Business Service Management Hub

The Hub Commentary_

IT at the speed of Formula One.  I’ve been writing about transformation for quite a while now and having spent 15 years in Indianapolis, I developed an affection for racing.  It’s hard to develop that affection from TV, you have to see it live, walk through the pits and garages, smell the fuel and rubber, hear the sounds which vary by type of car, etc. to appreciate what goes into racing today.

As an old application developer, I have to say how cool a job it would be to be working with racing teams, on the other hand the pressure for IT and the systems to perform might be too much stress.  To the risk taker go the spoils!

Here is the best quote that concludes the article,  “If [IT changes] reduce the amount of manual work engineers have to do, they can focus on the car and driver,” he says. The team, meanwhile, prepares for the next two races in Spain and Monaco this month.  Maybe Lotus F1 will find that three seconds.

This is IT in tune with the customer and what tuning means to the business, the business happens to be very cool racing with very large payouts for the successful.  This is true in commercial business as well.  Business requires technology and technology is the life blood of competitiveness, growth and profitability.

How competitive is your IT?  Where does your Drive come from?

Michele

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Lotus F1’s IT team made a technology pit stop and changed from a traditional application development strategy to an agile approach. Why shift gears? The pit crew and car designer wanted better data faster — and IT wasn’t about to pass on the opportunity.   (Read Full Article…)

IT is in the midst of a great transformation and wrote about this in a previous blog as referenced by a CIO article and a Forrester blog.  For those of us who have been in and around IT for the past 20 years, we’ve seen this ebb and flow of change.  New technology, growth of service providers, decentralization and then back to centralization and cost containment.  It was desktop computing and LANs, web services and eCommerce and now it is the cloud.  This time is different though, the business is driving and creating the new IT.  There is competition and easier buying models that didn’t exist previously.  I will also state that outsourcing is not cheaper, it is creating the change that cannot be created from within – the new IT requirement.

In the previous post and CIO article, I mentioned IT needing to run more like the vendors they purchase technology from and marketing would become a key component.  Many think of IT marketing as marketing great technology services and uptime within the organization.  It is just this wrong kind of marketing that is driving the transformation for change.  Your business does not care about technology uptime, the business cares about driving out cost for profitability and driving up revenue for growth and profitability.  Marketing of IT has 3 facets:

• Know your services, their cost and value
• Know your competition and their capabilities
• Know the market requirements of your customers

This is a transformation where internal IT is already late for the dance and few possess the capability to enter the dance floor with a perfect tango balancing technical capability and innovative intrigue.  The competition knows this weaknesses and is capitalizing on it.  Technology vendors are also making the shift as to who the new buyers of technology and services are – the business and the service providers.  The difference between the technology vendors and IT is that the vendors are used to identifying markets, trends, shifts and making the adjustments required to capitalize on a market based upon the buyers and their requirements.

Know Your Services

Assess your current landscape of services and future services and where they fall into this simple grid.  This will help you to understand business drivers.  For example:  services for competitive advantage have little care for cost or quality, it is about speed to market.  In order to accomplish this, IT will require the flexibility to deploy with speed and mitigate cost and negative customer impact with controlled risk.  This is service enabling the infrastructure leveraging management technology to perform the monitoring and controlled risk, while the technologists apply the internal IP to the services with the right technology and right deployment options.

This will transform IT into the service managers that are developing in the business today with the underground New IT movement.  I would suggest that the model adopted by IT in their strategy to transform would be applying focus of time and resources as accordingly:

• 50% on services driving competitive advantage
• 30% on services for service quality and service efficiency
• 20% on services driving out operating cost

The competition is focused on addressing the requirement of competitive advantage in your business, this is ITs greatest weakness and the service provider / vendors greatest ability to drive value.  ITs marketing efforts must begin here in developing the holistic strategy of technology, deployment options, cost and value to the business.

Know the Competition

Developing a holistic strategy will include a multi-vendor and service provider approach.  Understand internal strengths, weaknesses and the outside capabilities to drive the highest value, lowest cost solution and deployment.  This would break the traditional cycle of change driven out of frustration to outsource, not value or cost.  Outsourcing is not the lowest cost option, but right sourcing to meet the right objectives to deploy the right solution is IT transforming into strategic.

The competition also has weaknesses in high growth times like these.  The strength of IT is operational focus, while both the providers and IT could benefit from a bit of operational maturity, now is the time to illustrate operational maturity with good management practices, processes and ability to communicate business value.  The service providers are investing in the communication, while taking a risk (controlled risk in some cases) on management in meeting a time to market requirement.  To meet the same time to market requirement within your organization, evaluating how you leverage management technology to automate your processes and provide the communication required for your business, would provide both competitive advantage and allow you to focus your IP on driving new services.

Know your Customers

Typically when you ask IT about their customers, they respond with their users and internal employees.  Here I am speaking about knowing the customers of your business.  Why do they select your company for your services?  What do you do better than your competition?  Who is the competition of your business?

Instead of working to control the environment so tightly and throw up obstacles and barriers to change and adoption of new technology and interactions with both the employees (Service Efficiency) and customers (Competitive Advantage), embrace them.  Understand how and why they seek to use specific devices, technology, methods of interaction, etc. and how to best deploy the right option.  This is understanding the requirement, not necessarily mimicking each and every device and method.  Provide the flexibility, while balancing control and risk.  This is most important when evaluating customer requirements and creating loyalty.

Think about who you prefer to do business with and why in your personal life and bring this into your IT organization to start the transformation revolution.  While I agree that marketing within your organization is relevant, marketing the right services and message will drive the greatest value in your organization.  This is dependent upon knowing your customers, requirements, competition and a focus shift from technology operators to communicating and driving revenue as service managers.

Do you know your services, customers and competition?

Michele

This past week Kim S. Nash, Senior Editor for CIO, publshed an insightful article, “Top CIOs Predict the Five-Year Future of the CIO”.  I’ll paraphrase a few of the key points that I jotted down and stuck out when I read through the article:

• CIO of the future will be an Entrepreneur, Futurist, Global Talent Scout, Connector, Master of Business Metrics
• CIO / CTO Split?  No support for this prediction and fractures the ability to manage / deploy technology and be a strategist
• Big Technology Trends – Cloud, Mobile, Social Media, Consumerization, Big Data, etc. will not change the role
• Manage change, Not Technology
• Set strategy, Not server thresholds
• Technology will change the way a company interacts with it’s customers
• CIO Effectiveness – He/She handles and sparks major business shifts
• Entrepreneur
  • In-house futurist, will be measured by financial measure, will run a business and market like the vendors they purchase from
  • Set aside technology and focus on business outcomes
• Connector and Futurist
  • Will foster partnership with the providers to his company to deliver joint solutions
  • How workers, consumers and suppliers will create competitive advantage
• Global Talent Scout
  • Roles will change from operators to managers
  • Location won’t matter
• Master of Business 
  • Responsible to create new products and attract new customers, new revenue and thus new accountability
  • Innovate

There has been a long standing initiative and talk in the press and analyst papers regarding IT being part of the business and not separate from the business.  However, according to the analysts, more than 90% of IT organizations remain reactive and disconnected from the business.  I would concur with this.  We all attend industry conferences and think about how you answer this question, “What do you do?”.  Most of the time when I ask it, the response is something like I manage servers, I manage UNIX servers, I administer databases, I manage the networks, etc.  Then I look at their badge, see who they work for and respond with, “Oh you sell insurance or investment banking or ……”.

Before I visit a customer, I do a quick read of their annual report, the letter from the CEO and peruse their website so that when I shake the first hand, I have a fair idea what powers their business.  I continue to be surprise by the number of IT technologists that do not know the business their own organization is in or what powers the business, thus setting the easiest to identify priority.  Technology without imagination is a commodity, Technology with imagination has endless possibilities, however, most of us act as mere commodity operators keeping the lights on.  Keeping the lights on carries an annual cost of 1-2% of revenue, the time has come to power the business and drive with technology.

According to a Gartner and Forbes survey of Board of Directors (BoD), 65% of BoD count on technology to drive competitive advantage for the business and according to IDC >50% of IT will be outsourced by 2013.  The role of IT must evolve and it has become an imperative with the advent of competition and new buying models.  Competition with the MSPs/ASPs/ISPs, Cloud, SaaS, etc. has arrived and why the business has the buying decisions and is choosing to outsource IT.  The time has come to transform and the catalyst is the competition.  Kim does a great job describing the role of the CIO and the new face of IT in 5 years.

As a previous analyst in the outsourcing market, I will tell you as I have told many customers, no one outsources for cost.  It is a perceived cost reduction.  What isn’t factored into the equation is 3-7% of the cost of the contract to manage the relationship and the service and keeping overspending in check.  Outsourcing occurs to create change in the environment that is near impossible to do from within.  I wait each day for the new Fortune 500 list to arrive and I will hold it to compare with next year’s list.  Those that make the transformation to power their business with technology will take leadership spots in their industry’s.

Now let’s talk about what it will take to make this transformation.  To achieve the things Kim speaks of, IT must first know what the business is; then how best to use technology to operate it, create competitive advantage, communicate and market results, proactively make real-time changes, and why customers engage to drive future strategy.

What is the Business

In most businesses to drive revenue, you evaluate why customers engage with your organization.  In this case, IT in most cases, doesn’t know the business or the services of the business.  Step 1 must be to understand the business and current services.  I’ve written a previous post on The BSM Hub describing how to categorize and know your services based upon their value to the organization.  This will define how you manage these services and the supporting technology.  All services are not created equal and thus knowing the services and their relevance to the business is the first step to transforming to Service Managers versus Service Operators.

Here is a true story.  I once spoke at a medium sized regional event on the topic of Service Value and managing services in the winter of 2009.  After I finished speaking a man approached me and indicated while the discussion was interesting, IT is not strategic to his organization.  I looked at his badge and noticed he worked for a candy manufacturer.  So my first question was to go after the life blood of the business, the manufacturing line of the candy.  “Does IT have anything to do with the manufacturing line?”, the response was “no”.  Second question, “I know you must have an ERP system, correct”, “why yes we do…….”.  “I venture to guess that sales and distribution to your customers is important business, right?”, “Why yes it is”.  Now he is standing taller.  I mention how in September 1999 Hershey made the front page of the Wallstreet Journal for the poor deployment of an ERP and CRM system costing them Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, Valentines and most of Easter.  The lesson was that the public wasn’t as loyal to chocolate as they are to toothpaste and will buy what is on the shelves at the time.  “So managing and providing high availability of your sales, distribution and customer relationship management is critical to your business, wouldn’t you say?”.  He left with a different perspective than he came to the conversation with.

Companies are in the headlines everyday due to technology failures pointing out that if you do not know your business and what it costs you to be a mere operator, reacting to incidents, the press and the outsourcers will put  value on the situation.  The time has come to know the business, the services and their value and the supporting technology in order to manage it accordingly.

How Technology Supports the Business

Now that we know what the business is, let’s take a look at how the technology supports the business.  It is no longer sufficient to keep the lights on and manage all equipment the same.  Understanding the underlying infrastructure that supports the services defined above will change the way you manage the infrastructure.  Priority must be applied, not just severity of an event, business impact will be factored into the management of the technology.  Service enabled management in real-time must be applied, it is not a nice to have, but a must have.  Given the organization is wasting 1-2% of revenue annually, a service enabling management infrastructure is cheap and paid for before the first year is over.

Many management vendors speak of speed to root cause and speed to restoration.  This is still reactionary IT.   What is required is real-time, actionable intelligence to do something before a business impacting event occurs and avoid that business impacting event.  This now brings me to what many of the financial institutions already know, management is a mission critical service and requires high availability redundancy (as described in a post by my friend Tobin).  Don’t believe me?  So then I ask this question, “When flying on an airplane, do you want the pilot flying without instrumentation?, Then why would you run your business without instrumentation?”.

Now that you know the business and how your current technology maps to those services, it’s time to evaluate the best technologies and deployment options for the services and service enable them with management upfront, not as an afterthought.  Again, go back to the quadrant of services I described earlier.  Just because you have capability in-house to deliver commodity services, that isn’t generally the best choice.  Outsource the commodity.  Keep the competitive expertise in-house and evolve to manage services and put the proper instrumentation in place to service enable the infrastructure to mitigate risk, provided controlled risk for speed to market and provide the real-time actionable intelligence to make shifts on the fly to keep business running and creating quality customer experiences.

Why Customers Engage

Now that you have a grasp on today, let’s now use this new service enabled infrastructure to start creating the strategy to provide  stickiness with your customers, improve the customer experience with technology, creates competitive advantage and driving revenue.  This evaluation is 2 fold:  keeping current customers and gaining new customers.  Look at how customers want to do business with you, what devices they use, where and when they conduct business, etc. and often times creating a higher quality of service to maintain current customers will drive gaining new customers.

True innovation changes how an industry does business, think of eBay in the early days.  These sorts of transformations are rare, however, we are in the throws already of just this sort of transformation with how IT must revolutionize itself into the new IT.  Business is creating the new IT on it’s own by taking business folks with consumer technology knowledge and making the technology purchases in a decentralized manner.  Some call this “shadow IT”, I call it the “New IT”.  They are doing this because the current IT thinks more about managing and not enough about how to use the technology they are so good at running.

Running technology is the commodity, leveraging the IP in house to use technology to drive both revenue and competitive advantage is the new reality.  Now we’re back to where I started with my opening question, “What do you do for a living?”  Know your business, customers and how best to engage with them to drive your business.  Shift the focus of IT because the change is already happening all around us.

As I conclude on how to approach this transformation,  an interesting quote from Kim’s article by Nasir Khan, Executive Director of Infornetics at Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association, the administrator of 38 Blue Cross and Blue Shield health care providers covering 99M people, “Tactical reactionaries will be obsolete”.  This is why I look forward to comparing this years Fortune 500 list to next year’s as I fully expect that there will be a shake up at the top of many industries.  The shake up will occur because some make the transformation and do it rapidly and others remain as operators and commodity IT.

I do not want to leave you with the impression that the first two steps leave the business out.  Starting with Step 1, knowing the services and business, IT must engage with the business, start managing priorities and services as they power the business.  This cannot be an IT project.  The second step of mapping technology and deployment options to the services cannot become an inward IT CMDB project.  Yes, a CMDB does support this initiative, but it is about the services, not the project of creating IT documentation fondly called a CMDB.  Another ascertion I would make is that a CMDB project is of no value, but I’ll save the discussion as  to why for another post.  This transformation cannot be another IT project, it is a business transformation and those that succeed, will lead their industries in next year’s Fortune 500 list.

Investment must be made as a business investment that gives IT the management capability to manage services, manage providers, communicate real-time in business terms and use that management intelligence to drive competitive advantage both with new services and quality services that keep customers loyal.  Drive the cost out of the commodity and drive value  into the revenue.

How are you preparing for your transformation and service enabled infrastructure?

Michele

The Hub Commentary_

Technology spending is up from last year, but not across the board.  Interesting observation where investments are being made in software and subscriptions as I would have expected.

The competition of the service providers is heating up pushing IT organizations to think about where they invest to improve their business.  The environment is getting more complex with the introduction of multiple deployment platforms and managing the infrastructure in lock step with the business and evaluating outside options for commodity services will continue to grow.

Outsourcing options aid in driving change within the organization and the evaluation of which services are best suited inside and outside the organization.

Michele

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While I am still relatively bullish on the 2012 tech market outlook for the US (see April 2, 2012, “US Tech Market Outlook For 2012 To 2013“), I have to say that the data we got on the US economy and on the US tech market was a bit softer than I expected.  US real GDP growth came in at 2.2%, a bit lower than my expectation of 2.5%.  On the positive side, consumer spending rose by 2,9% in real terms, and residential construction continued to improve.  (Read Full Article…)

Mobility and wireless network infrastructures are the big takers when it comes to IT budget planning for 2012, our latest study reveals. Even so, organizations are moving to the next stage of the IT infrastructure build-out across multiple budget areas, and our 2012 IT Investment Patterns Study shows how the strategy trends of innovation, integration and reversion are having a significant impact on 2012 spending patterns.  Read More Here . . .

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In this survey results for spending in IT Operations/Management/Governance are the only area with an increase is Data Center Management. Those that are following the lead of the service providers will see this as the management of the technology to deliver that consistent and stable IT performance for business value from my previous post. Mobile delivery options prevail as a leading technology as the consumerization / BYOD (bring your own device) of IT continues. However, these solutions must perform and be available to drive your organizations competitive advantage in the market.  This is the link to business for 2012 investments requiring the stitching together of data from the many systems and applications that are in place today and turning it into real-time actionable information.

Does your IT just run the business or does it drive the business?

Michele

Organizations practicing Business Service Management (BSM) have reaped benefits by aligning their IT with their business processes, improving end-to-end management and standardizing and automating routine tasks. Latest market trend shows CIO’s are slowly adopting cloud computing to reduce costs, increase storage, use the flexibility of automation and ultimately freeing up IT resources to stop worrying about server updates and shift focus on innovation.

Companies offering BSM are now faced with a new set of challenges that makes me question is BSM ready for the cloud? Service Level Agreement, which is absolutely vital and important for engagement of service or product, should now monitor, measure and report end user’s experience or end user’s ability to consume resources rather than customer based agreement. Performance challenge would be to provide end-to-end view in a hybrid cloud computing that spans a combination of on-premise, off-premise, physical and virtual environments by testing for bandwidth, connectivity, scalability, and the end user experience. Ultimately BSM should address security concerns that prevent companies to save their important data outside the firewall.

Given the challenges and also the benefits of cloud computing its wait and watch to see if CIO’s invest and adopt BSM for cloud computing.

Manju

The Hub Commentary_

As the iPad2 came to market and there were many articles regarding the use of employees bringing their own devices to the work environment saving capex spending.  My challenge with this is the hidden cost of support and security of data.  Just because the employee can bring a device in does not mean it should come in and be supported without a business reason.

I was seeking a genuine business reason that these devices become a business value add, justifying a new deployment option.  As I started to read this article it sounded more personal preference and that this CIO still had a secondary device too.  Just as I arrived at the end of the article there were a couple of great examples for use.

The medical field and the sharing of a simple device with access to patient information with the ability to access personal calendars and email that is portable for the shifts of the medical staff.  Now add file sharing and synchronization services where the data is backed-up elsewhere and accessible by many from many devices and I’m on board with true business value changing the way business is conducted improving patient care and creating efficiencies for the staff.

How are you using new devices for value and efficiency for a good business service management practice?

Michele

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One CIO who has already made the iPad a critical part of his organization shares what he liked – and still wished for – after his first couple of days with the iPad 2. Read on for his take on FaceTime, Apple’s not-so “smart” cover, and more.  (Read Full Article…)

The Hub Commentary_

Figuring out  facts from fiction will be key for CIO’s as they map out their cloud computing strategies and justify the investment to their CEOs.  Cloud Computing ROI will be measured in ways far beyond the typical promises of cost savings.  Business Service Management ROI can’t be overlooked as enterprises accelerate their way to the cloud.

Randy

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To borrow from Mark Twain’s famous remark about the weather, everybody talks about the cloud, but nobody knows anything about it. At a time when companies’ use of clouds is just getting started, the chief information officer’s judgment and store of knowledge are invaluable assets. These are especially important when the CIO sets out to educate that most important stakeholder of all, the chief executive officer.  (Read Full Article…)

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

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.

(Read Full Article…)

The Hub Commentary_

The link to read the article below merely requires you to set up a sign-on with McKinsey for free.

Nice article to take heed to as we ebb and flow with new technology.  A doesn’t pass that I don’t read an article regarding bringing the mobile devices to the workplace and expecting support as an example.  Business service management practices have to govern the cost and business value of doing so or we end up spending more to support without a business value.

David speaks of joining as CIO into an organization that had grown fast, had many systems, decentralized, spaghetti strings of complexity to manage and support.  We all sit on the cusp of this reality as many seek to take the short term gains of new technology (cloud, virtualization, consumer devices, etc.).

It’s great when things ar booming and business is good, everyone overlooks the reality of what is progressing in IT.  In fact, we do it to ourselves because we do not have or take the time to step back, plan and take the time to do the long term right thing strategically to sustain long term growth.

I experienced this once in my career as well, the cost of doing business starts to overshadow the IT organization when it grows in this manner.  The business enjoys the revenue growth, but they too are looking at the spend against the revenue as margins and thus IT while seeming to support the growth is dragging down the business.

It is easier to measure twice and cut once up front than to create change as David did here and I commend him and his efforts.  I also see and understand that it took the team from the business and IT to come together as one unit and drive business goals and objectives to make this successful.  Often times creating change like this is difficult for the business and why it is often outsourced.  If outsourced, they would not have realized these savings.  The savings would have gone to the margin of the service provider and the business to manage the relationship.

This team achieved a 50% reduction in IT budget over 2 years and 65% in data size and cost in 3 years, that is truly phenomenal and also shows it can be done when the team comes together.  And as David looks back in the close of the story, he indicates holding firm to standards earlier would have made it more successful.

Thus putting the proper business service management strategy in place while in growth mode and service enabling the infrastructure as it grows and leverages new technology may take 5 minutes more, but in the end saves and grows the business faster and more successfully.  Awesome article!

Are you growing your business and service enabling the infrastructure at the same time?

Michele

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Since TalkTalk’s inception, in 2003, the company has grown both organically and through acquisitions to become the United Kingdom’s second-largest broadband provider, serving more than four million customers. Rapid growth, however, left the company with fragmented and inflexible operations and IT, which raised operating costs and made it harder to manage the customer base and maximize revenues across brands.  (Read Full Article…)

The Hub Commentary_

Business service management practices have always known business and technology are one and not ‘and’ one to another.  Designing services above the silos based upon desired business outcomes is absolutely the right approach, I wholeheartedly agree with Randy’s assessment and this has been at the heart of all business service management projects and practices.

Measurements – if you cannot measure it, it may not be worth monitoring and managing, let the business outcomes be your measuring guide.

Mapping – now map your underlying infrastructure to the top line services.

Automation – what automations and improvements can you make to the supporting infrastructure that will improve the top line outcomes.

Innovation – look at how applying new technologies can improve the capabilities in driving top line outcomes.

This is the transformation that the data center will need to move through in the coming year with a concept that is not new, business service management.

Is you data center IT or Business focused?

Michele

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Stop designing IT architecture around applications and start designing for business outcomes, says Forrester’s Randy Heffner. He shares five key questions to get you started. (Read Full Article…)

The Hub Commentary_

Consumer technology trends will always push that of the internal IT organizations.  The next generation of workforce I think of as the “me generation”.  When did we shift from getting a job and doing the job to me the worker defining the job and how it is done?  I do find this curious and am a proponent of the flexible work environment.

With everything there comes a need for balance:  flexibility and control, the heart of any good business service management practice.  The first example of social media driving sales is an excellent example.  That same sort of internal community building can be useful in finding pockets of expertise with business and productivity applications.  You are creating a big presentation, who has done something similar? who might have an example? who could help with this tricky macro?  The possibilities are endless.

I do, however, see a significant risk to the business when everyone works the way they choose to work, with their own devices.  Where is the data? How secure is the transport? Are you losing your IP when these workers leave the company?

The balancing act of cost, risk and service value will become increasingly more relevant as the conversation continues.

How flexible is your business and how do you manage risk?

Michele

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Social media’s emergence as a key business app is just one of the trends that have led to a point of no return on consumer IT. Dell’s Paul D’Arcy explains — and shares how CIOs can plan for and benefit from the consumerization of IT.   (Read Full Article…)

The Hub Commentary_

This is a great article and the biggest one of them all that I would add to include, “Align IT to the Business”.   Do we say, align sales to the business or align investment banking to the business or align claims processing to the business or distribution of product to the business?  Why is IT different?  IT is the power of the business, they are not separate.

Many of the cliches listed are because IT is not operating as part of the business.  For example 2 & 3, one where legacy processes define how things are delivered and one where it was likely over customized for a commodity process.  Another favorite of mine is the final #8, buying just because it comes from a big name regardless of cost.  All of these tell me that there is no business service management practice in place.

If IT were part of the business and operated as part of the business, most of these cliches would not exist.

I challenge you to become part of the business and make business decisions and the cliches would evaporate, service quality would improve and IT would start looking at driving revenue rather than looking for scapegoat cliches.  However, I post this as there is tongue in cheek humor to the article for a Monday!

How are you removing the IT cliches?

Michele

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Now that another season of NFL games has come to an end and our national summer pastime is about to begin, it’s time to swap one set of cliches for another. Sports broadcasting is replete with cliches—nice, comfortable, familiar, predictable phrases that connect current sports fans with previous and future generations of sports enthusiasts.  (Read Full Article…)

The Hub Commentary_

The survey says 7% of IT buyers plan to buy iPad Tablets in Q1 2011 not as a replacement to laptops, but more experimental.  I know I am hooked and have it on the top of my “want” list, however, I continue with my “need” requirements.  The same struggle businesses will go through in determining the business value of the iPad internal to the organization.

I really want one and am a fan, but what will I get that I don’t really already have with my laptop.  Definite cool factor and smaller, lighter footprint, no doubt.  It will carry additional costs with the 3G service, so we would all need to be mindful there.

So what will it take to be adopted in the enterprise?  It will be driving down internal costs and the apps that also drive down costs and increase productivity.

Where in the enterprise and IT will the iPad rule?  In servicing and interacting with your customers.  It will be the unique applications that take advantage of that 1-click ease in the apps store, exposure to potential customers and providing the same experience with your customers that they enjoy with other suppliers.

So what would push me right off the ledge from the “want” to “need” category in justifying my iPad2?  Starz Play on the iPad….Starz are you listening?  I am a happy Verizon FiOS customer, I take my Wi-Fi with me with no additional charges and I download and watch movies from Starz for one flat monthly rate where ever I am.  However, for that monthly rate I don’t use it as often as I thought on the laptop.  However, I see the iPad as the device I would get more out of the subscription.

Ok, not a great justification and I may find a different service provider who supplies the device I choose use.  So you see from a business perspective, it is the subscription and the customer interaction that will be relevant and we are mobile enough that we will switch to he who makes life simple and transacts business the way we want to interact.

How will you deploy and support tablets in your enterprise?

Michele

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When it comes to releasing new form factors for its iPad tablet and other products, Apple not only gets there first; it gets there best. (Read Full Article…..)

The Hub Commentary

The role of the C”I”O continues to evolve.  And the “I”s have it!  Infrastructure, integration, intelligence and innovation will need to be the focus of  next-generation CIOs.  As the article states, this is a year of innovation and the re-alignment of IT resources.  The shift is from keeping the lights on to growing the revenue with new products and services.

This impact IT operations in that they have to be ready to support and analyze the mission critical and need to automate the routine and mundane.  What I find most astounding in the article is as usual, Innovation comes in 4th.

5-10% of budget is allocated for innovation and growth where >70% of the budget goes first to infrastructure and just keeping the lights on.  This is the shift that needs to occur by optimizing and leveraging technology for integration and automation shifting the spend on infrastructure down shifting the spend on innovation and growth to 30% or better.

Innovation and growth has to come to the forefront this year and stop being the afterthought or the nice to have after everything else is done.

Randy

While next-gen CIOs will emerge from traditional technology backgrounds as well as business-leader backgrounds with technology expertise, the report says, current CIOs will need to master four emerging personas in order to compete in the new environment.  Read more

The Hub Commentary_

I agree with the categories and the applications.  Think about those that are commodity and easily defined in a box and easily outsourced.  IT has a hard time doing this and evolving roles as they adopt business service management practices.  It’s about categorizing the services and defining the appropriate deployment option.

IT management and many of the monitoring fuctions are easily suited for SaaS offerings where the knitting together of the data from multiple vendors and/or in-house options are suited for the value-add of IT as the role evolves to a service provider.  The end-to-end service performance is the responsibility of IT and will require an integration platform strategy going forward to stitch together the fabric of service providers and in-house services as an end-to-end service to the business.

SaaS is a deployment option, it is the categorization of your services that should drive the appropriate deployment options.

How are you using and measuring your SaaS options?

Michele

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SaaS will steal the show in certain categories but remain a bit player in others, Forrester research shows. Here’s a look at how SaaS will affect IT management tools, ERP applications and more, for the next two years.  (Read Full Article…)

The Hub Commentary_

This is a nice summary of a longer piece by my friend Glenn of Forrester.  Delivering high quality, high productivity while being flexible are the keys to success as we sit on a tipping point with technology.  IT must be flexible and must evolve to balance driving efficiency with driving revenue growth for the business.

The roles in IT will evolve from monitoring to using technology to automate and insure standard processes and configurations elevating the role of IT to business analysts.  Business service management practices will also evolve bringing IT closer to driving the business rather than just operating the business.  Much of the lower levels of IT are becoming commodity both from a infrastructure and a monitoring perspective and we need to rethink and evolve the roles and the management of the data center to be more flexible going forward.

Nice piece summarizing the great shift occurring in the data center in the coming years.

Are you driving change or slowing change?

Michele

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IT must industrialize infrastructure and operations — and IT workers must be taught to abandon their love affair with complexity, says Forrester’s Glenn O’Donnell. Consider these 10 pieces of advice on how to do it right.  (Read Full Article…)

The Hub Commentary_

We have all become accustomed to social media avenues, we expect to interact with companies on the internet and CIOs must incorporate it as part of the infrastructure.  As the article states, it isn’t an IT strategy, it’s for IT to support as required, but an executive strategy.

Many of us think of it as a marketing strategy, however, it can also be a support and information avenue with your customers who demand instant access to information.  It is a paradigm for sharing internal communication and keeping data current too.  The challenge is just as the article states, looking at driving revenue growth through new and different channels.

How do you incorporate Social Media into your strategy?

Michele

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What does it take for businesses to successfully harness the power of social media? A new report from Forrester Research says that a social business strategy is key. Here’s how to create one.   (Read Full Article…)

The Hub Commentary_

Great article describing the business service management practices that all organizations should be looking at and going through as the industry is at a tipping point with new technology and an explosion of service providers.  There is no difference between IT and the business, it’s just the business as the article states.

The shift in metrics is a great example, it’s not server downtime that is relevant, it is the impact on the sales force and value of sales impacted by the downtime.  1-2% of revenue is spent on downtime each year and another 1-2% of revenue is spent each year for your resources to just react and maintain.  I discuss this in further length in this post.

Do you measure server availability or sales value impacted?

Michele

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It is essential to focus on people in order to get value from consolidation. At Eisai, our divisions functioned as separate companies, with the mind-set to match. When we brought together all of the U.S. organizations, I quickly discovered gaps.  (Read Full Article…)