Business Service Management Hub

IT Transformation is and has been a hot topic for >20 years. Wow!  I was speaking to one of my analyst friends at Forrester not too long ago and we were chatting about how much waste exists in annual IT spend just “Keeping the Lights On” and how these metrics haven’t changed in >20 years. The answer has been simple, no competition, no catalyst for change.

This week I was reading an article from the NY Times Technology section, “Information Technology Spending to Hit $3.6 Trillion in 2012”, supported by information from Gartner and it pointed to this pent up demand for transformation within IT organizations. Much of the increase in spending is going to Cloud Service Providers and Consultancies even with economic challenges in Europe and China. There is an increase in Public Cloud spending by 20% representing considerable computing power and more efficient IT Systems due to complex systems, cloud computing and analytics. My reaction as I read the article was Wow again. Ironically, this comes on the heals of articles from the previous 2 weeks regarding the outage of the cloud and Amazon’s Ashburn, VA data center.

My first comment is no one outsources services because it is cheaper. Services are outsourced to create change that cannot be achieved from within. So let’s break this down into the great change that is underfoot and IT Transformation based upon cost, value and innovation.

Read full story here …….

I have posted a couple of new posts on NetIQ’s Qmunity and wanted to share here as well.  IT is under great Transformation to get to Service Brokers who can manage Service Governance.  This is the convergences of Development, Operations and Security functions within IT.  In the first post I discuss the convergence and the second post is on the topic of Service Governance and new research from Forrester.

Enjoy!

Overhauling Service Management – Developing, Operating and Securing

Previously I posted, “Why Service Management” discussing the melding of IT and the business for common objectives in managing, measuring and communicating service performance.  The recent Gartner Infrastructure and Operations Management Summit (IOM) also provoked the status quo of IT Operations andCameron Haight began to challenge and discuss a new term, DevOps, where development and operations are more closely aligned.  The post event Trip Report provides a glimpse into the many thought provoking challenges and discussions of the week.  continue reading…

 Communicating Service Performance – Beware of the Competition

We’ve discussed service management and the transformation that IT is undergoing with the catalysts being the cloud, service providers, SaaS, social media, collaboration, mobility, BYOD, etc.  The root catalyst is choice and options in the market and the competition speaks in terms of service value and service performance. I posted a question in LinkedIn regarding how much of your services are in the cloud today and expected to be next year?  Join the discussion.  The first answer was as I expected, a law firm that isn’t in the cloud and isn’t going there because of security concerns.  I responded as I bet they use services that are internet based, research likely, and thus they are in the cloud.  Just like a recent customer discussed having hundreds of apps in the cloud that now need to be reconciled, rationalized and managed for cost.  How did they get this point?  Easy, credit card subscriptions – cheap and easy to do business with.  continue reading….

The Hub Commentary_

Nice article!  Just because you can measure it, doesn’t necessarily mean it needs to be measured.  Number 5 in the list is the one I snap to right away.  IT measures technology like baseball stats.  As my father always said, “baseball is a team sport that allows individuals to excel, but they must all excel at once to win the game”.    I believe IT measures technology as if those measurements prove they are doing something and creating value, when the company says, “so what?”.

The worst part about these measures is that it drives the wrong behavior.  Let’s pick on the help desk as an example.  Counting the number of calls, number of closed tickets on the first touch and the number of tickets closed in <15 minutes.  During my first software job as a professional services consultant, the first bit of custom code I had to write was for a customer to keep the help desk analysts from “cherry picking” the easy calls out of the queue and force the top of the queue to be selected.  Really?  This is because of how they are measured and we wonder why the business is unhappy with service and the end of the service desk is near according to the Top 10 Trends from Gartner.

These metrics are not driving quality or quality of service, but how many tasks I can do and how fast I can do them.  I cannot believe in 20+ years these metrics haven’t changed and it is just now that Forrester is publishing this article.  This is why IT is being outsourced and how the cloud is driving change into the organization.  See number 11 in the list and behavior.

Number 13 is classic and reminds me of my first position with EDS and a manager telling me, “you can make any chart tell the story you want to tell”.  Meaning diagrams from spreadsheets.  Yes, this is correct.  Why on earth would I push a chart that illustrates poor performance?

These measures are all the commodity of IT and why it is outsourced.  Instead of justifying and seeking to measure against benchmarks (number 9) as I was often asked as a former Industry Analyst for META Group, why not work to change the 1-2% of revenue that is spent just keeping the lights on – operating – which is what these traditional metrics measure.

Kudo’s Forrester, let’s start measuring value, driving the top line revenue with technology and innovation and improve the bottom line by reducing the amount of revenue (1-2%) that is spent just keeping the “lights on”.

How are your metrics changing with the advent of the cloud and driving value?

Michele

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In a recent Forrester report – Develop Your Service Management And Automation Balanced Scorecard – I highlight some of the common mistakes made when designing and implementing Infrastructure & Operations (I&O) metrics. This metric “inappropriateness” is a common issue but there are still many I&O organizations that don’t realize that they potentially have the wrong set of metrics. So, consider the following:  (Read Full Article…)

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…)

The Hub Commentary_

I tend to agree with James and have written often on the same subject.  Those leading their industry this year, likely won’t be the ones leading next year.  The question is are you trying to merely drive down costs or fuel growth?  Even with the Amazon blip of a week or so ago, those fueling growth are unwaivered in their approach.

Define and leverage the cloud as a deployment option with the right objective and measure it accordingly.  There will be blips in service from service providers, have an alternative plan for those occurrences based upon the requirements of the service.  Having the proper monitoring and management in place to monitor and measure services will be key.

Just because you push services to external providers does not mean you have alleviated the accountability for the service.  Management of the providers has to be factored into the cost of the service.

I look forward to comparing this years Fortune 500 list to next years and find the movers and shakers of their industry.

Do you run for cost or fuel for growth?

Michele

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Is your cloud strategy centered on saving money or fueling revenue growth? Where you land on this question could determine a lot about your experience level with cloud services and what guidance you should be giving to your application developers and infrastructure & operations teams. According to our research the majority of CIOs would vote for the savings, seeing cloud computing as an evolution of outsourcing and hosting that can drive down capital and operations expenses. In some cases this is correct but in many the opposite will result.  (Read Full Article…)

The Hub Commentary_

I tend to agree with Rachel, there is no secret set of standard metrics.  There are methods and classifications for services, but no one size fits all.  I will also add that measurements drive behavior as well and that I would offer caution in over measuring.

For instance, if the service desk gets measured for number of tickets completed, they tend to cherry pick and submit every conversation to garner more points.  Counting time for application groups turns each non-developing task into something that requires planning.  All of this again leads to measuring IT and technology rather than the services driving the business.

As we’ve discussed in many articles and as Rachel too points out, it’s more about the value, action and method of measuring services and performance than technology metrics.

How are you measuring your IT – technology or services?

Michele

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ne thing that I’ve found in common across infrastructure and operations groups of all shapes and sizes is that they are continually searching for the ideal set of key performance indicators. A set of metrics that perfectly measures their infrastructure, demonstrates the excellence of their operations, but are still simple and cheap to collect.  (Read Full Article…)

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_

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_

I respect my friend JP, however, on this post I might have to push back a bit.  Business service management isn’t really a single tool, nor is it ITIL, but the practice of aligning infrastructure as services to facilitate the cost and value discussion.  That takes bringing many data points together to understand the infrastructure in a logical manner.

Discovery is a nice automation for input into knowing what you have and relationships, however, I have found there are many types of discovery.  Some are good at physical devices and configurations, others read network topology maps, some sniff network traffic and others listen to ports and communication between devices.  All add relevant pieces to the puzzle, but none are BSM or the CMDB.

It takes an integration platform to bring it all together, make sense of it and provide the best early warning view possible to mitigate risk prior to changes and in live environments.  It also could include business data and volume of transactions or value of those transactions to illustrate value of business impact at a point in time raising or lowering risk based upon true business impact.

Many tools have something to contribute to the practice of Business Service Management and it is the organization that can piece them together in the manner that best meets the needs of their business that becomes successful.

How do you define Business Service Management?

Michele

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I have in the past lamented the evolution of BSM into more of an ITIL support solution than the pure IT management project that we embarked on seven years ago. In the early years of BSM, we all were convinced of the importance of application dependency discovery: It was the bridge between the user, who sees an application, and IT, which sees infrastructures.   (Read Full Article…)

The Hub Commentary

SaaS as the article describes is followed with a ton of hype in these days of the cloud and transformation to business service management versus the commodity at the lower level.  The short term cost appeal with the subscription model and ease at which you can subscribe generates a lot of the hype.  I believe in the model and again always suggest first going back to basics and identify your services and classify them giving you a sense of what you need to service and support.

Once you understand the value of a service to your business, you can start evaluating whether it is a commodity process or specialized, market differentiators for your business.  Specialized services do not lend themselves well to these types of models.  Well defined and common services/process es are well suited for these models and should be used for that purpose.  In fact, they should be employed to drive standards into your organization and right size your service and support, which is hard to do from the inside once high levels of service have been delivered.

Another factor to consider is not all software was developed to be effectively used in a shared model and may not offer the economies of scale that a true shared service can offer.  As the folks at Forrester indicate, the commodity management, monitoring and lower in the stack items are well suited for this model as they should be standardized and common so your valuable resources can focus on driving business growth with technology over monitoring “box on / box off” lights.

Michele

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Given all the hype SaaS (software as a service) has garnered, you might be inclined to think every category of software will be delivered predominantly from the cloud at some point. Not so, says a new Forrester Research report.  (Read Full Article…)

The Hub Commentary_

Applying a social interface to IT may sound crazy to the technologists, however, if you move past the initial reaction and think about many of the initiatives from IT and the response from the business, it may just be the interface that drives acceptance.  We have all been exposed and most (even I must admit to it) have used, adopted and/or totally embrace the social media explosion.  Business Service Management is  practice and part of that practice is the interactions with our customers and how they want to interact with IT.

I consider myself middle of the road in adoption as I still like the human interaction and speaking with colleagues and customers face-to-face, however, those interactions become planned and raise in relevance given the accepted methods of quick, short interactions that occur all day long with text messages, emails, Twitter, Facebook, blogs, RSS Feeds, you name it.

The earliest form was chat and we all know it has been a long standing request for most service and support software to deploy chat methods to ask for help.  This could be a long post, but let’s keep it simple.  Social Media interfaces for the sake of it will fail, Social Media interfaces applied in the right situations could be wildly successful.  A couple of examples that pop to mind are:

Service Dashboards – Most of us think of these as one-way and very limited information and thus they are useful and provide information during a service impacting event and I would debate how much they are used outside of IT during smooth running hours.  However, Service and Support is a great example of where a social interface may make sense.  The experience is 2 way – giving, taking and sharing information.  A smart interface to accept and present information rather than merely accepting a new ticket.  Tobin’s power outage post is a great example.  Instead of entering a ticket, he clicked his way to the right information.

Configuration/Inventory/Service Information: Wikipedia is a great example of keeping information accurate and relevant through the use of consuming audience.  Now apply that what is typically thought of as the most technical of IT projects, the CMDB or Configuration Management System.  We all use a variety of technical devices and we all have varying levels of comfort and/or time to deal with servicing them, however, up-to-date information is required for service and support.

At the very least, we want to know when we will be affected by maintenance or service outages.  What if we could subscribe to communities of users of the various applications we use day-to-day and could find the power users of Excel or Adobe Presenter in our organization to help us with that important presentation?  The classic support challenge has been the questions of how to use a piece of software, the users of the software are the best choice outside of the supplier and finding those who may have figured out a clever function might be helpful.

Just  a couple of applications that come to mind.  I agree with Nigel, the Social Media interfaces are coming, we use them in daily life and should seek to evaluate the best method of interacting with our customers.

How socially accepted is your IT?

Michele

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IT has been here before, having to clean up islands of automation that left organizations unable to coordinate information and react rapidly to changing market dynamics.  (Read Full Article…)

The Hub Commentary __

Beth’s opening statement regarding the Aberdeen findings sums it up, mid size organizations are under performing larger organizations.  Pick up the Fortune 500 list as I do each year and look at the top 5 in each industry.  There are 3 things that always standout:

1. Those that lead, know how to harness the commodity of technology to not only power, but drive business.
2. Those that lead, lead by magnitudes greater than their followers.
3. Those that innovate, change how a market functions, don’t always stay on top.  Check out where eBay is for example.  The innovator often gets leapfrogged.

Beth references a previous article my good friend Glenn O’Donnell of Forrester is quoted offering the following 5 pieces of advice:

1. Consolidate management tools
2. Invest in Network Change and Config Mgmt
3. Application awareness
4. Pay for analysis, not monitoring
5. Get more from existing tools

2011 will be the year IT transforms to measure business performance and ties the analytics to the data to drive business performance, not IT or technology performance.  Use technology for the mundane and routine, measure performance, reduce costs, do more with less and measuring the network and application performance regardless of where it resides will be key to having that complete view of business performance to use technology to improve that performance in clever ways.

Michele

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If you’re overseeing performance management initiatives at a midsized organization — one with annual revenue between $50 million and $500 million — then you probably have a thing or two to learn from your counterparts at larger enterprises.  (Read Full Article …)

The Hub Commentary  __

A tweet pointed me to this post today and what a great post and analogy.  I, in fact, kick off most presentations by stating Business Service Management is EASY!  In fact, you hold the key to the most valuable insurance policy in your company.  Business runs on technology, it is commodity, like electricity, we count on it being there to conduct business.  I have a previous post on just that insurance policy in hurricane season on the east coast of the United States where the call center becomes the hub of activity for the power companies.  Customers phone in outages, crews are dispatched  and power is restored more quickly with better monitoring of the technology supporting the call center and dispatching crews.  Technology cannot stop an impending natural disaster, like a hurricane, it contains the effects of the natural disaster as described in the linked to post.

As with the oil spill that my friend JP references, early warning can aid to avoid an event or contain the event as was the case with the the power outage in the North Eastern US a few years ago.  This CIO once told me it took only 8 seconds for that outage to cascade from Ohio to the east coast.   Avoiding it at that stage was not possible, containing it becomes the goal.  After the event as JP describes, they implemented a monitoring system that correlated data from their grid monitoring system with their technology management tools for that complete picture to avoid events by reading the early warning signals and better contain events when they do occur.  An article is posted here describing the integrated approach this electricity operator took, just as JP describes.

I work with companies every day to justify the insurance policy we know of as Business Service Management.  In tough economic times when spending is reduced, justifying a spend becomes difficult when it is not reducing costs directly.  The cost of the approach and tools is far smaller (even when maintained over time) than the disaster of an outage or spill.

Can your company afford a game of high stakes poker when it depends on technology to operate?

Michele

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The Gulf oil spill of April 2010 was an unprecedented disaster. The National Oil Spill Commission’s report summary shows that this could have been prevented with the use of better technology.  (Read Full Article…)

It’s rumored that the Ford Model T’s track dimension (the distance between the wheels of the same axle) could be traced from the Conestoga wagon to the Roman chariot by the ruts they created. Roman roads forced European coachbuilders to adapt their wagons to the Roman chariot track, a measurement they carried over when building wagons in America in the 19th and early 20th centuries.  (read more…)

The Hub Commentary ___

I like this post by my friend JP, it brings a whole new meaning to “being stuck in a rut”.  I ask, what is the point of new technology if we cannot use it as designed?  Think about when you are are purchasing a product or service and are greeted with “the system doesn’t work that way”.  Generally, I do not care how the system works – I just want to buy something, exchange something and not be bothered with what it takes someone to perform the task.

So I always find it curious as IT professionals why we impose these obstacles and roadblocks to progress in supporting our business.  Another news piece by one of JP’s colleagues also makes the point of why start-ups are successful, they meet the customer requirements.

Markets dynamics and business requirements change – how as IT do we use new technology to craft innovative solutions as JP says and operationally figure out how to monitor, manage and measure it.  The service providers know how to do this and will feast in 2011 on the IT organizations that do not become agile to market dynamics and business requirements.

Michele

Cash-starved. Fast-paced. Understaffed. Late nights. T-shirts. Jeans.

These descriptors are just as relevant to emerging tech startups as they are to the typical enterprise IT infrastructure and operations (I&O) department. And to improve customer focus and develop new skills, I&O professionals should apply a “startup” mentality. (read more…)

The Hub Commentary ___

I find this a great analogy for IT organizations having sat on both sides of the fence.  I was once an IT application development & support systems analyst.  I remember working on my first client server application (I know that dates me) and meeting with a technical engineer from a start-up software company who had come to help me with some pointers on using the tool for my project.

One of the first things we discussed was why I wasn’t directing the application I was developing directly against the database server.  My response, “because if I use the database in the application, then all the users will have to have access/licenses and that comes with a fee.”  So let’s think about this, they are paying you to develop an application, drop a spreadsheet of numbers into a database you paid for, then extract it again to display in this tool that you paid for.  Yeah.  Dilbert cartoon in the making!  Incredible silence fell as we both knew we were spending more money to avoid a license to the database than if we bought those licenses and used the technology and application I was developing.  Dilbert!

That was 20+ years ago (yikes) and as IT organizations we are often a penny wise and a dollar short.  2011 will no doubt be a tipping point for the service providers with business frustration at an all time high and access to new services prevalent.  How an IT person answers this question is a telling statement to me, “What business are you in?”.  If the answer is “I am in desktop support”, I know it is an inward facing IT organization.  If the answer is “New drug development and I support keeping the scientists in R&D working racing against the clock to get formulas to the FDA to be first to market”.  I know this is a business driven organization and there is no business ‘and’ IT.

Think like a start-up – technology is a solution to innovation, not a problem to support and operate

Michele