to? Who’s managing and leading this due diligence in contracting for the services in the leader / follower scenario?

When seeking service providers, it is important to understand their management processes and capabilities. You do not want to define them, but the lack of management transparency and process indicates maturity of the service provider and their ability to delivery availibility of services. One thing to note here is not to ask for inappropriate service levels and/or penalties. Investigate their typical services, leverage the cloud and service providers for the commodity and take advantage of the economies of scale they offer.

Risk of a secure service
Security as an obstacle in going to the cloud or leveraging an as-a-service provider is, quite frankly, IT noise. As described in these articles and blogs, this is the service providers business and they know it is their number one objection. In many cases, they may offer a far more secure environment than most IT organizations and thus the rise of IT insecurity and noise. However, again, it is an area that must be investigated as it relates to the mature management practices of a service provider.

Cost of support
Organizations are expressing frustration with their IT organizations as a perceived obstacle to agility and innovation when they go to the cloud directly. As Richard’s blog points out, this costs your IT organization more in the long run to support, the service will go down, the business will call support for help, the provider most likely may not be reliable and in the worst case, data and security can be breached.

Management generally lags new technology and this cycle to go to the service providers directly for a defined service and defined cost is more appealing to the business. Management lags both with IT internally and with the service providers compounding the risk of an outage or security breach.

Providing the ability to monitor, manage and measure technology services both internally as well as the performance and availability of the service provider insuring quality service delivery will be key. Service enabling your infrastructure could not be easier today and would provide the control with agility your organization is screaming for from your IT organization. Management does not have to be an afterthought and the right platform can future-proof your services with technology adoption agility, it merely takes some proactive planning.

Check out these articles and then answer:  Are you following or leading your organizations cloud rollout – it is happening and coming . . . Are you Stealth or Leading? What are your challenges and concerns?

What does the post-recession IT world look like? More media will drive the need for more bandwidth, and a demand for Windows 7 upgrades and corporate use of personal smartphones will shape new priorities for IT.  (read more…)

The Hub Commentary ___

Think like a start-up sums up what I was thinking as I read this article.  Good long and short side views in the IT news these days.  This is a great thing, there is activity again and feels like budgets are loosening for the right spirit.

Here’s what I mean by short and long sided.  Cost savings by reducing infrastructure – To the Cloud!  Hidden costs to monitor, manage, support, secure and protect.  Rarely is it cheaper to outsource unless you are a hideously inefficient organization.  However, right source is the right approach.  Another example are all the new technologies mentioned in the article.  I’m sure there is an expectation for performance, availability, information accessibility and many platforms and by the way we are starting with mobile now.  Again, that pesky back-end monitoring, managing, supporting,  securing, protecting and measuring.

The consumer market drives business requirements and thus IT.  The introduction of every new technology to the consumer market should immediately be thought of as entering the enterprise and thus evaluated for it’s application and potential value-add or not.  Business is still ahead and IT is still out of synch reacting.

2011 is going to be a tipping point of a year for alignment of IT to become a service enabling organization with agility.  The IT manager that begins thinking like a start-up to meet the requirements, embracing new technologies and building management in from the get go will be the winner in the long run.

Is your IT an Operating Commodity   or   Contributing Necessity?

Michele

Cash-starved. Fast-paced. Understaffed. Late nights. T-shirts. Jeans.

These descriptors are just as relevant to emerging tech startups as they are to the typical enterprise IT infrastructure and operations (I&O) department. And to improve customer focus and develop new skills, I&O professionals should apply a “startup” mentality. (read more…)

The Hub Commentary ___

I find this a great analogy for IT organizations having sat on both sides of the fence.  I was once an IT application development & support systems analyst.  I remember working on my first client server application (I know that dates me) and meeting with a technical engineer from a start-up software company who had come to help me with some pointers on using the tool for my project.

One of the first things we discussed was why I wasn’t directing the application I was developing directly against the database server.  My response, “because if I use the database in the application, then all the users will have to have access/licenses and that comes with a fee.”  So let’s think about this, they are paying you to develop an application, drop a spreadsheet of numbers into a database you paid for, then extract it again to display in this tool that you paid for.  Yeah.  Dilbert cartoon in the making!  Incredible silence fell as we both knew we were spending more money to avoid a license to the database than if we bought those licenses and used the technology and application I was developing.  Dilbert!

That was 20+ years ago (yikes) and as IT organizations we are often a penny wise and a dollar short.  2011 will no doubt be a tipping point for the service providers with business frustration at an all time high and access to new services prevalent.  How an IT person answers this question is a telling statement to me, “What business are you in?”.  If the answer is “I am in desktop support”, I know it is an inward facing IT organization.  If the answer is “New drug development and I support keeping the scientists in R&D working racing against the clock to get formulas to the FDA to be first to market”.  I know this is a business driven organization and there is no business ‘and’ IT.

Think like a start-up – technology is a solution to innovation, not a problem to support and operate

Michele

One of the most interesting elements of any research project is to have the opportunity to speak with those in the IT “front lines” dealing with the challenges of the moment.  (read more…)

Not long ago, Forrester analyst James Staten wrote a report with the compelling title: You’re Not Ready for Internal Cloud.  (read more…)

Cloud computing will drive Business Service Management practices.  The first point of pushing things to the cloud that are standard is discussed in one of my previous blogs.  Don’t keep in-house that which should be outsourced and don’t outsource that which is so unique to your business.

However, remember the management of the private and public cloud as services, service levels and performance monitoring.

Being that we’re at the start of a new year and all, I thought I’d launch the 2011 newsletter by sharing predictions from a variety of network and systems management vendor executives.  (read more…)

Many mergers don’t live up to expectations, because they stumble on the integration of technology and operations. But a well-planned strategy for IT integration can help mergers succeed.  (read more…)

I find this article interesting as it hits the core of IT aligning to business, integration and a sound integration platform and strategy.  The link to the Credit Suisse article also discussing integration enabling distribution and regional agility with company level views.

The indisputable economic benefits of cloud computing for certain applications drive businesses to consider building clouds of their own, but they need to make sure they are prepared before jumping into the cloud.  (read more…)

Shadow IT has worried CIOs for decades. The practice is often defended as a source of innovation and a faster-than-normal way for users to get their jobs done but this off the radar technology use by employees presents serious dangers to the corporation ranging from increased security threats to compliance issues.  (read more…)

Preliminary findings of TRAC’s end-user survey show that organizations are still struggling to gain full visibility into their IT services and infrastructure. (read more …)

If you manage the delivery of any service from uber-modern SaaS and RIA‘s to human-based service desk and moves/adds/changes to good ol’ e-services such as e-mail, there are just five questions you should ask if you want to deliver the highest quality of experience (QoE) ….. (read more…)

Despite decades of increasingly intensive use of information across industries, IT has remained a black box for many executives. Too often, the link between spending and performance has been unclear, if not problematic. As a result, leaders felt that their only course of action was to hire a competent CIO, throw increasing amounts of money at IT, and hope for the best.  (read more …)

Tom Sanzone, CIO of Credit Suisse, says he was attracted to his position by senior management’s commitment to technology—a commitment demonstrated by his seat on the executive board of Credit Suisse. In that role, Sanzone helps shape the bank’s overall strategy, which is based on the opportunities that his technology organization has created.  (read more …)

Unisys on Tuesday introduced a dedicated, hosted computing service that lets customers quickly add extra capacity for short-term use, a feature Unisys says is unique among what it calls “hosted private clouds.”  (read more …)

The combination of more automation, increased offshoring, and better global IT infrastructure has taken its toll on the U.S. IT profession, resulting in a net loss of 1.5 million corporate IT jobs over the last decade, according to recent research from IT consultancy and benchmarking provider The Hackett Group.  (read more …)

It’s been an incredibly interesting, exciting, and tumultuous year for cloud computing. But, as the saying goes, “you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.” Next year will be one in which the pedal hits the metal, resulting in enormous acceleration for cloud computing.  (read more …)

Today, service providers and enterprises interested in implementing clouds face the challenge of integrating complex software and hardware components from multiple vendors. The resulting system can end up being expensive to build and hard to operate, minimizing the original motives and benefits of moving to cloud computing.  (read more…)