Business Service Management Hub

The Hub Commentary

Interesting insights about the ability to monitor and measure business processes that fall outside of the traditional front and back office structures.   Have you considered that many decisions  being made in the “middle office” may effect your ability to effectively manage business services?

Randy

Not every activity fits neatly into either front or back office processes.  There are in just about every organization as set of middle office activities that go un-noticed but may be prove to be more important than either end of the organization.  Too often we have thought of activities in the mid-office as either being the domain of management or knowledge work that cannot be readily monitored, measured or supported as past attempts have produced behaviors that were counter productive to the goal.   Read more…

Business Service Management practices have the greatest chance of success when:

• The solution provides several different views of the same data. The technical team needs a few different views (top down, bottom up, inside out), the end users of the systems (internal or external customers) want to see the services they are using along with the health (email, payroll, etc), management wants to see impacts to the business, revenue related metrics (trade volume).

• Granular security control is needed to control the depth that end users are allowed to drill in as well as controlling which users are able to perform actions such as Acknowledging an alarm.  While the BSM solution must be able to represent the service from end to end, there rarely is a reason to have an executive drill down and look at the performance metrics of a network card on some obscure server.   Showing that a single node of a cluster is down is important to some users, this is useless data to others.

• The solution fully understands health of the Service. Integrating with the JUST the top management tool may provide ‘all’ of the alerts within the environment, it won’t provide easy drill down into the underlying tool reporting the failure in order to get at additional details or command and control, it won’t tell you to fix Service A over Service B, it won’t tell you that if you do not reboot server123 in the next 10 minutes you will breach a critical Service Level.

• Root cause is more than determining the router being down is the root cause of the server being unaccessible. While this is useful information, this type of root cause does not always map to why a Service is down.   Don’t get me wrong, it is very important and needed information.   The team responsible for resolving outages need quick answers, they need to be able to to quickly see within the sea or red alerts that this particular server being down is the reason that payroll is down.  Between this server and the 15 other outages, they might want to work on this server first… it’s payday.

• The end users of the implementation are consulted with to understand their requirements. Just because you can set up the view one way doesn’t mean that it provides value to the end users.  They need easy access to the data, they need quick access to other internal tools (knowledge base, help desk, etc).  The solution needs to make their lives easier.

• Start with an important Business Service, or a single important application or one that keeps the CTO up at night worrying about it.   If you start with mapping the one service end to end (as best as possible without getting stuck in a rabbit hole), get an internal win, ROI, etc., it helps map out the next Services, rally other teams to get involved, etc.   Trying to do every service end to end completely automated, etc is trying to boil the ocean, it’s not going to work.   Sometimes a partial view is better than no view.  Stating small and working out from there is key.

One other reason that I purposely omitted is management buy-in.   I feel that it is important, but to get started, it may not require complete management buy-in.   What I mean is, sometimes management buy in is only needed within your own group or department, other management buy-in is sometimes needed in order to expand the footprint or get additional details.   I’ve seen that come along as the BSM team gets wins under their belt.

Okay, don’t be shy, what are some reasons that Business Service Management worked for your organization (or you think you need for your planned BSM implementation to be successful)?   Dashboards, HA/DR, CMDB, Discovery, ITIL projects…

– Tobin

The Hub Commentary

Do your customers have more visibility into your end-to-end management processes than you do?  You’re probably not alone…

Randy

In dealing with a service provider, I found that I have more visibility into the process they are providing than they do. That’s pretty sad. Part of me wonders if they’ll call me up and say, “David… what do you see from your view? Tell us, because we can’t see the whole thing.”  Read full article

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

Cisco today announced they had grabbed newScale, a service catalogue and service portal software developer. The purchase gives Cisco a valuable piece in the emerging private cloud business, one which makes it easier for customers to create an in-house service center.

A private cloud operates in the same fashion as a public one, offering web-based services, but instead of venturing outside the firewall, you get all your services in-house. This offers a number of advantages from a service and security standpoint, and provides a way to charge back customers for exactly  what they use. Your users like it because they only pay for services they use and you can plan resource requirements better from an IT perspective. As I wrote in a blog post earlier this month, Cost Transparency is a Two-way Street, “when your users understand the relationship between cost and consumption, everybody wins.”

What that means essentially is that by placing a set of clearly defined services inside a delivery mechanism like the one that Cisco bought with newScale, you can provide a clear set of costs associated with usage. That’s because, a service portal gives you the means to create a “store” where your users come for standard services offerings. For instance, you might set up a SharePoint collaboration site and a SharePoint file storage site. It provides a way to get in-house services as easily as going online to get services from say Google or Yahoo!.

Parvesh Sethi, senior vice president of Cisco Services said in a statement that they bought newScale because they were seeing a need in the market for this type of service. “Cloud computing represents a major shift in the evolution of the Internet, and as more customers migrate from traditional IT infrastructures, the need for rapid self-provisioning and efficient management becomes increasingly critical,” he explained.  This purchase does precisely that by providing Cisco with a tool the enables customers to create self-service portals quickly.

It’s a smart play because more companies are looking in this direction and looking for tools to help them set up service portals for their private cloud offerings. The deal is expected to close some time in the second half of the year.

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_

The IT Skeptic has an interesting post regarding service levels, running IT as a business, business service management practices.  I’ll cut to the chase on my views on these topics:  internal IT SLAs are meaningless when after the fact reporting the score, IT is not a business and IT is not a profit center.

Why is IT the only unit within a business that we speak of as IT and business?  Do we say sales and the business, marketing and the business, customer service and business, the list goes on and on.  All of the units are the business and all should practice good business service management practices measuring cost and value against the objectives of the business in prioritizing work and investments.

As a product company in technology, I think we may have a unique view.  We produce a product that needs to meet the requirements of the market and customers, sales, support, consulting, marketing, development, testing, etc. – all departments must contribute to the success of any given product brought to market and each is evaluated for cost and value.

Embracing business service management practices is a step in the right direction in breaking the “and” versus it’s just business.  Monitoring and measuring as services and changing the dialog around to cost and value supporting business objectives will advance your IT organization.

Are you an “and” or just business?

Michele

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“Run IT as a business”. I’ve been guilty of using it in the dim dark past. If providing IT is your business, say you are EDS, then that is a special case where the mantra makes sense. But for most organisations, running IT as an internal business is counter-productive if not downright destructive. In most situations, IT is a team-member not a supplier.  (Read Full Article…)

I have had this discussion many times and with some coaxing have decided to write about it here. The conversation typically starts with the basic question of – how does one create an accurate service model for a virtualized desktop infrastructure (VDI) environment with such a high degree of dynamism? A Service Model is typically a hierarchical representation of a service. That service can be made up of any number of applications, dependency, and components. The service model is also heavily influenced by the audience that will be viewing it (look for a separate post on this).

The big challenge in modeling a VDI environment has to do not so much with the virtualization, but the means by which the VDI solution handles the logged off users. Based upon the implementation when a user logs off for the day, their data is stored, and the system itself is torn down freeing up resources. Basically, this means that user johnW would be logged into virtdesk_123 one day and would then have virtdesk_982 at next power up. Further, virtual desktop could potentially be hosted on different hosts based on load balancing policies.

An additional challenge to creating the service model is introduced when the requirement of maintaining a history is present. For example, performance trends, behavior models, etc.

The primary means I use to tackle this challenge is to not focus on the desktops. I instead focus on the user and more specifically their role. It is the identity that matters, not the physical infrastructure. This simple answer to a complex scenario allows one to easily address the challenges mentioned above. Historical information is stored against the user object as opposed to the dynamic desktops. Of course, the argument will usually come up around the tracking of software and virus scans. Again, I focus on the user and their roles. If the client has an entitlement system where by users are entitled to use specific software packages based upon role membership, then this model becomes even easier.

The service models will vary based upon the needs of the audience who wish to see the information but, I will typically start with something that looks like the following. Top level of Roles, followed by a sub category of Users per role. The user will then have a list of information categories such as assigned template/desktop(s), entitled software, service requests, and environment health. Against each of these I will typically link in the information befitting the category complete with some business logic to control the role up of state through the service model.

I am not going to pretend that any environment is perfect. I also realize that it may not be as easy as it sounds to follow this method based upon tools being used in a specific vdi environment. It is however the method I use when I approach vdi service model. It is easier to have a plan as a starting point going in that not to have one at all.

I am hopeful that this was of some help to you. I am always open for new methods to do this so if you tackle this differently with less pain, please enlighten me, I would love to hear it.

How are you managing your virtual desktops?

John

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_

Adopter or climber?  Hmmmm I have to laugh, sometimes I am, rarely though and I’ve spent my career in the technology field.  I finally got myself an iPod a few years ago with accumulated airline points, I only traded up to a smart phone (Android) last year only because it had an up to date GPS, which so far has not proven itself better than my old standby Garmin, which I also got with airline points and is the size of a baseball.  I did purchase the first gen Kindle to read my newspaper while traveling and I no longer had to deal with the paperboy trashing my flowers in the spring.

As I’ve written several times today already, but what exactly will be the tipping point in the enterprise to embrace the tablets?  IT would be wise to be applying thought to inventive ways to communicate and interact with their customers with these mobile devices first.

Are you an adopter or climber and how will your enterprise use tablets?

Michele

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I grew up in transition neighborhoods outside of Cleveland Ohio and Hartford Connecticut.  By transition I mean it was a neighborhood where people moved in after the family got a promotion, generally into the lower ranks of middle management and then as they worked their way up the corporate ladder they moved out as senior management either to trade up their house or town.   (Read Full Article…)

The Hub Commentary

We’ve all had to “do more with less” in ever changing IT environments.  Cloud computing offers up an encouraging promise that we can actually “get more for less”.  But more of what?  Access to more applications, more compute power, more flexibility, more agility and certainly more innovation.

Randy

Cloud computing is more about agility, cost control and being able to do things previously impossible rather than increased productivity doing what the organization has always done.  Read more

The Hub Commentary_

In this survey, more than half the respondents have implemented some form of cloud computing (thus virtualization) citing increased flexibility and decreased costs in hardware, power, heating and cooling.  The challenge the article highlights comes in managing the network and pinpointing root cause of incidents, much less finding signs of trouble.

Management is always overlooked when trying to take advantage of the short term cost savings.  As my dad always told me, “short cuts never got anyone anywhere fast”.  Service enabling the infrastructure is a must from the development and implementation and never more so than now with the future being right sourced with hybrid implementations of private, public and physical infrastructures.

When I speak to folks about Business Service Management practices and tools, I’m often met with eye rolls and shrugs, but it is so hard.  I always respond, no it isn’, it’s only as hard as you want to make it.  It can be achieved a service at a time and can provide the real success in your cloud and virtualization projects with a bigger bang for the buck with short term savings and real value add up front.  All it takes is a little foresight to integrate the sources of data you have already to paint the picture that will help you manage in real time with a live view of the environment to manage both practively and with speed during an incident.

How are you service enabling your cloud and virtualization infrastructure?

Michele

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More companies are taking advantage of cloud computing and virtualization technologies to streamline their network operations, but significant management challenges remain, according to Network Instruments’ State of the Network Global Study.

The company’s fourth annual study surveyed 265 network engineers, IT directors and CIOs, located in North America, Europe, Asia, Africa, South America and Australia.  (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_

Here’s a fun piece to end a week.  Why buy a Cadillac when a Buick will do or letting IT spend for new toys!  Sneak Peak into an upcoming Harvard Business Review story.

How much empowerment does your IT organization have?

Michele

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How much empowerment is too much for your IT employees? As reluctant as you may be to micromanage your teams, there are certain decisions that you simply can’t leave to the troops.  (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…)

The Hub Commentary_

Data center outsourcing is done for purposes of change, not cost.  It may be viewed as a cost saving, but what quickly happens is described in the article below.  What most organizations have done is staff their data center with very expensive resources where the outsourcer has a more appropriate model.

Outsourcing brings the change that organizations are often hesitant and cannot do on their own, standardize processes and remove human resources with appropriately skilled folks.  Not all services delivered from IT require all nighters to support.  Defining service value and supporting services for the cost and value they deliver for the organization is right sizing your IT.

Using tools to measure and automate and evolving your skilled resources into analysts and service providers is the change that is difficult to make.  The service provider market is exploding with cloud services and are hungry for your business.  The service providers know the cost of delivering services and balance the costs with appropriately skilled resources with the appropriate responsiveness to the service.  This is the model IT organizations need to reward rather than the hero culture.

Do you reward heros or service analysts?

Michele

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The “stay up all night, do anything for the user” hero culture of corporate IT may win friends in the business, say outsourcing consultants at TPI and Compass, but it won’t yield real business-IT alignment. And it makes it almost impossible to succeed at outsourcing.  (Read Full Article…)

The Hub Commentary_

Mark McDonald of Gartner has hit the nail on the head – Playing for fun or Playing for Food?  IT being insulated from the business and the external customer means they play for fun, no consequences for their actions. Business service management practices and understanding service value and being the power of the business would bring the risk / reward closer to home to most IT organizations.

I once was on the IT side of the fence many moons ago.  I was working on a project that used a new tool we had purchased and I had the pre-sales technician stop by one day to look over my work and offer some tips and tricks.  As I sat and listened to him that morning what became clear to me was I was on the wrong side of the fence.  I love technology, I love working with people and I love solving the puzzle and bringing the project to life.

My favorite project while in IT was one where I revamped an old system and how billing occurred driving an additional 90K+ / month into the company.  That day I knew I did something with technology that drove value and revenue for the business.  As IT professionals, we lose sight of this by being insulated and thus focus inward and on the wrong things.

I jumped the fence and went to the dark side of the vendor community where we play for fun and for food!

Does you IT play for Fun or for Food?

Michele

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People ask about the differences between ‘the business’ and ‘IT’ and what people can do to eliminate them. It is a great question and unfortunately a persistent one. Usually when you have an issue that people recognize and work to resolve but cannot, there are deeper issues involved. I think that this is a big part of the situation here.  (Read Full Article…)

The Hub Commentary_

The continuation of centralizing, sharing, cost saving with the commodity IT.  These are short term savings that improve the bottom, however, do not improve the top line.  These are required and must always be on the agenda, balanced with growth initiatives.

The article mentions while providing higher performance and availability or quality of service.  These initiatives work to drive the top line in customer retention and new services for the business.  It is all a balancing act, but the key is not to lose sight of the long term growth for the short term save.

Michele

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Cloud and virtualisation also on the agenda

CIOs across Europe have identified IT consolidation as a key near term initiative as they look for ways to maintain or improve performances despite the economic situation.  (Read Full Article…)

The Hub Commentary_

As a marketeer and IT professional, I’m not sure I see the connection between IT and social media unless the infrastructure is set up inside a business.  I say this as someone who has spent a great deal of time in recent months both studying and deploying inbound marketing via social media technologies.  As a business service management practice it relates in driving growth for the business, internally the technologies are useful in driving collaboration and efficiency, but only if there is value to the business for the objective of the practice.

I don’t see it as ITs role to set policy on the use or management of external sources for social media content.  I am fortunate to work for an organization that sees the benefit of the external conversation, has minimal policies and trusts employees to use good common sense in their external social conversations.  External social media is about creating the relationship with your customers, prospects, providing good information – it’s not about Tweeting for the sake of it or Facebook just to have a page.  There needs to be a business driver, otherwise it is a personal action.

The opening comments of it gets in the way of work and is a nuisance is perplexing to me.  It isn’t an IT concern to control or manage the external world.  It is company policy that should define what employees do via external channels.  That said, these external channels are inbound marketing, awareness, and leads generation.  This is the problem with IT, they do not control all technology and need to seek how to best leverage, evolve, exploit and support new uses of technology to drive business growth versus being the usual, eternal obstacle.

Social media is not something for IT to govern.  Until it makes a connection back to the organization, IT is not involved.  Once the connection back to the organization occurs, then there needs to be a business requirement and policy enforced – most of all support to leverage that relationship as best as possible to drive business growth as possible.  The external conversation is not for IT to manage or govern, that is a company policy.  Times have changed and building a relationship with your customers is relevant and expected.  So I disagree with ITs role in social media until it links back to the organization and the mechanics of that link.

So as the article slightly mentions, it is service to your customers and it is marketing to your prospective customers and thus business growth.  Drive business growth and create competitive advantage with better customer service with new technologies, ideas and avenues rather than being the usual obstacle.  So I challenge you not to find fault with social media, but…..

How do you use social media to grow your business?

Michele

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The Hub Commentary_

Classic read!  Great humor for a Monday morning.  Having spent most of my career on the Ops and Apps side of the house, I especially enjoy the “No” in innovation and security!  While it is a funny read, it defines the business service management practice.

Technology silos are not a service.  It takes applications to develop, operations to manage and support and security to secure the environment.  It also takes knowing the business objectives as the article uses an example with the marketing department going outside on their own.  It all goes back to basics, what is your business, what are you selling, how do you grow that business, how do you support the business.

Security and operational support have to be baked into services and solutions as they are developed and services/solutions must be driven by the business objectives to  provide the highest quality of service to your customers or offering new services, both driving revenue.  One component does not work without the other, but when all are interlocked – organizations are successful.  Then you have a business service management practice.

Check out today’s Featured Commentary and the Finding your Services post.

Is your IT business service enabling or multiple obstacles?

Michele

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IT pros do battle every day — with cyber attackers, stubborn hardware, buggy software, clueless users, and the endless demands of other departments within their organization. But few can compare to the conflicts raging within IT itself.  (Read Full Article…)