Business Service Management Hub

Free Summary – EMA Radar for Business Service Management: Service Impact Q3 2010  – Enterprise Management Associates(Read Full Summary Report …)

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 …)

So you have a console that has your Business Service Management views.   You set up the views to show the key Services you are providing to your end customer(s) (EMail, Databases,  CRM, etc).  You somehow are bringing in monitoring data in order to light up the service views in order to show some type of condition and health. You figured out how to measure the Service Levels and provide all of these details back to the end users and management in a dashboard.  The question is, how do you maintain it?

If you have been following ITIL, one approach is to integrate the BSM solution with the CMDB solution (assuming they are different solutions).   The CMDB probably has discovery populating it with new CI’s and updates to CI’s.  The CMDB should have inputs to other systems for additional details around the CI’s.   In the end, the CMDB is the location for the factiods around the Services such as all of the CI’s comprising the Service, relationships between the CI’s, current configuration of the CI’s and so on.   If those details are available, why wouldn’t you use it to drive the way in which IT is managing the environment.   As things change within the enterprise, the CMDB is updated and in turn the BSM views should auto-magically update also.

Tobin

If you are reading this, then there must still be some questions in your mind on what Business Service Management (BSM) is, I’m not going to give you the elevator pitch, there are lots of companies with different flavors of those, I’ll take another angle on it that might help.

There is this large shipping company, they ship thousands of packages a day.  One of their critical operations is in a large hanger at an airport.   Planes and trucks are unloading packages and they need to be sorted and loaded back onto different planes and trucks.   There is significant computer automation that moves these packages along their way and in turn, these systems need monitoring.  Having an end to end view of the unloading, sorting and reloading of packages with a realtime update on volume, outages and other metrics is important to them.  Some might say that this end to end view is a very technical view and not BSM, to this shipping company, shipping packages is their business and being able to see this piece of the Service is important.

A large financial firm has many traders, it is important to ensure that all of the trading systems are up and running, network links to the outside world are required for these trades as well as the traders workstations and how well they are performing.  Having an end to end view of the complete trading application with up to date availability, trading volumes and other metrics is important for them to understand if they are making or losing money.

The typical BSM for a company is to be able to set up end to end views of the important corporate applications like EMail or CRM, but that is not the only example of BSM, shipping, trading, manufacturing, banking, there are endless examples of managing the environment in a manner that aligns IT with the business they are in.  By IT leveraging the BSM approach, they are ensuring that they are looking at the things that are important to the business, in turn they are providing value to the business.

Tobin

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…)

A true story, names not revealed to protect the innocent and a Dilbert in the making.  An illustration of Business Service Management, rather than a Wiki like definition, of technology impact and calculating costs and value.

Early in my career, green and wet behind the ears, about 8 months into the job working the 4:00 – 12:00 shift solo (the shift where stuff gets done, but not discovered until 7:00 am the next day) in a distributed data center.  You know what I’m talking about and likely already sense the pain that is about to come.  I knew how to run the jobs, I didn’t know what they were really doing or how to fix things if they went wrong – at least not until one fateful summer night.  I was working for an outsourcer processing insurance claims for the customer to pay the beneficiaries.

The Set-up:

I worked my shift, I left at midnight, jobs done, reports printed, tape back-ups done, the girl working midnight was about to have an easy night.  That is until about 6:30 am when she would attempt to bring 3 mainframes online for the next days claims processing.  Yes, she was greeted with more error codes than she knew what to do with, The Boss received an early alarm/wake-up call, I can’t bring Rodney to life (that’s the nick name of each of our mainframes) HELP!!

The Solution – Scavenger Hunt:

I arrive at work at 4 to chaos, looks of anger and irrecoverable damage on your shift yesterday.  I look around, machines are humming and I say it was not irrecoverable, Rodney is up and running.  The phone rings, I answer it, my friend Richard in a distant location, he asks how are you, I say worst day of my life, he says, “it was you!”, meaning he had helped restore service, but no one ratted me out as the root cause.

Richard walks me through my previous night’s shift and what I did and didn’t notice.  I trashed a bunch of  files.  Not a big deal if you have back-ups, which we did, just hang a tape, reload the files and restart Rodney – 5 minutes.

The Cost – my Penalty:

The Boss comes into the data center and waves at me, come take a walk with me.  I figure I’m about to get fired, afterall, the data center was down for 7 hours, not a single claim processed, beneficiaries didn’t receive checks, my company missed an SLA, dozens of people worked 7 hours to fix my mistake, but there was something even worse I was about to experience.  At 20 something, I couldn’t calculate the number of zero’s for the cost of my simple error.

The Boss walks me through a room with the folks that input claims and reminds me they get paid by the claim, meaning the number of claims they key each day.  My simple mistake caused a 7 hour outage, a team of people to find the root cause in order to restore service, my company may have been slapped with a fine, beneficiary checks were delayed, but most heart wrenching to me was that I impacted the paychecks of more than 100 folks that were paid by the number of claims they keyed each day.  As I walked through the room, they didn’t know I was the root cause, but they were glaring at us none-the-less.

The room seemed the length of a football field that day.  As we exited the room The Boss simply said, “are you going to do this again?” and I quickly responded, “I hope you fire me if I do!”.

Business Service Management – claims processing was my business, my company caused an outage of significant cost.  This happens every day, the cost is quite easy to calculate and the insurance policy to mitigate the risk is far less costly, however, as IT professionals we have a difficult time justifying service enabling our data centers with proper management until there is an outage.  A single outage can cost 1-2% of revenue and a solution to avoid it can be a fraction of that cost.

Data centers are growing more complex, virutalization and cloud computing are seen as low cost options by removing hardware and software costs, however, the cost of support is overlooked and we are entering a familiar cycle of short sided savings over long term cost to repeat the dotcom bust of the 90’s with the hosting providers and web services.  Service Enabling infrastracture with an end-to-end view to pinpoint root cause, visibility to read the indicators before impact so that restoration can be minutes – not hours greatly reducing the cost of an outage has to factored into the solution.  By service enabling with management upfront allows you to take risks, be agile with new technology by having the right management in place to monitor for thresholds, errors, etc. avoiding and mitigating outages.

I know my Boss wasn’t really mad that I was the root cause of an outage, he’s was mad that a 5 minute fix relied upon a 7 hour scavenger hunt!  This is my Dilbert – what’s yours?

Michele

I like to do searches on the internet from time to time to see the type of hits produced around specific terms such as Business Service Management and Cloud Computing.  Sometimes just changing the search slightly, you get drastically different results.   So today when I searched on “Managing the cloud”, I noticed that the most recent article was from Feb of 2009, in fact, many of the results were from 2009.   My first thought was the problem must have been solved if there are no recent search results.  I think it is that we are at the point that we have a better understanding of the cloud and are not as worried about it as much as we were before.  Sure, there are still some concerns, in fact many areas of concern, but they are manageable.

I know I am probably simplifying it, but managing the cloud has a lot of the same characteristics of managing the enterprise.   You need to be able to control access to the data/system/server, you also need to be able to keep tabs on the health and availability of things running in the cloud (internal or external cloud).    The cloud and business service management are related in some manner, where and how you run your services includes the term cloud, and how you manage those services is within the Business Service Management space.   Vendors that provide tools for managing the enterprise are going to end up being some of the same vendors that provide tools to managing the cloud, but keep in mind, monitoring the health of the server or service running in the cloud is only one part of it, there are other areas of managing such as service elasticity, governance, compliance and general provisioning.  It is time to start to look at a more holistic approach within IT to solve some of these management problems.

Tobin

Being that we’re at the start of a new year and all, I thought I’d launch the 2011 newsletter by sharing predictions from a variety of network and systems management vendor executives.  (read more…)

Preliminary findings of TRAC’s end-user survey show that organizations are still struggling to gain full visibility into their IT services and infrastructure. (read more …)

Tom Sanzone, CIO of Credit Suisse, says he was attracted to his position by senior management’s commitment to technology—a commitment demonstrated by his seat on the executive board of Credit Suisse. In that role, Sanzone helps shape the bank’s overall strategy, which is based on the opportunities that his technology organization has created.  (read more …)

Today, service providers and enterprises interested in implementing clouds face the challenge of integrating complex software and hardware components from multiple vendors. The resulting system can end up being expensive to build and hard to operate, minimizing the original motives and benefits of moving to cloud computing.  (read more…)