Business Service Management Hub

The recent earthquakes in New Zealand got me thinking about early warnings. A CIO.com article suggested that computerized early-warning signals might help warn people of impending disasters like the one that happened in February. What do earthquakes have to do with IT? Well, you might need early warning systems too before disaster strikes your system. 

In the CIO.com article, researchers were talking about warnings measured in seconds, but suppose you had the power to stop your network disaster long before it happened? A good monitoring system can give you that power. It may not save lives as the earthquake systems have the potential to do, but it could save your company money and you and your colleagues loads of frustration and aggravation.

Earthquakes leave death and devastation in their wake. I don’t mean to equate human misery on that scale with a computer outage, yet when systems go down it still can affect many people depending on its scope. If a service like Gmail goes down it could have an impact on millions of people.

When your mission critical systems go down, it can have a profound impact on productivity and that translates into actual dollars and cents measured in hours of lost productivity. If your web site goes down and you rely it on for ecommerce purposes, you can equate it with actual lost dollars

Regardless of how you measure it or look at it, if you could prevent a systems disaster  most companies would do it. And when you have good measuring systems in place and tuned correctly to measure how well your systems are running, you have at least the potential to help troubleshoot and prevent long term outages on your system before they cause problems.

It is certainly not on the scale of an earthquake, but you can implement your own early warning systems before disaster strikes your systems.

Photo by Rhys’s Piece Is on Flickr. Used under Creative Commons License.

Without a doubt the three trends having the biggest impact on the enterprise today are mobile, social and the cloud. These three elements have put the ability to access and share information easily into the hands of every employee with little or no intervention from IT, and from the perspective of some CIOs, that’s a very scary prospect indeed.

In a recent article on CIO Insight, A World of Risk: Are CIOs Up to the Challenge, author Irfan Salf looked at some of the risks associated with these technologies. Like it or not these, technologies are driving the movement toward what has been called the consumerization of IT.

In an article last week on Fortune, Brian Caufield talked about this trend saying that unlike the old days when IT dictated exactly what devices were allowed in the enterprise, and which ones were not, that power is fading fast as people (particularly executives) want to use their iPads and iPhones at work.

Beyond the devices, the cloud and social media tools bring another layer of simplicity for end users and complexity to IT pros in terms of monitoring and mitigating risk for the enterprise. The good news for users is that it means they can get their files anywhere from any machine, but conversely that could be bad news for you if it means dealing with compliance and governance headaches.

Like it or not , however,  the ship has sailed and you can’t really go back to the way you were before. The fact is that even as the cloud/mobile/social could life difficult for IT, locking down your enterprise is as counterproductive in its own way as shutting down the Internet was in Egypt in January. It hurts you as much as it helps you.

In the end these trends aren’t going away, and they can help build and enhance your business.  The fact is that you need to find a way to make this all work.

One way to do that is to use monitoring tools to help you get as big a picture as you can of your entire system. PC monitoring can help you track laptops. You can jump on the bandwagon and create custom apps to help you track mobile devices or you can give your employees access to your secure environment, so that when they are working on work-related materials they are better protected.

Just recently, I wrote about how companies like Box.net were changing the face of Enterprise software. One of the features of the most recent Box iOs release was aimed directly at this type of situation by giving your users SSO access to enterprise identity systems.

Instead of fighting against a change that can ultimately help your organization, look for ways to make it work for you and find ways to use the systems you already have in place. Monitoring tools can help you find that compromise you need to free your users, yet give you the control you need.

Photo by sfllaw on Flickr. Used under Creative Commons License

In a recent blog post called  IT Cost Transparency = Power to the people on the bmcsoftware blog, Tony Narvarrete wrote that when your users don’t understand IT costs, they can take them for granted. That means they probably think of them as free and as such, they don’t really care about consumption. Yet his title seemed to suggest that the advantage of knowing this cost rested with the users when it’s actually advantageous to both IT and users when service costs are laid out in a clear way.

A couple of years ago before there was a lot of talk about private clouds, I learned about a Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) initiative that provided a way for teams to set up and break down projects very quickly while in the field. The spokesperson explained they set up a portal with a series of tightly defined service offerings, and that individual projects were charged based on the services they used and for how long. That meant, users only kept a project open for as long as they needed and no more.

Even if you’ve established a services approach at your company, if you haven’t set up a cost structure for your users, there is no basis for them to understand cost and consumption. If I’m in a situation like the DISA service portal, I know if I’m using a certain number of software licenses, a certain amount of hard drive space and so much memory and it’s going to cost me x dollars for x days, I’m going to make darn sure, it gets shut off the day I don’t need it anymore.

On the other hand, if I don’t know how much these services cost, it’s not going to matter to me how many resources I’m using, and I’m probably not going to think to give those resources back when I’m done. It’s one of the reasons that companies have thousands of SharePoint sites sitting around on the company servers  — because there is nothing compelling project owners to shut them down, even long after the project is over.

But when you tell your customer-users exactly what it’s costing them to use your services, you can plan your resource requirements better because chances are you won’t have so many of these orphaned projects sucking resources. It’s better for IT pros because you can make better use of  existing IT resources, and it’s better for users because they can negotiate based on a firmer understanding of the costs of using a particular service.

When your users understand the relationship between cost and consumption, everybody wins.

Once upon time, you tended to side with a single vendor. You were an IBM shop or a Microsoft shop. Those days have disappeared for most organizations. Heterogeneity rules the day and it complicates the life of any IT pro. 

When you take the diverse set of hardware and software found in any large enterprise today and you factor in the cloud with a set of virtual services and external cloud vendors, it complicates the situation even further. And it begs the question about how you control it and get a broad view across the entire spectrum of hardware and software inside and outside your organization.

There are no simple answers to monitoring an increasingly complex computing environment, but a recent article on ITBusinessEdge called A Growing Problem: Data Management on the Cloud suggests there is a way to gain some semblance of control of this situation. And that is the subject of this blog: Business Service Management tools.

The article quotes,  Vikas Aggarwal, CEO at Zyrion, who calls BSM, “the ideal approach for addressing the rapidly growing cloud manageability issues.”

That’s because BSM tools at their best give you the ability to look across the entire environment, to see what’s working and what’s not, but it’s not just simply what’s on and what’s not. A good BSM system gives you insight across the business and the impact it has on what you do.

And it’s not just the fact that you are in the cloud that’s the issue. It’s so much more than that. You are spread across geographies. You are physical and virtual. You have a set of services you provide and all of the components that make up that service have to be in sync.

No tool is a panacea to the problems that face IT, but one way to get on top of the situation is to have a broad view across your computing landscape, whatever it comprises and wherever it lives and BSM, at least gives you a fighting chance to see the big picture.

Photo by ny156uk on Flickr. Used under the Creative Commons License.

Oh my, there was a lot of bad news about IT jobs last week. First of all Computerworld published a story called, As cloud grows, IT spending flatlines and then Forrester released a report suggesting that recent IT spending was actually hurting IT jobs growth. It’s enough to make an IT pro throw up his or her hands in despair.  But perhaps BSM could be the answer. 

While it’s clear there are some disturbing trends, it doesn’t have to be all gloom and doom. Let’s explore the numbers for a moment first. IDC says public cloud computing spending is going up at a fairly dramatic rate. This corresponds with a loss in IT jobs and the easy conclusion to make is that the shift to the public cloud is costing jobs (whether true or not).

Meanwhile, the Forrester report points out that companies are spending on IT infrastructure, yet not producing the corresponding jobs you would expect to coincide with that spending. What does it all mean?

It’s hard to find firm answers, but let’s assume that some of this jobs lag is due to trends like investments in Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI). By their nature these machines require less maintenance, at least on their face. You can upgrade them from the back end. You don’t have to deal with users downloading viruses, but these machines require far more network monitoring to be sure you are getting decent throughput across the system — and that’s where BSM comes in.

Same goes with the cloud. As I wrote recently in Cloud Control: Staying on Top of the Hybrid Cloud, “One consideration you might want to take into account when choosing an external cloud vendor is the extent to which it provides information for your monitoring systems.” As an IT professional one your big responsibilities in the future will be in monitoring your internal and external systems.

And these are just a couple of the small examples where BSM comes in. Remember, as a system BSM provides a way to monitor the health and well-being of your entire technology infrastructure, and it lets you see the business benefits of these technologies.

As you come to understand the information moving through these systems, you can begin to see the impact of technology across the entire organization and that kind of information is valuable.

That’s why I might not be exaggerating when I say that the future of IT might be in BSM because it is going to be increasingly important for organizations moving forward to understand the entire IT infrastructure and BSM can help you do that.

Photo by gwire on Flickr. Used under Creative Commons License.

In September, 2009 Gmail went down for two hours. To hear the complaining on social networks like Twitter at the time, you would have thought the entire world had come to a stand-still, but for many people it did. That’s because this service meant more to them than just a nice-to-have free service. People had actually come to depend on it to communicate for business and personal means. 

Other high profile outages have followed including the Intuit outage last June and the Skype outage in December. These two outages lasted more than a day, leaving many unhappy users in their wakes and providing a snapshot for you of what happens when your systems go down.

People who need these services to do their jobs are left looking for work-arounds that IT might not ultimately be happy with (like using unauthorized services to try and get something done).

The fact is that as you sit there looking at your monitoring dashboard, there are real people behind those red lights trying get their work done, and these stories illustrate in a very concrete fashion that when services go down–whether it’s a public service or a private one– it can have a profound impact on actual users.  It can be easy to forget that as you look at the data in front of you on monitors, but it’s important to keep in mind that it’s not just some abstract representation of the service levels inside your company.

In fact, for every red light you see on the dashboard, is another person unable to complete a task using that service and the more mission critical it is, the bigger the effect.

So as you monitor your systems, and review your data and watch the activity streaming through your equipment, always remember that there are humans who depend on these tools to do their jobs, and when a service goes down, even for a little while, it can have major ramifications.

Photo by nan palmero on Flickr. Used under Creative Commons License