The Hub Commentary
Do your customers have more visibility into your end-to-end management processes than you do? You’re probably not alone…
Randy
In dealing with a service provider, I found that I have more visibility into the process they are providing than they do. That’s pretty sad. Part of me wonders if they’ll call me up and say, “David… what do you see from your view? Tell us, because we can’t see the whole thing.” Read full article
In recent post, fellow BSM Blogger, Lee Frazier, gave The Top Reasons We Have Not Reached SLA Nirvana – Yet. Lee gave a lot of good reasons why we’ve failed to reach that perfect state just yet when it comes to service level agreements (SLAs).
At a session recently at the AIIM/info360 conference, analyst Jarrod Gingras from the Real Story Group gave a presentation on what he considered to be cloud myths. Gingras wasn’t there to sing the cloud’s praises that’s for sure. In fact, using content management as the example, he put a decidedly negative spin on things. That’s not because he wanted to be contrary just for the sake of it. He wanted us as individuals to think through the pros and especially the cons of this approach.
And one of those myths was that you could protect yourself legally via the SLA. Hold on a second! I was always under the impression the SLA was the final abriter and the saving grace of cloud computing. Not so says Gingras and not for any of the 7 reasons Lee Frazier outlined in his post — but because of technical limitations.
He gave the example of a Canadian company that wanted to go with a Cloud solution, but because it was dealing with public records that had to remain inside Canada, and there were no guarantees the files would not be stored on a server in the U.S., they simply couldn’t go with the solution they liked, and no SLA language could have protected them in that instance.
He went to discuss instances where a company needs to ensure that files are deleted completely, a process he referred to as “digital shredding.” Gingras said that to his knowledge there wasn’t a provider that would put such a guarantee in an SLA because it was too hard to ensure. As he put it, “If you think the SLA will protect you [in this instance], think again.”
So perhaps we should an eighth item to Lee’s list.
8. Legal System hasn’t caught up with technology.
As Lee indicated, none of these are necessarily show stoppers for every company, nor are they insurmountable. Some are cultural, some are technical and some are legal. Sooner or later we may actually reach SLA nirvana, but for now we have people like Frazier and Gingras making sure we understand there is no such thing as an iron clad agreement just yet.
Photo by Cletch on Flickr. Used under Creative Commons License.
I took a test on SearchCIO-Midmarket.com today to clear my head from other more distressing work details. I’ve been in the deep end of the social media swimming pool for the past 90 days and I’ve read many interesting articles, books, blogs, you name it on social media and inbound marketing. I’ve also read my fair share of articles regarding who in IT owns and manages social media and it’s process for your company. Most are pointing to the CIO.
Screech, time out, slow down, hold on – IT in most businesses is not currently aligned to managing system performance in alignment to the objectives of the company and do not practice good business service management. Thus the explosion of service providers creating competition for the business and new flexible and simple buying models from the external providers. When you ask an IT professional at a cocktail party what they do for a living, the response is generally, I’m a data base administrator, I manage networks, I write applications, the list goes on. When the answer should be I sell insurance for the largest organization in the world and I manage the network that interacts with our customers.
Rewind – back to the first question, so the organization that does not currently understand business objectives and priorities of the company is now being looked at to manage and implement the social media process for your organization’s brand and marketing. This is like oil and water or two battering rams knocking heads – or Michele and Tobin daily – Marketing versus Product Management 🙂 The infrastructure that will be used to grow awareness and dominance in the marketplace won’t be managed by your IT organization, this is a marketing strategy with new, free and public tools. It is live and in real-time interactions versus the days of old with snail mail flyers and phone calls – it’s brand, strategy and just a new set of tools that are free and in the domain of the cloud.
The touch point into IT is when you finally strike gold, go viral and have a swarm of killer bees after you coming into your web front. Then your IT organization should be alerted that a crazy marketing person is about to make revenue quota in an hours worth of sales on your network. In case your marketing folks forget that there might be capacity constraints in taking orders and creating revenue through the network. Then IT should have the business service management practices in place and the early warning system that value / volume of transactions are spiking and can take action to increase capacity to cash the checks and grow revenue. The alternative is melt down, lost revenue, lost customers and a very angry marketing team that worked hard to bring customers to the business.
We can no longer think in terms of business and IT, IT is the business and both have to have the same objectives, know the priorities and understand the points of interaction and impact to be successful together.
How well did you do on the test and how are you supporting your business growth?
Michele
One of the cornerstone concepts of cloud computing, whether you’re using a private cloud in-house or a public cloud is the ability to use fewer resources more efficiently. Last year while attending the MIT Sloan CIO Symposium, I learned that Salesforce.com uses less than 2000 servers to support more than 72,000 customers. That’s efficient.
But it’s not just the efficiency that’s a factor here, companies like Google, Yahoo! and Amazon that are running hundreds of huge data centers have a stake in making sure they are running as efficiently as possible because extra energy isn’t just bad for the environment. It’s bad for business.
When I was at CeBIT a few weeks ago in Hannover, Germany I saw Chang-Gyu Hwang, who is National CTO of South Korea talking about using the heat generated by buildings in cities to generate more energy. This same principal could be applied to server farms to generate the electricity to run them.
But it’s still open to debate, which brings us to measurements. When you have a system in place that enables you to measure the energy you’re using, you can begin to quantify your energy usage to the extent possible.
On one hand, if you move some of your functions to a public cloud, you off-load some of that energy consumption to the vendor (but you could still see it as part of your company’s carbon footprint).
If your vendors provide this type of information, you could plug it into your monitoring infrastructure to track energy usage as part of your overall business measurement goals.
And if you use virtualization in-house, you might be using the same number of servers (or even less due to increased efficiency), but you’ll be using them to greater capacity meaning that they aren’t just sitting there doing nothing a good part of the time (yet still using the same amount of electricity regardless).
Having tools in place that manage your entire business IT infrastructure across different types of measurements including energy consumption, can help you fully understand your business and the impact your energy usage is having on the environment and your bottom line.
Photo by AleBonvini on Flickr. Used under the Creative Commons License.
Cisco today announced they had grabbed newScale, a service catalogue and service portal software developer. The purchase gives Cisco a valuable piece in the emerging private cloud business, one which makes it easier for customers to create an in-house service center.
A private cloud operates in the same fashion as a public one, offering web-based services, but instead of venturing outside the firewall, you get all your services in-house. This offers a number of advantages from a service and security standpoint, and provides a way to charge back customers for exactly what they use. Your users like it because they only pay for services they use and you can plan resource requirements better from an IT perspective. As I wrote in a blog post earlier this month, Cost Transparency is a Two-way Street, “when your users understand the relationship between cost and consumption, everybody wins.”
What that means essentially is that by placing a set of clearly defined services inside a delivery mechanism like the one that Cisco bought with newScale, you can provide a clear set of costs associated with usage. That’s because, a service portal gives you the means to create a “store” where your users come for standard services offerings. For instance, you might set up a SharePoint collaboration site and a SharePoint file storage site. It provides a way to get in-house services as easily as going online to get services from say Google or Yahoo!.
Parvesh Sethi, senior vice president of Cisco Services said in a statement that they bought newScale because they were seeing a need in the market for this type of service. “Cloud computing represents a major shift in the evolution of the Internet, and as more customers migrate from traditional IT infrastructures, the need for rapid self-provisioning and efficient management becomes increasingly critical,” he explained. This purchase does precisely that by providing Cisco with a tool the enables customers to create self-service portals quickly.
It’s a smart play because more companies are looking in this direction and looking for tools to help them set up service portals for their private cloud offerings. The deal is expected to close some time in the second half of the year.
They described it as follows on the event web page:
“At MMS 2011, you’ll drill deep into IT management technologies and learn about the latest solutions for Desktop, Datacenter, Device and Cloud management from Microsoft.”
Now, you might expect since it’s Microsoft that this was exclusively devoted to managing Windows devices — whether PCs, tablets or mobile phones — but you would be wrong. In fact, Microsoft announced the Beta of a new monitoring tool that they claim enables you to track iOS devices (both iPhones and iPads). Symbian (that’s Nokia’s OS for now until they switch over Windows Phone 7 next year) and Android.
It also lets you watch your servers and clients (although presumably these are Windows only).
The tool, The System Center Configuration Manager 2012 (SCCM 2012), will supposedly enable IT pros to manage this variety of devices from a central console. According to a post by Mary Jo Foley, Microsoft reporter extrordinaire, on ZDNet, the new tool has been designed specifically to handle the so-called consumerization of IT, which has lead to the proliferation of a variety of mobile devices across the enterprise.
Microsoft released its second SCCM beta last week. From a monitoring stand-point, this is a big departure for Microsoft which typically confines its monitoring to Windows devices. While Foley suggests this undercuts Microsoft’s claim that Windows tablets are superior to iPads and Android tablets, I think it shows surprising foresight to acknowledge the breadth of the existing market and to provide a way to monitor all of the mobile devices in the organization.
Foley pointed out, however, in an update that the SCCM 2012 actually results in a weaker mobile reporting product in spite of the fact it’s supporting these additional devices. That’s because Foley’s colleague, Simon Bisson, reported that Microsoft has decided to moth ball the System Center Mobile Device Manager (SCMDM), which while supporting fewer devices than SCCM 2012, provided a more detailed view of those devices it supported.
Regardless, it show that with a Summit devoted entirely to monitoring, it is a critical part of IT’s job. Look for another post or two later this week on news from last week’s Summit.
Why aren’t we at Service Level Agreement (SLA) nirvana? I mean really, we have had SLA tools for 10, 15 years or more. You probably have 1 or 10 or more tools that measure SLAs, of which most probably aren’t used. Why aren’t all of our data centers, applications, servers and everything else just numbers on some dashboard that we just glance at to make sure everything is good to go and that we are open for business? This troubled me so I decided to make a list of some of the possible reasons:
1. Too many different tools, specialties and areas of focus
You have tools the measure SLAs for the network, different ones for the infrastructure, different ones for virtual machines, different ones for the cloud, and the list goes on and on. I think this is one of the biggest issues with SLA reporting. Who wants to look at 3 – 10 different tools to know if they are passing all of their SLAs? Or who wants to maintain integration into all of those tools to then pull all of that data into one dashboard? And then what do you do if someone wants to see historical data? This becomes a very deep and very big hole. So then companies move on to my number 2 reason.
2. SLA monitoring via trouble tickets
Wow, this is great. Finally one source for all of our SLA data. All we have to do is make sure every issue we have gets opened as an issue in our help desk tool. Right! The issue eventually happens that you missed an outage and that outage caused you to violate your SLA. Then the logic pervades the company something like: ‘If our tool missed that SLA, what else is it missing?’ And eventually: ‘We just can’t trust this tool’ or ‘We just can’t trust our monitoring’ etc. Also, this is dependant on someone putting in the correct data and time. Not to say they would purposely fudge the numbers but how long would you say something was down that you were responsible for?
3. SLA status based on Network availability
Ok, we have all been guilty of it. If you have ever had to guarantee 5 9’s availability, you reported on just the network availability. Why? Because you had the data, your data met what was expected ( 5 9’s ) and you could easily report on it. Did that meet the intention of the SLA? No, but (insert your excuse here). When someone that cares about an SLA defines it as 99.999% availability, they truly want to be able to access the application or business function 99.999% of the time not just the network. This is discussed further in item 5.
4. Can’t get the data.
Sometimes we just can’t get at the data that we would need in an automated fashion to allow us to have an SLA defined. This may be due to political or technical issues, I am sure you have seen both. This must be resolved with either the customer pushing for it or someone pushing for the customer. In the IT world we live in today, virtually all data is accessible with permission and ingenuity.
5. Technical vs business data
This one is also very common. You report you are meeting your SLA of 99.999% up time and the customer says, ‘but it is never available when I need to use it.’ Been there? Why is this? Because you are reporting that all of the things that you are responsible for technically, are available. But when the customer goes to use the application or business service, some piece that he uses and you might not be responsible for isn’t functioning or responding in a timely manner, etc. Does this make your SLA data wrong? Yes, from a customer perspective (and does anything else really matter?). Your SLA must be looked at from the business point of view as much as possible. Now, you won’t be able to take into account the customer’s home network being down and then having that blamed on you, but if you have enough data showing the service was available from a business point of view, you will be able to push back on them.
What do I mean about monitoring the SLA from a business point of view? Well, it means a few things and these will change depending on how your customer uses the service. Through put, response time, transactions processed per time period, synthetic transaction, functional status of all single points of failure for the service.
6. Data is too bad
When you do get everything monitored and all of the data in one source, sometimes the data is just too bad. Instead of 5 9’s, you’re showing 5 7’s. So instead of showing this to the customer or management instead you (insert your excuse here). This issue can be overcome by either going into the underlying tools and fixing the monitoring to only report outages when they are outages or by fixing your applications and infrastructure.
7. SLA’s just a punishment tool
I have seen this in many different companies. You struggle to meet the SLAs and whenever you miss, here comes the stick. This will then motivate you to either fix the issues or quit reporting. Too often I have seen the later. This doesn’t have to be. Used correctly SLAs can be a carrot and a stick. They can allow you to qualify exactly what is part of the SLA and what hours you are responsible to meet the SLA, thereby reducing/eliminating penalties for off hours and devices that aren’t part of the service or not in you control and then allow you to better meet the SLA for the true service times. SLAs need to have the carrot to be managed effectively.
As we have remained in a reactive mode for many years, now is the time to turn that around into proactive and aligning with the objectives of the business. In the next post we’ll talk about how you turn this around and stitch together a successful Service Level strategy.
What would you add to this list of challenges?
Lee Frazier
The Hub Commentary_
Bernard has put out a great piece for operations and development teams pragmatically discussing the development, implementation and operations of cloud projects. Development of new services is the fit for new technology, otherwise, it becomes disruptive and costly to the whole of the IT organization. Goes to that old addage, “just because you can, doesn’t mean you should”.
Business service management practices help you to weigh the cost and value and most importantly, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”. Until an existing service outlives it’s usefulness or becomes a costly support burden, these services are not suitable targets for cloud infrastructures.
The three use cases are accurate and eye openers for the operations folks. The time for push-back is over and it is time we work to become agile organizations. In this case, Platform and Infrastructure-as-a-Service providers exist and are easily accessible with a credit card. This is an expensive bypass, but the options exist and the crafty developers will most definitely go around operations to develop new services. Then the time comes as Bernard points out, when the service needs to go into production and the infrastructure isn’t there and operations is not able to monitor, manage and support the new service taking more of a black eye.
The one thing 2011 has is an abundance of sourcing options and is the year we work toward common business goals and put the management systems in place that will help us to achieve these goals.
How agile is your operations team?
Michele
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Organizations looking to deploy private clouds must understand where they’re headed. A development cloud is an appropriate start, but consider these three scenarios for how use of your cloud will evolve — for better or for worse….. (Read Full Article…)
The recent earthquakes in New Zealand got me thinking about early warnings. A CIO.com article suggested that computerized early-warning signals might help warn people of impending disasters like the one that happened in February. What do earthquakes have to do with IT? Well, you might need early warning systems too before disaster strikes your system.
In the CIO.com article, researchers were talking about warnings measured in seconds, but suppose you had the power to stop your network disaster long before it happened? A good monitoring system can give you that power. It may not save lives as the earthquake systems have the potential to do, but it could save your company money and you and your colleagues loads of frustration and aggravation.
Earthquakes leave death and devastation in their wake. I don’t mean to equate human misery on that scale with a computer outage, yet when systems go down it still can affect many people depending on its scope. If a service like Gmail goes down it could have an impact on millions of people.
When your mission critical systems go down, it can have a profound impact on productivity and that translates into actual dollars and cents measured in hours of lost productivity. If your web site goes down and you rely it on for ecommerce purposes, you can equate it with actual lost dollars
Regardless of how you measure it or look at it, if you could prevent a systems disaster most companies would do it. And when you have good measuring systems in place and tuned correctly to measure how well your systems are running, you have at least the potential to help troubleshoot and prevent long term outages on your system before they cause problems.
It is certainly not on the scale of an earthquake, but you can implement your own early warning systems before disaster strikes your systems.
Photo by Rhys’s Piece Is on Flickr. Used under Creative Commons License.
The Hub Commentary_
While this is more of a post promoting a conference, I have had many conversations with co-workers of late while working on how we speak about Business Service Management and how do we break it down into simple speak and most of all why is it relevant.
We hear a lot about IT and Business alignment, which I completely disagree with. This is the only industry I can think of where we talk about one group needing to align to it’s business. What I equate this with are the youngsters that show up at work these days and tell me what their work schedule will be and what they will do. I shake my head and think when did this change? You go to work and do what you are told and work toward the common goals of the business, why has IT always been different and why?
Businesses that lead their markets, don’t make this delineation. Also, what does this really have to do with the data center and operations anyway. Operations doesn’t build new services and architectures, we just support them. That is is exactly the point.
We spend 1-2% of revenue merely “keeping the light on”, operating and reacting to what is happening. We spend another 1-2% of revenue on outages, yikes, that is expensive. The impact to operations is improving these stats and spend. Setting ourselves up to embrace, manage, measure and communicate technology as services as fast as new services and architectures come at us is what we in operations need to do.
Think about how you automate and provide early warning signals regarding the infrastructure like a high performance sports car before technology meltdown. This is the power operations needs to embrace in managing, measuring and communicating services with the business objectives in mind.
Are you ready for new services and technology in operations?
Michele
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IT leaders are at a crossroads. To thrive in today’s — and tomorrow’s — rapidly changing digital world, they must move beyond the elusive idea of business and IT alignment, where business leaders are in the driver seat and IT leaders play a supporting and lagging role. Rather than plodding along in alignment, it’s time to jump in the copilot seat. (Read Full Article…)
The Hub Commentary_
Accenture research indicates 40% of all cloud knowledgeable business will use the cloud to drive new revenue over the next 5 years. This is a shift from just leveraging it operationally currently to cut costs on infrastructure for irregular surges in capacity requirements or moving from an old system to a new one that is Software-as-a-Service based.
This is a typical approach and cycle, go after the low hanging fruit first to cut costs before a strategic use is put in place. This should serve as a wake-up call to IT operations that it is coming and will you be ready to monitor, manage and communicate effectively when the infrastructure requirements are ready for production operations. Monitoring, managing and measuring complex mixed environments will require one of three choices to be made: 1) Seek to an integrated, single vendor that has the platform to manage the infrastructure, 2) Build the integration yourself across your heterogeneous environment or 3) Seek an integration platform that is your manager of managers.
I find what was old is new again. I’ve read many papers and sat through many analyst presentations as of late that call for the integration platform that will enable IT operations to stitch together the fabric of the infrastructure in order to continue to communicate technology as services. Now more than ever it is important to get to measuring and communicating technology as services as it only gets harder in these mixed environments.
I agree with the parting comment by the author, Jeanne Harris, smart IT executives will jump on their preparation to not only define new revenue generating avenues, but also operations to support and manage the new services without delay.
How ready are you to manage services in the cloud?
Michele
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If an IT leader works for a company that isn’t named Amazon, Google or Facebook, chances are it hasn’t gotten a big revenue boost from the cloud. It’s much more likely that the company has used the cloud to cut costs, replace a standalone software application or back up older documents. (Read Full Article…)
VMware has introduced a new iPad app for IT professionals that enables you to monitor your virtual machines from the iPad. The vSphere Client app was approved and available in the Apple App Store as of March 18th.
This tool brings monitoring to mobile devices. While some tools like Windows Intune let you access the monitoring console from a mobile browser, VMware built an app from the ground up to give IT professionals access to the virtual machines they monitor from wherever they are from the iPad..
You can monitor performance, keep an eye on your host servers and all of the virtual machines associated with those servers in a visually attractive, easy-to-manipulate interface.
The way it works is you download the app, log into your VMware account and you get access to all of the servers under your watch. You click a server and you can see the all of the virtual machines running on it. It even provides little icons like Windows and Red Hat to let you know which virtual machines are running a particular operating system. You can see a shot of this screen below:
Once you have a server displayed you can put it in maintenance mode or even reboot it remotely from your iPad if need be.
Clicking on a particular virtual machine displays a screen with information about that virtual machine such as recent events, and each virtual machine has controls like the server that let you suspend, stop or restart it as needed.
What’s more you can see the amount of memory and CPU that the chosen virtual machine is using from the server as a whole.
We like to show many examples of different types of monitoring on this blog, and this new tool from VMware brings virtual machine monitoring to a new level. It might not be as comprehensive as the tools you have access from your PC, but it provides a lot of good information to help you manage and understand your virtual machine environment from an iPad and from a monitoring perspective, that’s pretty exciting stuff.
Screenshot courtesy of VMware.
The Hub Commentary_
I agree with Don and his summary of this topic as it hits the core of any business service management practice – it isn’t IT and then the Business, IT is the business. In some cases it is more prevalent that technology is driving revenue with online order processing and customer interactions. In all cases I can point someone to how IT is the business in the supporting functions that drive the efficiency and effectiveness in a more behind the scenes nature.
There are 3 things Don calls attention to regarding IT and the focus now on driving revenue and lining up with business objectives: 1) Innovation where IT drives revenue very obviously, 2) Competition from the cloud providers and 3) Cost cutting driving bottom line margin. We have focused too long and too much on the last, driving out costs, without automating so we can focus on the first one. The catalyst for the “why now” question is the obvious, the second piece – the competition.
IT has not balanced growing and operating well in the past and has created opportunity for competition with new technology and buying options from the many cloud providers that are growing exponentially this year. Investment must be made to automate the mundane operating to create intelligence for higher quality services, but also freeing resources to concentrate on innovation.
Are you balanced between growing and operating?
Michele
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InformationWeek has been out and about talking up their most recent CIO survey and keeps calling attention to the fact that one in three CIOs see creating a new business or business model as a driver in 2011. This is not a new phenomenon, but one in three is more CIOs than I would have intuitively thought, so I started to think about it.
The Hub Commentary_
The ebbs and flows of break-up and re-marry are alive and well in the Telecomm sector. While this is interesting in the telco industry, I hear you asking, “Michele, what does this has to do with Business Service Management?” It’s one sentence buried right in the middle of the article, lack of competition brings , fewer choices, higher prices and less innovation.
IT is in exactly the opposite situation these days with virtualization going mainstream and cloud providers popping up daily. Due to the high cost of IT, lack of ability for the business to influence new services, flexibility and the delivery of services in market time, competition and new options have become available to meet those requirements.
Organizations have the opportunity to dig out of the hole of stagnation and illustrate a nimble approach in delivering new and higher quality services to the market while leveraging new technology. The IT organizations that do this effectively and manage service value in lock step with business objectives will be next year’s leaders in their industry.
How are you driving innovation?
Michele
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It’s clear that AT&T’s proposed acquisition of T-Mobile USA would reshape the U.S. wireless market by combining the country’s No. 2 and No. 4 operators. What’s not clear is whether the deal, which is subject to regulatory approval, will actually go through. (Read Full Article…)
Without a doubt the three trends having the biggest impact on the enterprise today are mobile, social and the cloud. These three elements have put the ability to access and share information easily into the hands of every employee with little or no intervention from IT, and from the perspective of some CIOs, that’s a very scary prospect indeed.
In a recent article on CIO Insight, A World of Risk: Are CIOs Up to the Challenge, author Irfan Salf looked at some of the risks associated with these technologies. Like it or not these, technologies are driving the movement toward what has been called the consumerization of IT.
In an article last week on Fortune, Brian Caufield talked about this trend saying that unlike the old days when IT dictated exactly what devices were allowed in the enterprise, and which ones were not, that power is fading fast as people (particularly executives) want to use their iPads and iPhones at work.
Beyond the devices, the cloud and social media tools bring another layer of simplicity for end users and complexity to IT pros in terms of monitoring and mitigating risk for the enterprise. The good news for users is that it means they can get their files anywhere from any machine, but conversely that could be bad news for you if it means dealing with compliance and governance headaches.
Like it or not , however, the ship has sailed and you can’t really go back to the way you were before. The fact is that even as the cloud/mobile/social could life difficult for IT, locking down your enterprise is as counterproductive in its own way as shutting down the Internet was in Egypt in January. It hurts you as much as it helps you.
In the end these trends aren’t going away, and they can help build and enhance your business. The fact is that you need to find a way to make this all work.
One way to do that is to use monitoring tools to help you get as big a picture as you can of your entire system. PC monitoring can help you track laptops. You can jump on the bandwagon and create custom apps to help you track mobile devices or you can give your employees access to your secure environment, so that when they are working on work-related materials they are better protected.
Just recently, I wrote about how companies like Box.net were changing the face of Enterprise software. One of the features of the most recent Box iOs release was aimed directly at this type of situation by giving your users SSO access to enterprise identity systems.
Instead of fighting against a change that can ultimately help your organization, look for ways to make it work for you and find ways to use the systems you already have in place. Monitoring tools can help you find that compromise you need to free your users, yet give you the control you need.
Photo by sfllaw on Flickr. Used under Creative Commons License
The Hub Commentary_
In the next 12 months the Corporate Executive Board predicts that one of the driving IT trends includes the end-to-end views of managing technology as business services. The complexity of the environment is turning business service management practices into an imperative versus a nice to have.
The re-focusing of resources on growth and driving revenue is coming more and more to the forefront, while still balancing good cost conscience practices, but the time has come to move from only focusing on operating to driving growth.
This is a great article and the close is spot on, those that drive growth and put good business service management practices in place will lead their industry and the others will play catch-up. It’s not about IT and business aligning, it’s about driving the business forward with technology.
How are you growing your business with technology?
Michele
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Demand for increased business-partner control of IT is coming from opposite ends of the workplace spectrum: senior business executives and frontline end users. IT in 2011: We’re Managing Information, Not Just Technology….. (Read Full Article…)
The Hub Commentary_
Today, I might agree that Cloud is somewhat disruptive, but for the right vendors it will be sustaining. The mere fact that Amazon led the charge to change the purchasing model indicates that there is a desire for change in the industry just as they changed online purchasing forever. The conversation that shifts this from disruptive to sustaining is the business service management discussion regarding cost and value and the appropriate deployment option.
This comes down to the planning and the best use of service providers and technology in your environment to deliver high quality services and drive value (revenue) for your organization. We tend to focus way too much time (85% of the IT budget – 1-2% of revenue) on just operating rather than driving revenue and innovation for the business.
It’s not about The Cloud, it’s about using technology to drive revenue and differentiating services for your business.
What are you doing to drive growth for your business?
Michele
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If you’ve read this blog over the past couple of years, it should be no surprise that I am a huge advocate of the theories of Clayton Christensen, author of “The Innovator’s Dilemma.” Christensen and his book were brought to mind this week by the cover story in Forbes about his severe health problems, his experience with the U..S healthcare system, and his prescriptions for how to fix it. (Read Full Article…)
I had a meeting with a customer the other day which was centered on virtualization and private cloud and a funny thing happened: it morphed into a Business Service Management (BSM) discussion. The discussion got me trying to put my arms around “BSM in a virtual environment” and what it means.
In a traditional BSM scenario, you are managing your IT from a business perspective with the ability to drill into the business models until you can isolate and correlate the technology supporting the business service. But in a virtual environment, you’ve abstracted another layer, right? For example, my order processing is running slow. Which is of more value to me? The first layer down tells me that the virtual database server is experiencing a performance hit or knowing that the underlying network-attached storage is living in a network segment that is currently overloaded due to end of the month processing?
To be honest, I’m not sure there is a clear answer. I think if I am the “break/fix” guy, I need to know at the lowest level so I can attack the problem in the infrastructure. And of course, the business unit wants to know at the highest level that order processing is experiencing a slowdown.
What my conclusion was is that at the highest level, BSM hasn’t changed. You are still mapping out your business processes to show the health of the process flow and the performance of the service. But, to accurately or perhaps more appropo, usefully, map the technology to the business process, you need to have the virtual abstraction layer, which has the actual infrastructure mapped to it. This could lead to some interesting analysis, such as response times across the virtual environment compared to response times in the physical environment and how they both correlate to performance of the business service. Just some food for thought.
I’d be interested to hear about some real-life examples. How are you monitoring the virtual?
As you look at cloud computing, it’s useful to understand that there are three types of services offered:
Once you have a basic understanding of how cloud services break down, it’s useful to think about how these different levels of cloud services could affect your IT environment, how comfortable you might be farming out some of these services to the cloud and what impact it would have on your ability to understand and monitor these different services as part of your overall IT job function.
Photo by Lucien Savluc on Flickr. Used under Creative Commons License.
The Hub Commentary
All things in moderation yes…but I’m convinced a healthy dose of “March Madness” can actually give a boost to office and employee morale and reduce some workplace tension. Just don’t let it get too carried away and I bet you might even find that filling out a tournament bracket and following your favorite team(s) improves productivity and gets some adrenalin pumping in your ever hardening veins.
Randy
Nearly one third of bosses say that the NCAA Basketball Tournament activity should not be allowed in the workplace, but 80% of employees say that major sporting events such as “March Madness” present no distractions from work duties. Read more here
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