Business Service Management Hub

The Hub Commentary_

Today is the topic of integration in Business Service Management land.  The nature of taking advantage of cloud and dynamic resources will require open connectivity.  The subscriber maintains the responsibility for overall management of services to their customers.  This in and of itself screams of open systems and integration platforms.

The role of the data center is changing and will continue to rapidly evolve as the service provider, stitching together the best services to drive the growth of it’s business and operate the business efficiently.  This will require integration of subscribed to software services and the sharing of corporate data, integration of management technologies and feeds from the infrastructure running the workloads the subscriber pushes off premise.  The workloads themselves will need to be intelligent and service enabled providing a view of risk of failure as an early warning system just as organizations have today.

In my opinion, this is the reason IaaS is so popular as a first stab at the cloud.  Providing hardware is a bit less complex, but still requires feeds of data for management and monitoring.

Are you considering your integration strategy as you go ‘To The Cloud’?

Michele

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Few people would argue against the efficacy of open, interoperable systems. And yet market forces being what they are, a fully open IT universe has forever been hopelessly out of reach.  (Read Full Article…)

The Hub Commentary_

I feel like changing things up here in Business Service Management land today.  This blog caught my attention as it describes the leap of going from an independent software vendor (ISV) to a SaaS offering.  It has challenges in how the software is architected so that it can then later be hosted and ultimately used by many customers in a single, multi-tenant environment to take full advantage of the economies of scale.  The fact is most are run in dedicated environments to short cut this challenge.

The piece I find curious and would debate is why should an ISV turn into the service provider?  I would be highly speculative of these situations as most lack the experience to make that leap to manage a data center.  Best to partner with a hosting provider with th expertise in managing and running software and stick to what you know best – the application.

Now relating this back to the topic of Business Service Management, the application needs to be instrumented or as I call it, service enabled.  Data needs to be sent to the monitoring and management technology to provide basic health and availability and thus the need for that middleware testing the performance of the hosting provider as well as application performance data.  The cloud and service provider models bring great agility, but all point to the requirement for an integration platform to provide that end-to-end service view.

How are you measuring your service providers?

Michele

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Sinclair’s recent post Cloud Middleware: The Language Shared by Network Engineers and Developers posits that the cloud space has seemingly maintained a bias towards infrastructure offerings (IaaS) and is now at an “inflection point” where a common layer – the cloud middleware layer – will be required by developers and network managers alike to, as Jeff Kaplan puts it: Bridge the Great Divide in Cloud Computing.  I’d like to expand on this theme.   (Read Full Article…)

The Hub Commentary_

As the writer mentions, a lot of ink has covered cloud computing – I might suggest a lot of that ink has been about the commoditization of IT.  As I posted yesterday with the 2×2 grid of service classification, most of what falls into the Cost quadrant are services that could be considered commodity. Applying business service management practices and taking a top down view as my friend Siki suggests in the article, is the first step in identifying services, where they should run and how they should be managed for that end-to-end view as she also mentions.

The for Cost services are not unique and different from one organization to the next and those resources can be redeployed for applying technology to growth opportunities for the business.  As we have posted many times on The Hub on this topic, management has to be baked into workloads making them not only secure, but also intelligent to feed the proper monitoring information back into your management tools.

How are you taking advantage of the cloud today?

Michele

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So much digital ink, on InfoWorld and elsewhere, has been spilled analyzing cloud computing — what it is, whether it’s anything new, whether it will change IT as we know it. But a recent conversation has me thinking that cloud computing’s greatest contribution may be in the way it applies the principles of mass production to IT.  (Read Full Article…)

The Hub Commentary_

Business Service Management practices need to be baked into the workloads as they are configured and deployed just as you would instrument applications and hardware as it is deployed into production environments.  The difference in this situation is that the workloads are a bit more dynamic and potentially paid for with a subscription on outside infrastructure.  Management to decommission workloads is as important as deploying additional resources during peak periods to monitor costs appropriately.

Management practices are often the last applied when moving or changing services into production.  However, in order to be properly instrumented for monitoring and management, the management must be planned and implemented during the planning and configuring stage in order to properly test and move to production.

How intelligent are your workloads?

Michele

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The Hub Commentary_

This article has some extreme points, however, I too believe this is the year for radical change for data centers and IT.  Service value and Business Service Management practices are an imperative.  The catalyst for change is the explosion of service providers and cloud options, frustration with internal IT lethargic behavior and a promise for increased spending in technology that guarantees to grow the business.

In another recent news article and post I mentioned pick up this years upcoming Fortune 500 list of leaders and hold it for next year and compare the shifts in who leads their industry and who applied technology in lock step with their business driving growth through service value and new technologies.  I believe there will be a few industry upsets in next year’s list.

How are you driving service value in 2011?

Michele

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Like the cranks who frothily peddled the notion that vaccinations trigger autism, too many uninformed tech-strategy charlatans are still pushing the ancient and empty bromide that CIOs need to “request a seat at the table.”  (Read Full Article…)

The Hub Commentary_

The first question should really be “Do you know the value in managing consumer devices on your network.” Good Business Service Management practices would start with an evaluation of the cost to manage a new device and the value it provides to the business over doing something else that would drive revenue growth.  This goes to a post from last week on the very same topic.

There is no doubt that as data centers and services advance the first devices evaluated will be mobile, however, just because it is there and is someones new gadget doesn’t mean that it is a must to support.  Does it drive revenue?  Will it aid in customer retention? How does it make the environment more productive and efficient?

Practices of good service value evaluations are a must have these days with the exponential growth and proliferation of new devices and technologies.

How do you evaluate Service Value before signing up for support and management?

Michele

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Smartphones and other devices such as the Apple iPad have clearly reached critical mass. The iPad alone is expected to reach sales of 65 million units this year. While we call them consumer devices, a hefty percentage are owned by people who want to use their phone or tablet computer to access corporate e-mail and other applications. Chances are good that you are already dealing with workers at your organization wanting to connect their devices to your network.  (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…)

We had a snow storm the other day, during the night we lost power and by morning, the house was cold.   I was able to get on the internet with my laptop which has a cellular wireless connection as well as my cell phone.   I checked some emails for work purposes and then went to the electric companies website to see if there were any details on the power outage in my area.   I found a link on the home page which lead me to an up to date map on outages and details on the outages.   From this map I was able to find my location on the map, click on the red circle and get estimates on when the service (electricity) would be restored.

It is nice to see a service provider that leverages technology, by them having an up to date website with details on the services they are providing to me, I will not be calling into them to speak to a representative for an update.  Granted, for this type of situation the dial in method would probably have some very long generic recording, just not sure I’d be interested in listening to the whole thing before hitting buttons to get directed to a human being.

The moral of the story, having dashboards for customers to log into to check on the services a service provider is providing was at one time a differentiator, it is now an assumed feature of the service being provided.     The same is true for the IT department.  I want to log into a dashboard to check on my active helpdesk tickets and planned maintenance and active outages (with updates on when they will be resolved).

Business Service Management is the methodology for gathering all of the details and populating the dashboard for the customers.

The Hub Commentary_

The lack of clarity and transparency of IT services as consumed by the business is a catalyst for many of the service providers and as-a-Service offerings.  The service providers are in business to grow and drive revenue as should IT organizations.  Business Service Management practices and knowing your services is first step in achieving this transparency in measuring services both for quality and cost.

For many years IT has pushed back against such transparency and as the article ends, it could work in their favor to provide this visibility to costs.  It’s like cell phone minutes, as long as I’m not paying the bill I just use the phone without regard.  As soon as I had to assess my own usage and purchase my own phone, I had an eye opening experience.  You mean when I was in Europe it was like $2.00/minute and then there was roaming too!  Yikes!  Why didn’t someone just tell me and I would have planned accordingly and may not have used the phone as much or as often.

As long as all services are created equal and there is cool mobile and remote technology to use, the business will continue to ask for the highest levels of service and support for 24×7, where ever I am and on whatever device I choose to use.  If the costs were exposed and the tables turned to ask the questions “what is the value”, we might find the value isn’t really there and the business would say turn that off.  Currently, IT doesn’t have the right to ask the business value question until they can answer the cost question.

Do you know what your services cost and what the value is they deliver?

Michele

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For years, enterprise IT departments could be fuzzy about the costs of individual IT services and applications, but tight budgets and the relative clarity of cloud computing costs have forced CIOs into sharp focus.  (Read Full Article…)

The Hub Commentary_

Innovation is an overused term, I agree.  True innovation are products and services that change the way an industry does business, however, business growth through new services and products are now more than ever dependent upon technology.  As you can see from this recent survey business is relying on IT to support business growth.

Growth is dependent upon automation of the routine to free resources to move from “Bulb Monitor” roles to service providers and more agile to deploy and manage new services that will use new technologies to drive business growth.  Operationally, IT must rethink how to take advantage of technology to not only deploy new technologies, but also how to free themselves from the routine tasks too.

I’ve seen and posted many of these articles already this year and look forward to the story of an organization who is putting it into action and moving from “Bulb Monitor” to the fuel for growth.

Michele

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A new survey from SAP suggests that IT budgets should be focused on innovation – but, as Gary Flood asks, is that enough?

Innovation. It’s both a very trendy but also much abused term at the moment in IT. And maybe we’d have a better idea of what it actually means – and what it could contribute? – if we were given a chance to do some of it.

(Read Full Article…)

The Hub Commentary_

Back to basics balanced with growth opportunities.  Doing more with less and getting the most out of the bottom of the data center food chain and layering in the value add for future growth needs to be the theme for 2011.

I’ve spoken to many recently that are looking at consolidation projects as replacement projects too.  Replacing the commodity monitoring with lower cost open source options, ITSM SaaS offerings, adding value in the instrumentation of their next generation infrastructure (cloud, virtualization) and then the topic turns to integration platforms to stitch together the fabric for real-time visibility.

I believe we have all learned waiting for an uber framework that can do it all is just a dream.  Taking the best, most cost effective feeds into an integrated view that can be twisted like a Rubik’s cube depending upon the viewer is the fastest route to injecting run-time monitoring, management and measuring into the infrastructure of the future.

Michele

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Fifty-one percent of data center managers and decision makers at large organizations see technology refreshes as the top data center priority for 2011, according to a survey from IT infrastructure specialist SANpulse. This finding highlights the fact that mean time to migrate (MTTM) is critical for rapid adoption of new technologies and fast execution of these operations.  (Read Full Article…)

The Hub Commentary_

The theme of integration still rings true.  The key to efficiency remains in the ability to get the most out of what you have and pull it all together for that end-to-end view to avoid impact, proactively manage change and take full advantage of agile technologies.  A key to Business Service Management is fundamentally just this integration capability and the end-to-end live view and if you don’t have it, you are no doubt behind the 8 ball.

2011 is the year of Business Service Management and communicating service performance in terms of service and not technology and that will require integration of all the data points you already have in your data center.

Michele

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Improvements and simplification of data center management software, standardization and virtualization of IT hardware and software assets, and improved integration of new technology into existing systems are all proving to contribute mightily to a company’s bottom-line profit.   (Read Full Article…)

The Hub Commentary___

Great read of an inspirational CIO taking advantage of agile technology.  What is missing is how does he manage and measure the workloads in the cloud?  How does he instrument them or does he to make them intelligent to proactively monitor, manage and measure back to the business on the cost and value.

What I find intriguing with many of these articles on the those being successful with the cloud is that only half the story is told, sure they took advantage of the agile technology, but what about the operational side of it too?

I’m all for the adoption and deployment of agile technologies as I am in the long term future for that technology with the operational management that makes it cost effective and valuable in the end.  Another article I posted yesterday indicates the all too common reality of downtime and how it costs on average $100,000/hour of downtime and this has been my experience in working with customers and prospects on Business Service Management projects that proactively monitor, manage and measure services versus technology avoiding downtime.

Real power of the cloud can be short sided if not managed and measured.  How do you measure your cloud?

Michele

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Leave it to Rob Carter, the CIO of FedEx, to clarify what’s really powerful about cloud computing. Carter, the company’s CIO since 2000 and an InformationWeek advisory board member for almost as long, has a knack for discussing technology in a way that cuts to the business payoff, but without leaning on buzzwords that whitewash the complexity involved.  (Read Full Article…)

The Hub Commentary_

IT by the numbers and with Business Service Management.  In lean times, we need to get the most out of what we have, look at lower cost alternatives for the commodity and make the investment in the things that will drive value to the business.  Delivering real ROI has been something IT has been notoriously poor at executing because they manage by technology and not by the business service and lack the understanding of the cost / value to the business.

We are entering a time of growth and expansion of technology and the time will come to reimagine IT as business services and manage them as such.  Investing in new, agile technologies also require the right management baked in.  Last week the press was all over the Gartner report dissing Amazon for not providing enough monitoring.  Whose responsibility is it to manage your workloads in the cloud?  Service enabling those workloads and instrumenting them to manage as end-to-end services will be key in taking full advantage of agile technologies and opex subscription services.

Time has come to think in terms of Business Service Management of the infrastructure.

Michele

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You can’t run a company without technology, but you can’t invest in technology without the blessings of the finance department. And thanks to the stagnant economy, the pendulum of power between Finance and IT is swinging decidedly toward the chief financial officer’s door these days.  (Read Full Article…)

The Hub Commentary_

The time has come to re-think IT, the assets, sourcing options and management with the focus on growth, sure cost cutting is still in the balance of things too.  Opportunities to re-think the routine, automation, leverage lower cost tools for the commodity and apply the shift in that spending toward growth.

One side effect to increased spending is the spending only on new technology without reimagining the whole picture of managing and operating on the day-to-day as well.  In another article posted today from the Cloud Computing Journal, downtime costs $100,000/hour.  Reimagining IT is the whole operational picture – this is exciting for those who embrace it and make the most of it both from new services and operations.

Michele

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Last week Gartner announced the results of Gartner’s 2011 CIO Survey and Agenda under the theme of reimagining IT. The idea behind this theme is that CIOs and IT leaders have an opportunity to use new business priorities and technologies to create value in new ways.  (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…)

The Hub Commentary_

Management instrumentation required, service enable during development.  New technology getting ready for production, but not ready for production creates the virtual stall.  Service enabling, instrumenting and an integration strategy will keep management on track.  Old management tools are no going to provide the data required for virtual infrastructures.  It will be a combination of the virtualization and traditional management tools that will provide the end-to-end view through an integrated strategy that will break the stalemate of the virtual stall.

Michele

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We’re hearing a lot about “virtual stall” these days. Supposedly, this is what happens when too many virtual machines clog up both physical infrastructure and traditional management systems, bringing productivity to a halt. This places an artificial cap on the amount of virtualization the typical enterprise can handle, and, by extension, its ability to leverage cloud technology.  (Read Full Article…)

The Hub Commentary_

Interesting we swing to virtual stall over management tools and the year ahead holds data centers being designed with integration, systems management, hardware, end-to-end views in the planning and implementing.  Good summation of trends in the market and keys to success.

Michele

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What will be the big trends in data center design and operations in 2011? We surveyed some of the leading thinkers in the field, and got their thoughts about the trends that will make news this year. Their predictions cover a lot of ground. But a key theme was the emergence of a holistic approach to the data center, that integrates the many technologies, departments and processes that historically have created challenges for the industry.   (Read Full Article…)

The Hub Commentary_

It’s that time of year for Gartner’s updated CIO Agenda and survey.  2011 promises to be a year of change for the brave that reach out and embrace it.  On my personal blog I used the phrase, Technology without Imagination is Commodity – Technology with Imagination has Endless Possibilities!

I find change exciting, budgets are loosening, new technologies and approaches to business are available – now what are you going to do with it?

Michele

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Its time to reimagine IT as business and technical changes require CIOs to answer new questions rather than just find new answers to old questions. That is what Dave Aron and myself found as we completed a worldwide CIO survey from September to December 2010. The survey includes responses from 2,014 CIOs representing more than $160 billion in corporate and public-sector IT spending across 50 countries and 38 industries.  (Read Full Article…)