Business Service Management Hub

The Hub Commentary

The opening statement of the article says it all and what I heard is, “the technology and services are incompatible with our processes” and resistance to change and why I predicted the service providers will feast on data centers in 2011 in my predictions post and why I also predicted first in the list that ITIL will wane in the conversation.  Data  center staff has to wake up and smell the coffee, so to speak.  Technology is commodity, driving business is the value.  Think of it this way, when you go to the bakery do you care how they make the chocolate cake or do you just want to buy a chocolate cake?

It is no longer about the monitoring and managing of technology and configurations, that’s the commodity and those jobs are with the service providers.  The IT jobs are analytics, business performance, using technology to grow the business.  All three of my posts today are articles referencing the impending transformation that the data center must embrace in 2011 or be outsourced.

Business is frustrated with IT because IT does nothing but talk and impose “how” to manage technology on the business rather than delivering and driving services.  When you outsource (cloud, as-a-Service, take your pick), you are purchasing a service, not managing the infrastructure and how they manage their processes.  Define the contract, service expectation, reliability/performance/availability considerations and what you expect during an service impacting event.  That’s it.  The service provider is tasked with meeting that service contract and defining the processes that insure they do.

Now I also state in these conversations over and over again, many of these start-up service providers are one outage away from being out of business because they do not have good practices in place.  Yes, as a customer you should quiz and probe to gain comfort that they do know how to run the business (you notice I said run the business – not manage problem tickets), write the contract and manage to the contract.

I have several service level agreement posts and cloud service provider posts.  ITIL (I am certified) is advice on processes, not SEC filing rules for public companies.  ITIL and it’s followers will slowly fade into the woodwork if they do not embrace changing market dynamics and technologies.  The single biggest problem with ITIL that I will blog separately on is that it is still stuck in defining a life cycle, a process for the service and not how to deliver service value driving business value.   More on that another day…

2011 is the year of the cloud, virtualization, service providers, analytics for business performance and mixed /complex environments, not ITIL in the least.  Communicating performance inclusive of right sourced components as part of the service is the transformation goal.   No one will care how the data center communicates business performance, only that they do and drive value!

Are you communicating business performance and driving value or still communicating how you manage a data center resistant to the cloud because it changes a process?

Michele

______________________

The Cloud is fundamentally incompatible with ITIL — the most widely accepted framework for professional IT management.  (Read Full Article…)

The Hub Commentary ___

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

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

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

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

Michele

______________________

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

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

The Hub Commentary ___

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

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

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

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

Is your IT an Operating Commodity   or   Contributing Necessity?

Michele

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

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