Business Service Management Hub

While on vacation in the local paper, cayCompass.com, there was an article regarding a new healthcare facility and the technology going into it to provide higher levels of healthcare to the residents.  One of the discussion points was doctors using data to better diagnose patients.  Again, the article took the negative side first regarding the “must use” the technology for a diagnosis.  I’m not sure I want to remove the human subjective element from my doctor, however, I would welcome the use of my history and an all encompassing view of my current condition, weighing that against a database of possibilities that no human could carry with them daily, to make a better diagnosis. Why not make use of being able to carry that encyclopedia of information around with you to deliver better patient care?  Again, the value side of the equation versus the “monitoring” of the physicians side of the equation.  Both are useful and valuable.

In this article the same discussion continues as well as knowing the location of patients, doctors, equipment to insure a safer environment and getting people and equipment where it is most needed.  I most enjoyed the Wayne Gretzky quote: “A good hockey player plays where the puck is. A great hockey player plays where the puck is going to be.”  We have embraced technological advances to assist in healing us faster, making surgery less invasive and remeding illnesses that just a decade ago were less treatable.  Why is using the vast amounts of data for split second decisions any different?

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Big data, including the advent of genomic medicine, is altering how providers manage information, according to the chief executive of a major West Coast academic healthcare organization.

“Big data is going to change the rules of IT departments and beyond,” said Thomas Jackiewicz, who was named senior VP and CEO of Keck Medical Center of the University of Southern California at the beginning of 2012. “We have to become experts at managing data,” he said.  Read More Here . . . 

There are several technologies that fall into this category.  This article caught my attention as hypes the tracking feature as the initial focus of this technology versus the value it brings to the table.  The crux of the discussion is the embedding of an RFID chip into school ID cards to be used for tracking attendance and insuring that funding continues to the schools.  This is useful, but not the value to the public and causes debate.  How many of you ever punched a time clock?  I have on multiple occasions, well that was an early and crude form of attendance monitoring / tracking.  Why is it now that we can use technology to more accurately track and rapidly assess to take action of value with the data different?

Flip the debate and think about some of the most tragic incidents that have occurred in our schools in the last decade and one that is close to home for me at VA Tech.  When I was in school, we roamed campus freely including all of the buildings.  We didn’t have cell phones, we knew our dormmates, we phoned each other on land lines, we had an idea of where those close to us were, we stuck together in groups and I knew I could phone one of the boys from the dorm to meet me and walk me back to the dorm in the dark if I got stuck somewhere alone and felt unsafe.  So again, I challenge folks not to just look at it from a tracking standpoint, but from a ease of security standpoint.  Who’s in the building? Where are my kids? Did they make it to the bus? The list goes on.

This is just the tip of the Big Data, Security and Management of data and services coming in this next generation.

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Weeks after Northside Independent School District in San Antonio rolled out its new “smart” IDs that tracks students’ geographic locations, the community is still at odds with the program.

The “Student Locator Project,” which is slated to eventually reach 112 Texas schools and close to 100,000 students, is in trial stages in two Northside district schools. In an effort to reduce truancy, the district has issued new student IDs with an embedded radio-frequency identification (RFID) chip that tracks the location of a student at all times.  Read More Here . . . 

The Hub Commentary_

As I began reading this article I thought there is a CIO in tune with her business.  R&D is the heart and soul of pharmaceutical companies and IT needs to work to drive business growth and cost saving in these days of transformation.  AstraZeneca is on the outside of the recent Fortune 500 list, but if innovation continues with this strategy in mind, I would expect to see growth out of them in the coming years.

I found the commentary interesting that follows the article.  Sales organizations have one and only one metric, are they selling and did they hit the number.  Sales professionals know this and while AZ may have lost members of the sales organization for a variety of reasons, I suspect, I applaude the Angela’s strategic thinking and confidence not to take a back seat in driving innovation into the organization with technology.

I ask, how are you driving innovation into your organization with technology?

Michele

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The strategic review undertaken each summer by pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca acquired additional significance this year in the wake of a first quarter in which sales fell by 11%, to $7.3 billion, and earnings plummeted by 44%. Resultant investor criticism cost chief executive David Brennan and chairman Louis Schweitzer their jobs in recent weeks.  (Read Full Article…)

The Hub Commentary_

Outages always make for big headlines and make for good examples of the cost of visibility and management.  I read these articles with positive thoughts and still see cloud computing as the future and those who are bold took advantage of growing business earlier rather than later.

As noted in the first article, some of these organizations would not be where they are today with their business if they had not leveraged new deployment options as fast as they did.  In a previous post, I discussed mapping your services based upon business value and cost and how to manage those services and selecting deployment options.  It’s a balancing act of how bold and how much of a risk you take to grow your business with cutting edge technology.  The balance to strike is how much you spend to have a DR or back-up plan for an event like this as you know they will happen.

Outages will occur and this shouldn’t push folks to write unwieldy service level agreements as you pay for those by pushing the risk back to the provider.  I would suggest that spend would be more wisely spent on a back-up provider to account for hiccups in a cost effective manner.

My hat still goes off to those embracing the cloud and growing their business as a result with agile technologies and there are learnings to plan for moving forward.

How are using agile technologies?

Michele

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CNET Article

A partial failure at Amazon Web Services’ cloud-computing infrastructure brought down some Internet operations today, including the Web sites of Quora and Reddit.  (Read Full Article…)

NetworkWorld Article

Amazon reports this morning that it is making progress in restoring full service to customers of its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Relational Database Service in the eastern portion of the country after a rocky stretch of trouble that began sometime before midnight.   (Read Full Article…)

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

SaaS has the ability to move the cost of supporting infrastructure and applications from the in-house staff to a service provider, but these are the commodity services.  We have discussed in previous business service management posts that it is important to categorize services as value-add, differentiators or commodity, manage for cost.

While I agree with the author on his points of flexibility, configuration and customization, I caution that if it is a service that requires customization than: either 1) you need to reconcile if it is a commodity service and the standard can be accepted or 2) that it is a differentiating service and should stay in-house.

Services that are easy to defined, contained and non-differentiating are well suited for outsourcing.  Accept and embrace the standard, not all services are created equal and take the opportunity to impose standards for the commodity to drive down costs.

Do you have a service map for commodity versus value?

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Michele

Of all the three models of cloud computing: IaaS, PaaS and SaaS…SaaS (Software as a Service) is the one that has the most appeal and potential to evoke interest from enterprise CIOs.  The popularity of SaaS is expected to grow several times in the near future.  Read full article

The Hub Commentary

Trend No. 4  “Server-centric to Service-centric”, predicts that architecture will shift from in-house servers to a distributed model in order to separate infrastructure, systems, applications and businesses processes from one another.   Take a look at the seven other trends Accenture says will continue to transform the technology landscape  in 2011 and beyond.

Randy

“The role of technol0gy is changing: it is no longer in a support role.  Instead, it is front and center driving business performance and enriching people’s lives like never before.” The real value of the report lies with insights on taking advantage of these technology shifts to gain business intelligence and business value.   Review  full report…

The Hub Commentary_

Surprise cloud leaders in the F500 multi-billion revenue organizations.  These organizations are listening to their businesses and building private clouds with their vendors and learning to save and drive growth with appropriate capacity.  Understanding and driving service value into their organizations and business service management practices to reap the rewards of new technology.

Competing for the data center with the explosion of service providers starts to change the game in how IT approaches and delivers services.  This is a long over due change for IT organizations in an effort to becoming part of the business and leveraging technology to both operate and power the business.

Michele

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The way you know you’re in the midst of a technology shift and market disruption is when organizations don’t behave the way you expect them to based on past track records. Cloud computing has been filled with surprises and unexpected behavior from the get-go.  (Read Full Article…)

The Hub Commentary_

As an old COBOL, mainframe programmer, I still chuckle that the mainframe never did die as expected and I enjoy the commentary in this article about the processing power, thought in design and speed of the VSAM files over today’s relational databases and 4GL tools.  In those days, much time was spent on design for speed, use of space and read once for many output purposes.

As hardware and storage became cheaper and processing power increased, this attention to design has somewhat fallen out of fashion.  As the author describes, the portfolio and modernization must be evaluated as we have described in previous posts regarding the service, value and costs to the organization.  As a manager of a long time ago once told me, “Michele, just because you can re-write it, doesn’t always mean that is the right answer.”

The most interesting metrics as reported by Gartner in the article were that 60-80% of all business applications are mainframe COBOL and 90% of financial transactions are mainframe COBOL.  Astounding!

Michele

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With the exception of very small organizations, migrating to the cloud is not a simple switch that can convert them from an ‘ in-house’ data center to Cloud.  Large enterprises have to modernize much of their applications to adapt to cloud,…..  (Read Full Article…)

The Hub Commentary_

I would agree that IT is commoditizing and the role of IT leaders is evolving much like my good friend Siki indicates where commodity services can be done elsewhere and which then frees the evolved IT resources to sit at the table as Diane describes to apply technology to business choices.  This is the practices of business service management in action.

In the featured post, Finding your Services, I describe first classifying your services based upon their contribution and cost to the business.  How you deliver (source) that service then becomes the next choice.  Just because you have technical capability in-house to deliver the service does not mean you keep it in house.  Many services are becoming commodity and should be shipped out of the data center.  On the other extreme, where you are seeking to deliver new and innovative services to the market to drive growth, but you may not have the expertise in-house to deliver it timely enough, you may also choose to seek outside assistance.

Again, it becomes a balancing act between operating and growth and weighing the cost and value of in-house versus external options.  Then the new role of IT becomes that which is described by both Siki and Diane, one of the facilitator of services that both operate and drive the business.  We are in unique times of role evolution and this will become uncomfortable for the traditional IT staff.

Are you driving business with technology or just operating?

Michele

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This week I saw two articles that captured the two visions of IT that will dominate the future. Both were interviews with senior IT leaders, one a CIO of a major technology company, the other a senior executive with a leading system integrator. One article depicted a vision of IT as a future of standardized, commodity offerings, while the other portrayed IT as a critical part of every company’s business offerings.  (Read Full Article…)

The Hub Commentary_

I read this post by a friend of mine and I couldn’t agree more wholeheartedly.  Cloud computing by the nature of it screams heterogeneous environment versus a single vendor framework homogeneous environment.  I also screams requirements for an integration platform and business service management practice to manage the services consuming the technology.

I suppose my first question to someone would be “why consider the agility of cloud computing if you are seeking a single vendor framework?”  The speed at which the market is exploding with varying as-a-Service offerings, whether it be infrastructure, applications, storage, etc. indicates that you must consider and determine how best you will monitor and manage these threads of technology as a service fabric holistically.  The requirement for an end-to-end view of the service is possible in real-time with the right approach to integrating the metrics from the various sources of monitoring whether they be in your data center or provided by the service provider.

Finally as this pains me to mention again and will have to be the last time this year, there is taking advantage of the technology for business growth and opportunity, as was done this past Sunday for 5 hours in Texas Stadium.  During opportunities of promotional selling, the ability to dial up/down services, reposition capacity to insure the greatest opportunity to reap the benefit of the customer interaction will be the key to agile computing and business growth in the future.

Michele

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Larry Ellison let it be known at the recent Oracle OpenWorld (an ironic name if I ever heard one) that he saw nothing wrong with companies using just Oracle solutions across the entire enterprise. Of course, he would think that given that he runs Oracle. But these days, more often than not, you are going to find multiple solutions from a variety of vendors, and you need a cloud solution that is going to support them all.  (Read Full Article…)

The Hub Commentary_

I cannot escape the cloud discussion today and must say that I agree with Don and his article this week in contrast to the other I just posted today.  Business Service Management practices, Service Level measuring and management of the service regardless of where it runs is the responsibility of the service provider – IT.

Having a view of the overall service, who’s doing what and how each component is performing is the value of the integrated end-to-end view of services IT delivers to the business.  Take advantage and evaluate the most cost efficient and best use of your resources when evaluating where it should be deployed, however, do not forget you must still instrument it to be managed and measured.

Service levels are a key component when engaging with the service providers.  You want to define your expectations for service availability, performance and responsiveness to an incident, but you need to map your requirements to the value delivered by the service.  Exercising your right to define very stringent service levels only increases the price, balance your real requirements with your service level requirements.

Are you measuring your service provider and cloud services?

Michele

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(Read Full Article…)

The Hub Commentary_

All the news these days seems to be about the cloud.  This is a nice summary of things to consider, however, leaves out the usual after thought that makes or breaks new technology deployment – management of it.  Business Service Management practices and instrumenting for management and measuring performance should be a factor to consider when planning a movement to the cloud.

All services, applications and technologies will be scrutinized in the coming year for suitability to be deployed in the cloud or some mixture of cloud and in-house resources.  One important factor will be the service levels and how you will measure the service in conjunction with in-house services for value to the business as well as monitoring the service provider for performance.  Without the performance monitoring and instrumentation to manage the service, it becomes a he said / she said debate regarding the perception of service quality.

Just because you move services to the cloud, you do not alleviate the requirements to manage and measure the services for service value.

How are you measuring your cloud providers?

Michele

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Everyone is talking about cloud and they want to implement the same in their companies. CIOs are the first people who will get the work on this new initiative or change. This article will give them the quick overviews on what all are the factors needs to be considered during cloud movement.  (Read Full Article…)

The Hub Commentary_

The article references the cost of a single cost of downtime as approximately $100,000 and the risk of downtime increases as systems and infrastructures become more and more distributed and complex.  Now more than ever, services must be service enabled from a proactive monitoring perspective before it goes live into a production environment. Management cannot be an afterthought and also keep in mind, not all services are created equal.

Service enabling and creating adequate redundancy comes at a cost and has to be weighed against the value the service contributes to the business.  Managing the infrastructure as services is an imperative in 2011 to balance cost and value, while insuring service quality and availability.

Integrating the metrics from various technologies and make sense of them as an end-to-end service becomes critical in proactively managing services in real-time and taking action based upon leading indicators that illustrate risk of an outage is rising.  Mitigating risk and reducing downtime must be a factor of service enabling the infrastructure as it goes live in production.

As the article states, the cost of down time is high, catastrophic and the scavenger hunt that ensues to solve and restore service leads to lengthy downtime and is costly to your organization.  As technology professionals, leveraging new technology and deploying agile infrastructures is just a piece of the puzzle, management and service enabling the infrastructure is equally as important.

This is the year of investment in IT technology as well as it’s management infrastructure to service enable the infrastructure to insure it continues to execute in market time.

Michele

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North American businesses are collectively losing $26.5 billion in revenue each year as a result of slow recovery from IT system downtime according to a recent study. The study also indicates that the average respondent suffers 10 hours of IT downtime a year and an additional 7.5 hours of compromised operation because of the time it takes to recover lost data.  (Read Full Article…)

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

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

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