Tag Archive | "Business Service Management"

DR to the cloud

Tags: Business Service Management, Cloud, DR


I was thinking the about computer system recovery, mostly because I was/am trying to fix a computer at home.   It started me thinking about the companies I have seen over the years with the blank check approach to DR and the ones I have seen with the piggy bank approach.  It’s interesting, I’ve seen the companies that wanted/needed 100% uptime, but they are in denial of the costs associated to that level of uptime.   Anyways, I was wondering how the cloud (a service provider) might be a solution for some types of DR for those companies with little to no budgets for IT.

Let’s use a small company as the example, they don’t have data centers, they have a room with ‘servers’ in it.  A file server, email server, company web server, database server, etc.   They have some spare parts in the closet, but not everything.  The servers are under warranty, so replacements are available but it takes some time to get the parts ordered and shipped.   The company isn’t in a situation that they are ready to deal with the costs associated to seamless DR, but they do want limited downtime.

If you think about it, if you had a server that was the company web server, email server or a database of some sort, and you had some type of hardware failure like the motherboard getting fried (and no spare available).   If you have good documented procedures for restoration of the server, you could hit up a cloud provider to get a OS provisioned and then at least set up a temporary “server” while the other server (or parts) are being ordered/fixed.  If you have some level of virtualization adoption, this type of DR might be even easier.    The point is, if you are on a low budget, you could test out these type of DR scenario’s up front and then not have to have the hardware costs associated to DR.

With the amount of providers out there that are making it easier and easier to click a few times and then have an OS provisioned and available quickly, using the cloud as an alternative DR is becoming more of an option.   There are some providers that are making canned configurations available which will make it even easier.   Anyways, I have to go, I need to get back to fixing my computer problem, the CEO (wife) is complaining about how the IT department (me) is not responsive enough to fixing the outage.   She has important web surfing to do 🙂

Meet the Service-Driven Data Center: 5 Key Traits – PCWorld

Tags: Business Service Management, Cloud, PCWorld, Service Level


Many organizations are asking whether it makes more sense to move their enterprise to the cloud – or bring cloud computing into their enterprise. And a surprising number are discovering that the best, most practical answer may be “both.”   What does it mean to bring cloud computing into the data center?  (read more…)

The Rise Of Managed Cloud Services – CloudAve Blog

Tags: Business Service Management, CloudAve Blog


Looks like it is time to take “self service” out of cloud definition. There is a new trend that is slowly gaining traction which, even though it is not cloud washing, appears to be a desperate repackaging of services by companies with deep roots in the managed hosting world.  (read more…)

Pinning service management hopes on the cloud – NetworkWorld

Tags: Business Service Management, Cloud, ITSM, NetworkWorld


Some enterprise IT executives struggling with their service management initiatives are finding hope in the cloud.
That’s the upshot of 1,000 senior enterprise IT decision-makers surveyed independently by Vanson Bourne on HP’s behalf. In a survey report issued last week, “IT State of the Nation 2010,” Vanson Bourne notes that 41% of … (read more…)

Business in the Cloud – BSM Brings Value Back into the Data Center

Tags: Business Service Management, Cloud, Service Level, Service Providers


Business going to the Cloud can be the Catalyst for IT to Measure and Communicate Value!

How many of us have heard what a road block IT is, how costly / what a mystery IT is and IT cannot communicate value to the business leaving frustration in the organization. It’s sort of like the Mars and Venus thing and “if they only understood me better” debate. It’s OK to laugh, we all suffer these discussions, I too am guilt – the makings of a good Dilbert cartoon no doubt ending with Catbert reigning down his wrath of mandates. However, with all sourcing decisions, it is about creating change in an environment where change is difficult and should be embraced. IT has the opportunity to do just that and be the hero in the end. This is a good sourcing option as it creates the change that will drive down costs that are difficult for in-house IT to drive.

Moving from technology silos to managing and communicating in terms of services is easier than one thinks. It does require different management approaches and technology, measuring in terms of service and yes, sometimes the right investment can save money in the end while creating value. A recent NetworkworkWorld Article has a good quote from a good friend of mine and Forrester analyst, Glenn O’Donnell, “invest in analysis, not monitoring”. The monitoring data is required, but means nothing when not related to other bits of techno data and turned into information by which to perform useful analysis about services and the value delivered to the business. This becomes ever more challenging when in a mixed environment, physical, virtual, cloud, and when many management tools exist as well.

CIO also published an article yesterday “Why IT Costs Must Come Out of the Black Box — Now” describing similar requirements for service measuring and service transparency. The lack of transparency drives the business to seek alternatives where they contract for a service and know the cost. What is often left out is the definition of good service levels, which is a topic for a separate blog. The new service appears cheaper and why is that? Economies of scale is one piece, shared service, ……the second piece is they are very standard, non custom, no configuration, minimal choices, if any, services. Standardization that is difficult to impose from in-house without the cost transparency, service measurements and links to business priorities. This is not a fair apples to apples comparison of services, however, a standardization many IT organizations have difficulty implementing as an in-house provider without the measuring of services and transparency, but possible moving forward.

Instead of challenging the business in moving to a cloud provider, I suggest embracing it and offer that history will repeat itself with many of these start up providers bringing the service back in-house and providing the opportunity to be the hero, improve service quality, reduce costs and communicate value. Many will fail due to lack of good service level agreements, lack of the business asking for them and collapse or dissatisfaction of the business with a single costly service impacting event.

Embrace the opportunity to do a few things in the meantime:

1. Standardize, drive down costs for services and technologies that do not require customization
2. Measure the provider, start to deliver service levels and views of transparency of in and outsourced services
3. Develop and Implement the service view and transparency into the “black box” of IT
4. Invest in the analytic measuring and viewing technology, less on the commodity monitoring – explore open source

When Outsourcing Creates Good Change – Embrace the Cloud Providers – Consolidate Tools and Invest in becoming a Service Measuring Organization Communicating Value!

BSM Stories from the Trenches — Tale of the CMDB

Tags: Business Service Management, CMDB, CMS, Configuration


Tale of Customer Service, Cost of Service Impact, Mitigation of Risk and the CMDB Heart!

This is a story about a manufacturer, a retail buyer and the consumer and how IT management touches them all. This is the first in a series of Business Service Management (BSM) Stories from the Trenches that I’ll post describing the benefits of a single-pain-of-glass (I did mean the pain of glass!) and management of complex infrastructures as services to the business and the customer driving revenue and growth.

The Set-up . . . . .

One day a CIO receives a call from a friend, another CIO, but a customer, a big customer. The conversation quickly turns to “how come we are having difficulty placing orders with you? Should we buy from someone else?”. What’s going on…..

* Each hour we process >$100,000 worth of orders
* We experienced ~60+ hours of server down time last year
* $6M in orders have been impacted by the down time

How are we going to improve the availability and quality of the customer experience and reduce costs in a very heterogeneous, complex environment?

The Solution . . . . .

We need to know what we have and what it does in order to better measure quality and service levels. This requires 5 things:

* Define what are our services, prioritize them and align to business priorities
* Configuration Management Database (CMDB) that is a intelligent model of the infrastructure
* “Live”, single-pane-of-glass bringing life to the intelligent model of the infrastructure
* Governance over the model to ensure it is accurate and in compliance with approved changes
* Automated Service Level measurements, live and historical trends

We have monitoring in place, but we do not have a way to pull it together and marry it in a meaningful way to the infrastructure and we need to create a Service View of the infrastructure. This will require a lot of integration to meet the “live” requirement so that we can take action in real time and avert service impacting events in the future and govern that the model remains accurate and ultimately automate our service level measuring and reporting.

This is where Novell’s Business Service Management came in to integrate, build the intelligent service models, automate the model building and governance and provide the service level dashboard.

The Benefits . . . . .

* Service Level reporting is manual and costly, now that has been automated – approx 2 FTEs 5 Days each
* >25% service quality improvement with “live” service monitoring and averted service impacting events
* BONUS: Discovered >25% of logins were failing leading to a customer satisfaction challenge when placing orders that was corrected

The Intelligent Service Model and the automation’s improved customer satisfaction, quality of service, averted service impacting events and controlled costs. This is not an uncommon story for customers of the Novell Business Service Management solution. The heart of the solution is the “live” integration and intelligent service model making sense and relating bits of disparate data as super objects within the model enabling operations teams to service align, manage costs, mitigate risk and deliver quality services driving the business and growth.

Monitor, Manage, Measure and Report on your Workloads Intelligently!

Check out this recent article: How to Monitor, Measure and Report on your Workloads

BSM Stories from the Trenches-Hurricanes, Availability & Power On!

Tags: Availability, Business Service Management, Monitoring


Tale of Customer Service, Cost of Service Impact, Speed to Restore and the “Charley” View!

As we are in the heart of Hurricane season, I’m reminded of the old “Charley” Business Service View – a Category 4 Hurricane in 2004. This is a true story about a power company and how IT is impacted and how IT, by being proactive and hurricane prepared, can be the business driver in containing and managing the impending events that a hurricane brings with the loss of power due to downed lines. This is the second in a series of Business Service Management (BSM) Stories from the Trenches that I’ll post describing the benefits of a single-pane-of-glass and the management of complex infrastructures as services to the business and the customer driving customer satisfaction, revenue and growth.

The Set-up . . . . .

Just 22 hours after Tropical Storm Bonnie hit, Charley struck as a Category 4 Hurricane making it the first time in history that 2 tropical cyclones struck the same state in a 24 hour period. While the power companies have a bit of time to prepare for storms, managing the 2004 season was a tough one. So what is relevant to the power companies and what does IT have to do with the delivery of electricity:

* >3 million power consumers in the region
* Customer service applications become key
* Responding to customer complaints and logging them
* Using the customer calls to identify all outages
* “Keeping the Lights On” in the customer response center becomes key
* Dispatch systems are operationally key
* Returning service to customers in a time of need relies on IT doing more than just “Keeping the Lights On”

The Solution . . . . .

We need to know what to work on first in a “sea of red”and we know that due to power issues we will be inundated with network and systems management events. Managing those key customer and operational systems will take on a higher priority than anything else. This requires 4 things:

* Identify key customer and operational services in adverse situations
* Filtering of the intelligent service model to focus on newly prioritized services
* “Live”, single-pane-of-glass prioritizing events automatically
* Proactive service view to manage key systems averting downtime

We have monitoring in place, but we do not have a way to pull it together and marry it in a meaningful way to the infrastructure and we need to create a Service View of the infrastructure. This will require a lot of integration to meet the “live” requirement so that we can take action in real time and avert service impacting events, to filter the view to changing conditions and prioritize events.

This is where Novell’s Business Service Management came in to integrate, build the intelligent service models, automate the filtering of services, prioritization of events and the “Charley” dashboard that drove the delivery of high quality service of key customer and operational services.

The Benefits . . . . .

* >500,000 customers lost power
* >6,000 crews were dispatched successfully
* <1 week, 98% power restoration
* Exceeded the committed goal of 10 days for power restoration

IT does not restore the power and IT is impacted by the loss of power, but IT is critical in delivering the services that enable those to restore the power by connecting customers and line crews. The Intelligent Service Model and the automation of filtering services and prioritizing events ensures that systems are available that aid in power restoration. This is not an uncommon story for customers of the Novell Business Service Management solution. The heart of solution is the “live” integration and the intelligent service model making sense and relating bits of disparate data as super objects with rules describing conditions and state enabling operational teams to service align, mitigate risk and deliver mission critical services with consistent high quality driving the business.

I often run into IT folks that do not believe IT is critical to the organization. I find that is because they have not invested in understanding and aligning to the business objectives. Electricity is commodity, however, IT is key to driving revenue in getting power flowing again and the restoration of service in a time of need and adversity. Ask yourself what your company delivers to the public and how IT impacts driving the services that support that revenue and you have your answer as this power company did in determining where to focus and how that focus changes due to conditions. Are you agile enough to monitor, manage and measure to changes in real-time?

When Mission Critical Services is All About — “Keeping the Lights On”!

Check out this article of yet another energy company, again containing & mitigating risk: An Integrated Utility Network

BSM Stories from the Trenches–Flexible & Customizable Service Levels

Tags: Business Service Management, Service Level


Standard Tool to Define, Input & Report, but “No More, One Size Fits all Meaningless Data!”

As the Cloud and as-a-service consume the airwaves, trade rags and vendor messaging, one thing is becoming more and more relevant – IT Aligning to the Business, Measuring how the business consumes services and Communicating in terms of services and business metrics. Flexibility to measure and communicate the way business uses technology and agility to customize measurements and communication are key and will become more complex in a mixed physical, virtual and cloud computing environment. Developing the proper management, measurement and communication today will enable embracing cloud delivered services without an interruption in service communication. IT organizations that implement proper management, measurement and communication in terms of services will be those that drive value into their businesses.

Read how a Novell Business Service Management customer has long since conquered this dilemma and continues to deliver technology as business services in the advent of new delivery models and technology.

The Set-up . . . . .

A large financial institution headquarted in Europe was experiencing the shift from measuring technology to communicating services in terms of business objectives and KPIs. The business, in fact said, “no more, one-size-fits-all meaningless data”, we need to understand services in terms of KPIs to the overall business as they differ across regions and divisions. A few key metrics:

* One of the largest, global banking networks headquartered in Europe, strong positions in Asia and significant presence in the US
* Operates in >80 countries
* >100,000 employees with >70% in Europe
* Net banking income >18M Euros
* Business required a flexible list of services and service level agreements aligned to business objectives
* Services may be common – used differently by region & division – varying levels of priority by region & division
* Regional managers wanted a standard tool to define SLAs & OLAs from historical KPIs
* Applications were similar, but different across regions
* Need consistent, common and timely communication across the institution

The Solution . . . . .

We need to know how services are performing from a technology standpoint, how the technology is impacting the business in processing value/volume of transactions and we need to define priority of services driving how the supporting technology is managed. We have plenty of monitoring, but we need to measure and communicate in business terms and with flexibility to change and define by region and division.

This requires several things:

* List of Services – Service Catalog
* Definition of key metrics to the services
* Intelligent service models to reconcile and correlate disparate data sources
* Implementation of measurements in terms of KPIs and flexibility by region
* Flexibility to modify measurements without coding/development
* Common vehicle to communicate services by region and roll up to the institution
* Leverage current investments in management technology to gather data
* Historical views of trends by which to adjust SLAs and management priorities

This was and is a mature organization in that they had the management of technology in place, understood their services and metrics, but did not have the single, automated view for communication and ultimately to adjust services in order to drive value into the business. Complex infrastructures require integration of data, correlation of that data and presentation in real-time in order to manage operationally, but to also communicate and manage from the business view point.

This is where Novell’s Business Service Management came in to integrate, build the intelligent service models, automate the correlation of disparate data sources, prioritized events and delivered flexible business service dashboards where the regions and business units could define and alter their SLAs and OLAs managing the technology. Flexibility to adjust was accomplished, while communicating service delivery across the organization up to the institution level in a consistent and timely manner.

The Benefits . . . . .

* Centralized, common tool for management and communication
* Flexibility to define by region & division
* Rapidly deliver SLA contract via web based dashboards and enable modification to the metrics based upon market and business conditions
* Users see and drive the services versus IT and technology driving services and communication
* “No more, one size fits all meaningless data”
* One of top 10 global banking brands – technology delivers value powering the business

This is not an uncommon story as it relates to the implementation of Service Level Agreements, measurement and communication to the business. When IT reaches the ability to turn meaningless, technology data metrics into information that can be communicated and consumed as business services, is when IT is delivering value to the business and powering the business for competitive advantage to lead it’s industry.

Now the interesting metric – this was > 5 years ago prior to the added complexity of virtualization, cloud computing and Intelligent Workload Management. The Novell Business Service Management solution is technology and architecture agnostic, meaning that the service still powers the business. The Intelligent Service Model is still the power with the addition of more meaningless data when viewed on it’s own regarding new management technology and/or infrastructure metrics.

SLA’s–Incident-Availability-Performance or Svc Based–Which Matters?

Tags: Business Service Management, Service Level


Getting to SLAs that are Meaningful

I stumbled into a blog thread yesterday that prompted me to add another SLA blog regarding the components and measurement of meaningful SLAs. Earlier this summer I posted two blogs on SLAs, a Part 1 and Part 2. SLAs could generate a multi chapter book. In the first one, I discussed the relevance of SLAs with your service and cloud providers and in the second one I discussed more about how to approach building meaningful SLAs. Today let’s talk about the components of relevant SLAs.

ITIL tells us a SLA is the Utility (service definition) + Warranty = Value. In simple terms, the Warranty should be composed of: Availability + Performance + Responsiveness.

* Is the Service Available when I need it?
* Is the Service Performing as I expect at this time?
* If it is not, I expect it to be back to this level, for this time in XX amount of time!

In these days of services and composite applications, SLAs have become more complex in aggregating the parts and pieces that participate in delivering a service. The Cloud and as-a-Service providers are gaining in popularity with business units – Why? Because they define and deliver a service and the business is frustrated with IT. Now I might suggest that your business counterparts may or may not be asking and receiving good Warranty’s or SLA commitments for the delivery of those services. Thus those services that escaped you may some day come back in house.

In the previous blog, I discussed identifying and categorizing services. I suggest keep it simple and straightforward.

* Revenue impacting, mission critical services required to be in business
* Quality of Service to external customers required to be in business
* Internal effectiveness – services required, but not seen by customers, to process the business
* Internal efficiencies – required internal services for productivity

Now I suggest defining the simple: Availability, Performance and Responsiveness expectations for each category and work to keep the services in each category as standard as possible. Thus, not all services are created equal and those in the Efficiency category do not require the same level of responsiveness as those in the first, regardless of a severity 1 incident. What is the priority, now comes into play.

Creating all services equal based purely on severity of incidents is what makes internal IT expensive and appear as a bottleneck to progress in the business and what makes external service providers look very attractive.

Now to answer the question in the title, which one matters. The Service is what matters and the incident responsiveness, performance and availability are objectives that comprise the overall service level. Monitoring all three of these objectives and driving toward real-time monitoring of the Service Health to avert service-impacting events is when the SLA gains relevance.

I view the ability to create an intelligent service model that monitors each of these three objectives as the must have starting place in today’s business environment. Those that then marry in business objectives regarding the value / volume of transactions processed are those that are performing true Service Management. Performance, Availability, Responsiveness and Business Transactions each indicate risk to the business of the affects of a service-impacting event and averting these events proactively in real-time will soon be the must have, versus nice to have.

Accidental Cloud Ldr–Stealth Cloud Followers–Which Cloud are you On?

Tags: Availability, Business Service Management, Cloud, Performance, Service Level


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 artilce 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 duiring 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 availbility 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.

Novell Operations Center (a WorkloadIQ solution) provides 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. 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!

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

I See Your 10 and Raise You 4 . . . . .

Tags: Business Service Management, Cloud, ITIL, Service Providers, Trends


Tis the season for Vegas, gambling and the Gartner Data Center Conference and thus many top 10 Predictions for the coming year. I’m not a gambler, take these as you may, but for those who know me might say she might just have a bit of challenge the status quo in her and a knack for blowing things up from time to time. As a bit of a researcher of the IT management industry, these are just my musings to add to recent flurry of top 10 lists from my friends on WorkloadIQ and Baseline that sparked my imagination of further possibilities. Here goes, a tad controversial, I welcome the discussion!

  • ITIL has reached its height in the America’s and ITIL will begin to wane in conversation. Data center efficiency is an expected given to the busines and are tiring of investing in inward focused programs and are demanding a focus on the top line versus the bottom line and deployment of agile technology for growth.
  • ITIL will begin its next revision to release late to the wave in late 2012 in reaction to waning interest. Second rev took 20 years, 3rd rev took 6 years and the 4th rev is late. Service Value will take ITIL center stage in the 4th revision in advancing ITIL up the maturity curve from silos of processes, integrated processes, a service life cyle to finally focusing on the Service Value contribution.
  • Service Providers will experience double digit growth driving the growth in IT Management Technology spend leading to new licensing models with lower up front costs and longer term revenue sharing with the vendors. The tide begins to turn with the customer to the vendors shifting toward the Service Providers. Growth in the Management market and the Service Provider market is driven by virtualization, private cloud and public cloud deployment.
  • Management of the private/public cloud and virtualization is the make or break key to value and success, whether internal or external. Service Providers that ignore management are one outage away from being out of business and data centers that ignore management are in the process of being outsourced.

I’m not a gambler, won’t bet my house on these, but having been witness to the same new technology, IT Management and Sourcing cycles for >25 years (I started working IT when I was twelve I agree with Richard’s blog that we are at a tipping point. Sourcing options become appealing when the level of frustration for change is high and we are in a perfect storm of agile technology, sourcing options and an increasing focus on growth and innovation.

Those who embrace new technology and sourcing options and harness the power with agility for driving value with speed are those that will drive their industry. All you have to do is look at the annual F500 list and see who leads your industry and leads it by magnitudes greater than #4, 5, 6, etc. and you see those that lead with technology.

Which cloud does your data center choose to be on, the Cloud Leader or a Stealth Cloud Follower?

An Interview with Novell’s Michele Hudnall – BSMDigest

Tags: BSMDigest, Business Service Management, End-to-End View, Integration, Performance


In BSMdigest’s exclusive interview, Michele Hudnall, Novell Solution Marketing Manager – BSM discusses the move from IT performance management to Business Service Management, and where integration fits in.  (Read Full Article ….)

Driving Business Service Management with Private Cloud – BSMDigest

Tags: BSMDigest, Business Service Management, Cloud


Private cloud might be one of the best things to ever happen to Business Service Management. Private cloud inherently requires the company to be more focused on the needs of the business side of the organization, which leads directly to aligning IT performance with the business needs. Because of this, the move to private cloud is driving Business Service Management in many organizations. (Read Full Article ….)

A Closer Look at ITIL – NetworkWorld

Tags: Business Service Management, ITIL, NetworkWorld


The Information Technology Infrastructure Library is designed to help cut costs and streamline IT operations, and is finding converts seeking to maintain regulatory compliance as well. Initially popular overseas, ITIL is growing in use in the U.S., where four out of 10 organizations will adopt it by 2007, according to Meta Group (now part of Gartner). Former Meta analyst Michele Hudnall, now director of service management at software vendor Managed Objects, recently spoke with Network World Senior Editor Denise Dubie about the realities of ITIL and how corporate IT shops can make the most of their implementations.  (Read Full Article…)

ITIL Realities – NetworkWorld Podcast

Tags: Business Service Management, ITIL, NetworkWorld, Podcast


This week, Network World Senior Editor Denise Dubie chats with Michele Hudnall, director of service management at software vendor Managed Objects, about the realities of ITIL.  (Listen to the Podcast….)

Change Mgmt Tools Can Prevent Application Outages – NetworkWorld Podcast

Tags: Availability, Business Service Management, Change, NetworkWorld, Podcast


Gartner says 80% of downtime is due to human error and problems created by process, such as inadequate testing and unauthorized changes. And research from Managed Objects, a provider of business service management tools, shows many of these failures come from custom or home-grown applications. Network World’s Jason Meserve talks about the issue of application outages and what can be done to prevent them with Michele Hudnall (12:34)  (Listen to this Podcast…)

An Integrated Utility Network – Electric Energy Online.com

Tags: Availability, Business Service Management, Electric Energy Online.com, Performance, Service Level


The business case for business service management (BSM) at Ontario’s Independent Electricity System Operator, commonly referred to as IESO, started out as a proposal for solving a traditional IT management problem. Yet in the process of defining the problem and evaluating solutions, the IESO discovered a way to simultaneously enlist the endorsement of business users by incorporating the supervision, control and management of the power grid and its energy market systems into the IT project.  (Read Full Article…)