Tag Archive | "Service Value"

Marketing IT and the Competition

Tags: Availability, BSM, Business Service Management, CIO, IT Management, Marketing, Service Providers, Service Value, Transformation, Trends


IT is in the midst of a great transformation and wrote about this in a previous blog as referenced by a CIO article and a Forrester blog.  For those of us who have been in and around IT for the past 20 years, we’ve seen this ebb and flow of change.  New technology, growth of service providers, decentralization and then back to centralization and cost containment.  It was desktop computing and LANs, web services and eCommerce and now it is the cloud.  This time is different though, the business is driving and creating the new IT.  There is competition and easier buying models that didn’t exist previously.  I will also state that outsourcing is not cheaper, it is creating the change that cannot be created from within – the new IT requirement.

In the previous post and CIO article, I mentioned IT needing to run more like the vendors they purchase technology from and marketing would become a key component.  Many think of IT marketing as marketing great technology services and uptime within the organization.  It is just this wrong kind of marketing that is driving the transformation for change.  Your business does not care about technology uptime, the business cares about driving out cost for profitability and driving up revenue for growth and profitability.  Marketing of IT has 3 facets:

  • Know your services, their cost and value
  • Know your competition and their capabilities
  • Know the market requirements of your customers

This is a transformation where internal IT is already late for the dance and few possess the capability to enter the dance floor with a perfect tango balancing technical capability and innovative intrigue.  The competition knows this weaknesses and is capitalizing on it.  Technology vendors are also making the shift as to who the new buyers of technology and services are – the business and the service providers.  The difference between the technology vendors and IT is that the vendors are used to identifying markets, trends, shifts and making the adjustments required to capitalize on a market based upon the buyers and their requirements.

Know Your Services

Assess your current landscape of services and future services and where they fall into this simple grid.  This will help you to understand business drivers.  For example:  services for competitive advantage have little care for cost or quality, it is about speed to market.  In order to accomplish this, IT will require the flexibility to deploy with speed and mitigate cost and negative customer impact with controlled risk.  This is service enabling the infrastructure leveraging management technology to perform the monitoring and controlled risk, while the technologists apply the internal IP to the services with the right technology and right deployment options.Business Service Management Commentary on IT Service Management, Service Level Management & Performance Management

This will transform IT into the service managers that are developing in the business today with the underground New IT movement.  I would suggest that the model adopted by IT in their strategy to transform would be applying focus of time and resources as accordingly:

  • 50% on services driving competitive advantage
  • 30% on services for service quality and service efficiency
  • 20% on services driving out operating cost

The competition is focused on addressing the requirement of competitive advantage in your business, this is ITs greatest weakness and the service provider / vendors greatest ability to drive value.  ITs marketing efforts must begin here in developing the holistic strategy of technology, deployment options, cost and value to the business.

Know the Competition

Developing a holistic strategy will include a multi-vendor and service provider approach.  Understand internal strengths, weaknesses and the outside capabilities to drive the highest value, lowest cost solution and deployment.  This would break the traditional cycle of change driven out of frustration to outsource, not value or cost.  Outsourcing is not the lowest cost option, but right sourcing to meet the right objectives to deploy the right solution is IT transforming into strategic.

The competition also has weaknesses in high growth times like these.  The strength of IT is operational focus, while both the providers and IT could benefit from a bit of operational maturity, now is the time to illustrate operational maturity with good management practices, processes and ability to communicate business value.  The service providers are investing in the communication, while taking a risk (controlled risk in some cases) on management in meeting a time to market requirement.  To meet the same time to market requirement within your organization, evaluating how you leverage management technology to automate your processes and provide the communication required for your business, would provide both competitive advantage and allow you to focus your IP on driving new services.

Know your Customers

Typically when you ask IT about their customers, they respond with their users and internal employees.  Here I am speaking about knowing the customers of your business.  Why do they select your company for your services?  What do you do better than your competition?  Who is the competition of your business?

Instead of working to control the environment so tightly and throw up obstacles and barriers to change and adoption of new technology and interactions with both the employees (Service Efficiency) and customers (Competitive Advantage), embrace them.  Understand how and why they seek to use specific devices, technology, methods of interaction, etc. and how to best deploy the right option.  This is understanding the requirement, not necessarily mimicking each and every device and method.  Provide the flexibility, while balancing control and risk.  This is most important when evaluating customer requirements and creating loyalty.

Think about who you prefer to do business with and why in your personal life and bring this into your IT organization to start the transformation revolution.  While I agree that marketing within your organization is relevant, marketing the right services and message will drive the greatest value in your organization.  This is dependent upon knowing your customers, requirements, competition and a focus shift from technology operators to communicating and driving revenue as service managers.

Do you know your services, customers and competition?

Michele

IT, the CIO & Business, Fast Forward 5 Years – How Will You Get There?

Tags: BSM, Business Service Management, CIO, IT Management, Service Value, Transformation, Trends


This past week Kim S. Nash, Senior Editor for CIO, publshed an insightful article, Top CIOs Predict the Five-Year Future of the CIO”.  I’ll paraphrase a few of the key points that I jotted down and stuck out when I read through the article:

  • CIO of the future will be an Entrepreneur, Futurist, Global Talent Scout, Connector, Master of Business Metrics
  • CIO / CTO Split?  No support for this prediction and fractures the ability to manage / deploy technology and be a strategist
  • Big Technology Trends – Cloud, Mobile, Social Media, Consumerization, Big Data, etc. will not change the role
  • Manage change, Not Technology
  • Set strategy, Not server thresholds
  • Technology will change the way a company interacts with it’s customers
  • CIO Effectiveness – He/She handles and sparks major business shifts
  • Entrepreneur
    • In-house futurist, will be measured by financial measure, will run a business and market like the vendors they purchase from
    • Set aside technology and focus on business outcomes
  • Connector and Futurist
    • Will foster partnership with the providers to his company to deliver joint solutions
    • How workers, consumers and suppliers will create competitive advantage
  • Global Talent Scout
    • Roles will change from operators to managers
    • Location won’t matter
  • Master of Business 
    • Responsible to create new products and attract new customers, new revenue and thus new accountability
    • Innovate

There has been a long standing initiative and talk in the press and analyst papers regarding IT being part of the business and not separate from the business.  However, according to the analysts, more than 90% of IT organizations remain reactive and disconnected from the business.  I would concur with this.  We all attend industry conferences and think about how you answer this question, “What do you do?”.  Most of the time when I ask it, the response is something like I manage servers, I manage UNIX servers, I administer databases, I manage the networks, etc.  Then I look at their badge, see who they work for and respond with, “Oh you sell insurance or investment banking or ……”.

Before I visit a customer, I do a quick read of their annual report, the letter from the CEO and peruse their website so that when I shake the first hand, I have a fair idea what powers their business.  I continue to be surprise by the number of IT technologists that do not know the business their own organization is in or what powers the business, thus setting the easiest to identify priority.  Technology without imagination is a commodity, Technology with imagination has endless possibilities, however, most of us act as mere commodity operators keeping the lights on.  Keeping the lights on carries an annual cost of 1-2% of revenue, the time has come to power the business and drive with technology.

According to a Gartner and Forbes survey of Board of Directors (BoD), 65% of BoD count on technology to drive competitive advantage for the business and according to IDC >50% of IT will be outsourced by 2013.  The role of IT must evolve and it has become an imperative with the advent of competition and new buying models.  Competition with the MSPs/ASPs/ISPs, Cloud, SaaS, etc. has arrived and why the business has the buying decisions and is choosing to outsource IT.  The time has come to transform and the catalyst is the competition.  Kim does a great job describing the role of the CIO and the new face of IT in 5 years.

As a previous analyst in the outsourcing market, I will tell you as I have told many customers, no one outsources for cost.  It is a perceived cost reduction.  What isn’t factored into the equation is 3-7% of the cost of the contract to manage the relationship and the service and keeping overspending in check.  Outsourcing occurs to create change in the environment that is near impossible to do from within.  I wait each day for the new Fortune 500 list to arrive and I will hold it to compare with next year’s list.  Those that make the transformation to power their business with technology will take leadership spots in their industry’s.

Now let’s talk about what it will take to make this transformation.  To achieve the things Kim speaks of, IT must first know what the business is; then how best to use technology to operate it, create competitive advantage, communicate and market results, proactively make real-time changes, and why customers engage to drive future strategy.

What is the Business

In most businesses to drive revenue, you evaluate why customers engage with your organization.  In this case, IT in most cases, doesn’t know the business or the services of the business.  Step 1 must be to understand the business and current services.  I’ve written a previous post on The BSM Hub describing how to categorize and know your services based upon their value to the organization.  This will define how you manage these services and the supporting technology.  All services are not created equal and thus knowing the services and their relevance to the business is the first step to transforming to Service Managers versus Service Operators.

Here is a true story.  I once spoke at a medium sized regional event on the topic of Service Value and managing services in the winter of 2009.  After I finished speaking a man approached me and indicated while the discussion was interesting, IT is not strategic to his organization.  I looked at his badge and noticed he worked for a candy manufacturer.  So my first question was to go after the life blood of the business, the manufacturing line of the candy.  “Does IT have anything to do with the manufacturing line?”, the response was “no”.  Second question, “I know you must have an ERP system, correct”, “why yes we do…….”.  “I venture to guess that sales and distribution to your customers is important business, right?”, “Why yes it is”.  Now he is standing taller.  I mention how in September 1999 Hershey made the front page of the Wallstreet Journal for the poor deployment of an ERP and CRM system costing them Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, Valentines and most of Easter.  The lesson was that the public wasn’t as loyal to chocolate as they are to toothpaste and will buy what is on the shelves at the time.  “So managing and providing high availability of your sales, distribution and customer relationship management is critical to your business, wouldn’t you say?”.  He left with a different perspective than he came to the conversation with.

Companies are in the headlines everyday due to technology failures pointing out that if you do not know your business and what it costs you to be a mere operator, reacting to incidents, the press and the outsourcers will put  value on the situation.  The time has come to know the business, the services and their value and the supporting technology in order to manage it accordingly.

How Technology Supports the Business

Now that we know what the business is, let’s take a look at how the technology supports the business.  It is no longer sufficient to keep the lights on and manage all equipment the same.  Understanding the underlying infrastructure that supports the services defined above will change the way you manage the infrastructure.  Priority must be applied, not just severity of an event, business impact will be factored into the management of the technology.  Service enabled management in real-time must be applied, it is not a nice to have, but a must have.  Given the organization is wasting 1-2% of revenue annually, a service enabling management infrastructure is cheap and paid for before the first year is over.

Many management vendors speak of speed to root cause and speed to restoration.  This is still reactionary IT.   What is required is real-time, actionable intelligence to do something before a business impacting event occurs and avoid that business impacting event.  This now brings me to what many of the financial institutions already know, management is a mission critical service and requires high availability redundancy (as described in a post by my friend Tobin).  Don’t believe me?  So then I ask this question, “When flying on an airplane, do you want the pilot flying without instrumentation?, Then why would you run your business without instrumentation?”.

Now that you know the business and how your current technology maps to those services, it’s time to evaluate the best technologies and deployment options for the services and service enable them with management upfront, not as an afterthought.  Again, go back to the quadrant of services I described earlier.  Just because you have capability in-house to deliver commodity services, that isn’t generally the best choice.  Outsource the commodity.  Keep the competitive expertise in-house and evolve to manage services and put the proper instrumentation in place to service enable the infrastructure to mitigate risk, provided controlled risk for speed to market and provide the real-time actionable intelligence to make shifts on the fly to keep business running and creating quality customer experiences.

Why Customers Engage

Now that you have a grasp on today, let’s now use this new service enabled infrastructure to start creating the strategy to provide  stickiness with your customers, improve the customer experience with technology, creates competitive advantage and driving revenue.  This evaluation is 2 fold:  keeping current customers and gaining new customers.  Look at how customers want to do business with you, what devices they use, where and when they conduct business, etc. and often times creating a higher quality of service to maintain current customers will drive gaining new customers.

True innovation changes how an industry does business, think of eBay in the early days.  These sorts of transformations are rare, however, we are in the throws already of just this sort of transformation with how IT must revolutionize itself into the new IT.  Business is creating the new IT on it’s own by taking business folks with consumer technology knowledge and making the technology purchases in a decentralized manner.  Some call this “shadow IT”, I call it the “New IT”.  They are doing this because the current IT thinks more about managing and not enough about how to use the technology they are so good at running.

Running technology is the commodity, leveraging the IP in house to use technology to drive both revenue and competitive advantage is the new reality.  Now we’re back to where I started with my opening question, “What do you do for a living?”  Know your business, customers and how best to engage with them to drive your business.  Shift the focus of IT because the change is already happening all around us.

 

As I conclude on how to approach this transformation,  an interesting quote from Kim’s article by Nasir Khan, Executive Director of Infornetics at Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association, the administrator of 38 Blue Cross and Blue Shield health care providers covering 99M people, “Tactical reactionaries will be obsolete”.  This is why I look forward to comparing this years Fortune 500 list to next year’s as I fully expect that there will be a shake up at the top of many industries.  The shake up will occur because some make the transformation and do it rapidly and others remain as operators and commodity IT.

I do not want to leave you with the impression that the first two steps leave the business out.  Starting with Step 1, knowing the services and business, IT must engage with the business, start managing priorities and services as they power the business.  This cannot be an IT project.  The second step of mapping technology and deployment options to the services cannot become an inward IT CMDB project.  Yes, a CMDB does support this initiative, but it is about the services, not the project of creating IT documentation fondly called a CMDB.  Another ascertion I would make is that a CMDB project is of no value, but I’ll save the discussion as  to why for another post.  This transformation cannot be another IT project, it is a business transformation and those that succeed, will lead their industries in next year’s Fortune 500 list.

Investment must be made as a business investment that gives IT the management capability to manage services, manage providers, communicate real-time in business terms and use that management intelligence to drive competitive advantage both with new services and quality services that keep customers loyal.  Drive the cost out of the commodity and drive value  into the revenue.

How are you preparing for your transformation and service enabled infrastructure?

Michele

Looking At Cloud Strategy Through The Lens Of Value – Forbes

Tags: Availability, Best Practices, Business Service Management, Cloud, Forbes, IT Management, IT Management Tools, Performance, Service Providers, Service Value


The Hub Commentary_

Cloud for the sake of cloud and a technology will leave organizations following their competition.  I could not agree more and have many times commented here on The Hub regarding the use of the right technology deployment for the service, cost and value as described in the post on defining your services.

Now more than ever if IT is to achieve getting to service orchestrator ,they must start managing technology as a service over silo’d technologies.  This is going to requiring baking management into the services such that they are service enabled and provide proactive visibility as to their performance in real-time to mitigate risk and deliver the highest quality of services.

Management always lags new technology, but in this case to achieve the imperative of becoming a service orchestrator / broker / manager, IT has to evaluate a new way of managing the services they are responsible.  Yes, IT is responsible for the service regardless of how it delivered.

With buying decisions moving to the business, the job of managing services will get harder before it gets easier.  The business is taking over out of frustration to drive change, however, ownership of managing the service is being overlooked and putting IT back into the reactionary seat.  Now is the time to move from reactionary to proactive service broker.

Are you driving or riding as your business takes competitive advantage or loss?

Michele

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If the innovative ways that businesses are using cloud computing haven’t set off alarms within your organization, it’s time that they did. Enterprises that look at the cloud solely through the lens of technology will be left behind by more agile competitors that use the cloud to develop innovative new business models based on faster time to market, new modes of customer interaction and more efficient operating models. Likewise, ITservice providers that market their cloud offerings simply as technology solutions will be outmaneuvered by competitors that position their offerings based on the business value they deliver.  (Read Full Article…)

The Cloud Is Not Just a Technology Play – ITBusinessEdge

Tags: Business Service Management, Cloud, Gartner, IDC, IT Management, ITBusinessEdge, Service Providers, Service Value, Transformation, Trends


The Hub Commentary_

Nice article summing up considerations that must be evaluated when assessing a cloud deployment option.  IDC predicts that by 2013, 52% of IT budgets will be dedicated to “OUTSOURCED IT” – ASP, Public Cloud, and Enterprise/Hosted Private Cloud.  There is also a shift in where the budget and where spending decisions are being made – in the business.

As a former analyst in the sourcing space going back to the first ASP/ISP/MSP, du jour of the late 90’s / early 2000, the speed of this shift and the shift in decision making serves as an indicator in businesses to create change to drive the business.  The requirement to move from technology operator to service manager or broker has been there for almost 20 years.  Now there is competition to force the change.

Rarely is outsourcing cheaper, but it does create change that cannot be achieved easily from within.  Cloud deployment for the sake of it still isn’t the right blanket direction.  Looking at deployment options, commodity services, speed to market to drive competitive advantage whether inside or out are all factors to evaluate and consider.

If one lesson can be learned from these historical ebbs and flows between insourced and outsourced services, it should be that of service enablement in order to make the transition to service manager/broker at the time of deployment rather than an afterthought.  An effective service manager/broker will rely heavily on the federation or integration of data in order to manage the services delivered as mentioned by Gartner in the slides attached to the article.

How will you service enable  your infrastructure to deliver service value that powers your business, regardless of technology platform?

Michele

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It’s human nature to want the newest and best of everything, even if the ramifications are still unknown. Enterprises fall into this trap as well, considering they are built and run by humans. It’s kind of the digital version of shoot first and ask questions later.  (Read Full Article…)

2011 BSM Benchmark Survey – BSMReview.com

Tags: Best Practices, BSM, Business Service Management, IT Management, Service Providers, Service Value, Transformation, Trends


The survey, which was conducted in the first half of this year, measures the maturity of BSM initiatives industry-wide. The report provides unique insight into the working relationship between IT and their business counterparts, across departments and roles. It measures the effectiveness of IT service support and identifies the current use and planned adoption of ITIL v2 and v3.  Read More Here . . .

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Nice set of statistics from large, small, global organizations both from IT professionals and business executives.  In 2011 15% of technology buying decisions were made by the business, in 2012 it is expected to rise to 25% and by 2015, 50% of buying decisions will be in the business.  The level of frustration that IT sees themselves separate from the business they enable is driving this trend.  

In a recent Gartner Forbes Survey of Board of Directors, it was found that “65% of Board Members hold ‘high to very high’ expectations for IT strategic contribution to the business in 2012”.  Your business is counting on you to deliver value, are you ready to take the lead?

Are you “keeping the lights on” or are you powering your business for competitive advantage?

Michele

10 Ways to Sell Your CEO on Cloud Computing – CIOInsight

Tags: Business Alignment, Business Service Management, CIOInsight, Cloud, IT Management, Service Level, Service Value, Transformation, Trends


Is the enterprise ready for the cloud? Companies like Google, Salesforce, IBM and others think so and they’re creating solutions give enterprise customers what they want. Cloud-computing solutions are gaining traction across the market. As a CIO, the value of cloud computing is clear. And chances are, if your company hasn’t already deployed cloud solutions, you’re making plans to do so. However, with budget limitations, unless your CEO finds value in cloud computing, it may be challenging to get the solution you want. How can you educate your CEO and convince him or her that cloud computing will be a boon to your business?  Read More Here . . .

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I am still a little lost on the press convince your CEO of a new technology. Shouldn’t we be driving solutions leveraging the right deployment technology to drive competitive edge into the organization. Technology for the sake of a technology has no real value. While I agree with many of the points in this particular article on 10 Ways to Sell your CEO on Cloud Computing, it is still selling technology versus a business driving solution. We as IT have to change our thinking to that of the service providers that are popping up daily in selling our CEOs solutions leveraging technologies that drive agility and quality performance into the business, just so happens they use things like virtualization and cloud computing.

I’ve been working with many service providers as of late and it is reminiscent of the dot com era. Those that will survive and thrive are not just chasing the latest technology trend for the short term, but are baking in the practice that will sustain them for the long term and what business is asking of its own IT organizations, the ability to answer 3 questions:

(1)    “Am I open for business?”

(2)    ”How are we performing?” ”What is the customer experience?”

(3)    ”What is the risk of an outage?”

all in real time so as to take action, rather than reporting on it after the game is over.  The reason most organizations outsource services is not for cost, but for change that they cannot create from within the organization.  The time for IT to change and become the service provider of choice driving value and competitive advantage into their organizations has come.  Time to manage the business rather than convince someone of an IT technology or process.

What do you think?

Michele

 

IT Management Slideshow: Innovate or Save Money? The CIO Balancing Act – CIOInsight

Tags: BSM, Business Alignment, Business Service Management, CIOInsight, Cloud, IT Management, Mobile, Service Providers, Service Value, Transformation, Trends


Like many CIOs, you may find yourself struggling to innovate in advance of an anticipated economic recovery, while still striving to keep costs down in a decidedly uncertain business climate. And, even though you’re striving to be seen as a valued, senior member of your management teams, the enterprise perception of how much IT contributes to a competitive edge is decidedly mixed.  Read More Here . . .

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As part of its look to the future CIOInsight highlights the Top 3 initiatives keeping CIOs up at night: cutting costs, operational efficiencies and deliver consistent and stable IT performance to the business. These initiatives are neck and neck with the number of organizations that see IT as their competitive edge in the market. Most IT organizations still spend ~85% of their IT budget “just keeping the lights on”, with minimal focus on supporting and delivering upon stable and consistently performing innovative services aligned with business objectives. This percentage of spend is generally ~ 1 – 2 % of revenue spent annually operating rather than driving.

The cost of not evolving is far greater for IT organizations than the cost of transforming and adding value to their business.  Buying decisions are also migrating to the business because they have more options and they are creating change.  Outsourcing is never done for cost savings, it is to create change in the environment that the organization is unable to create on it’s own.

Time for change may have arrived in 2012.  Good set of insights.

Michele

ITs Perfect Storm: Time for Change or Be Changed

Tags: BSM, BSMReview.com, Business Service Management, CIOInsight, Cloud, Harvard Business Review, IT Investment, IT Management, Service Level, Service Providers, Service Value, Spending, Transformation, Trends


It’s that time of year when the press is filled with the latest IT predictions for the coming year. A couple of articles and surveys caught my attention as they relate to the unspoken imperative of connecting to the business to drive the business for competitive advantage versus just operate the business. This practice, while not called out, is Business Service Management and is the heart and soul of success for many of these initiatives.

In the Gartner Forbes 2011 Survey of Board of Directors, “65% hold ‘high to very high’ expectations for IT strategic contribution to the business in 2012” and “52% rate ‘maintaining competitive advantage’ of ‘extremely high importance’…”.  It is no longer IT and the business, IT enables and drives the business.  The key question is, “does your IT operate or power your organization?”

As part of its look to the future CIOInsight highlights the Top 3 initiatives keeping CIOs up at night: cutting costs, operational efficiencies and deliver consistent and stable IT performance to the business. These initiatives are neck and neck with the number of organizations that see IT as their competitive edge in the market. Most IT organizations still spend ~85% of their IT budget “just keeping the lights on”, with minimal focus on supporting and delivering upon stable and consistently performing innovative services aligned with business objectives. This percentage of spend is generally ~ 1 – 2 % of revenue spent annually operating rather than driving.

There is also an equal amount of press on new technologies and how to convince your CEO of a new technology. Shouldn’t we be driving solutions leveraging the right deployment technology to drive competitive edge into the organization. Technology for the sake of a technology has no real value. While I agree with many of the points in this particular article on 10 Ways to Sell your CEO on Cloud Computing, it is still selling technology versus a business driving solution. We as IT have to change our thinking to that of the service providers that are popping up daily in selling our CEOs solutions leveraging technologies that drive agility and quality performance into the business, just so happens they use things like virtualization and cloud computing.

I’ve been working with many service providers as of late and it is reminiscent of the dot com era. Those that will survive and thrive are not just chasing the latest technology trend for the short term, but are baking in the practice that will sustain them for the long term and what business is asking of its own IT organizations, the ability to answer 3 questions:

(1)    “Am I open for business?”

(2)    ”How are we performing?” ”What is the customer experience?”

(3)    ”What is the risk of an outage?”

all in real time so as to take action, rather than reporting on it after the game is over.  The reason most organizations outsource services is not for cost, but for change that they cannot create from within the organization.  The time for IT to change and become the service provider of choice driving value and competitive advantage into their organizations has come.

In a recent CIOInsight survey results for spending in IT Operations/Management/Governance, I see the only area with an increase is Data Center Management. Those that are following the lead of the service providers will see this as the management of the technology to deliver that consistent and stable IT performance for business value. Mobile delivery options prevail as a leading technology as the consumerization / BYOD (bring your own device) of IT continues. However, these solutions must perform and be available to drive your organizations competitive advantage in the market.  This is the link to business for 2012 investments requiring the stitching together of data from the many systems and applications that are in place today and turning it into real-time actionable information.  Another Survey illustrating many of these and further results is the BSMReview.com 2011 BSM Maturity Benchmark Study.

In 2003 Nicholas Carr wrote a 28 page article for the Harvard Business Review, “IT Doesn’t Matter”.  In the article he discussed the outsourcing of IT and the changing roles within IT.  Now fast forward 9 years and the advent of the cloud, the explosion of service providers and new buying options.  The business is purchasing on its own and creating “The New IT” for those that are not evolving fast enough.  Leading analyst firms predict that by 2015 50% of all IT buying decisions will be made by the business, not IT.

I have had many conversations with organizations that are replacing their commodity monitoring tools from the Big 4 Vendors with lower cost options and turning that savings back into the investment of turning their IT organization into service providers of choice creating business value.  The investment is in the real time Business Service Views that transform the IT organization into proactive Service Delivery Managers versus reactionary red light / green light monitors turning the sea of data into actionable, intelligent information.  The service providers arealso making the very same investments to illustrate operational capability and market differentiation to capture market share fast during this great period of change.

I’ll quote from a long time customer who has leveraged the Operations Center solution for many years now. Their implementation, while it started technically as a single-pane-of-glass, has evolved into the trusted Business Service view and situational awareness of the environment running the business. Because this customer made the transition to trusted adviser and communicator as to the health of the business, he is trusted with purchasing decisions because as he states, “I provide value”. This is the secret sauce – providing business value and relevance for IT.

2012 will be an interesting year without a doubt with new technologies like mobile and cloud computing entering into leading IT organizations, the risk takers seizing the opportunities to drive their organizations.  The leaders will emerge as those risk takers who also bake in their operational management and efficiencies with controlled risk to deliver consistent, stable performance and value to the business.

Michele

Rise of BSM 2.0 out of the Fiery Failure of BSM Marketecture

Tags: Business Service Management, IT Management Tools, Service Providers, Service Value, Transformation, Trends


“Data, Data Everywhere — Not a BIT of Intelligence Anywhere”

What is Business Service Management simply and why does it appear to have waned in discussion and answer the question has it failed, is the concept required, what’s new? Yes, the number one complaint in the market is still that IT does not understand the business, the level of frustration is rising and fuels the fire driving cloud computing and hosted services.

Business can buy easily, don’t hear about operational processes, technology and why things don’t work. They hear a service, price and value delivered.  So what is BSM and why did it fail and why is it still the fuel driving the outsourced market.

It is really quite simple, it became an marketecture umbrella for many over a large collection of tools focused on silos of management capabilities, ITIL tools and processes. I recently had the privilege to discuss the topic with my friend Jean-Pierre Garbani of Forrester Research and his recent article:  I&O Execs:  It’s Time to Rediscover BSM JP summed it up well in the opening, “BSM today has morphed into an Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) support solution,;rather than the pure infrastructure and application management vision that appeared seven years ago.”

As I reviewed many RFPs and spoke to many organizations during this era, the executive overview is always about connecting to the business and the need to manage IT in lock step with the business, but the requirements reviewed and projects are always the same:  ITIL incident, problem, change, configuration, asset management and generally service desk technology.

The second most popular technology during this era were the discovery tools that held the promise of mapping logical services out of physical infrastructure. What was quickly discovered is that it was a lot like drinking water from a fire hose. Tons of data that needed to be reconciled and for what purpose: business service logical mapping or technology configurations for the tuning and management of the physical infrastructure. What was difficult and could not be addressed auto magically with a discovery tool is the logical connection to business services.

So once again the concept is spot on, the implementation goes straight back to an operational focus – what IT knows. However the answer stares us in the face, we have tons of “data”, what we need is intelligent information by which to take the appropriate action at the right time. “Data, Data Everywhere –> Not a BIT of Intelligence Anywhere”. Many tools provide a wealth of fantastic data – performance, availability, configuration, process records (changes, incidents, problems), etc. by which to tune the technology, but it is the aggregation of all this data that transforms the data into intelligent information. There is no one magical tool that will deliver Business Service Management, it is a mindset and the transformation of the data when it will begin to speak to you as service information.

In one article, there were some recent survey results the author found shocking. What I find shocking is that after 20 years IT is still making a grade of a D+. We are in the midst of the usual circle that hinders recognizing the “B” of BSM – the Business. A focus on new technology for what is perceived as cost savings by acquiring technology on demand and not managing the hardware and software to operate the service. However, in the long run without strategy and management focusing on business objectives, what appears cheaper will have higher long term costs. Why are cloud based services and service provider offerings so popular? Under the veneer of the agility it brings organizations is the frustration business has with their technology organization. It is the failure of IT being exposed and outsourced.

Survey results continue to illustrate the number one global concern as the lack of understanding business and the priority and impact of technology on the business. The number one reason cited for lack of ITIL adoption/success was lack of management commitment. Those 2 citings alone speak volumes to me. I ask why there should be a focus on ITIL and why the number one focus isn’t driving business growth? This upside down focus is the fiery failure of the marketecture of first generation BSM.

Why aren’t we talking more about new and unique services driving business growth? Business moving to the cloud removes the requirement for operationally focused projects (ITIL) that have not delivered business value. In a recent Harvard Business Review survey, an observation was noted that the role of IT is shifting from “constructing and operating” to that of “acquiring and deploying”. I’m not so sure I agree that it is so much about deploying as it is about “service managing” and management of the suppliers. This will require very different skills and the transformation of roles within IT and will force the focus on the Business value.

The time has come for the Business Service Management imperative and Transforming Data into Intelligent Information focusing on driving business value. This does not require more monitoring tools and IT processes as much as it requires the following:

  • Service Identification, Classification, Business Prioritization (see previous post)
  • Integration and Aggregation of Data Sources
  • Service Mapping based upon Data Sources
  • Service Rules Weighting Data and Thresholding Data
  • Service Visualization
  • Service Trending Over Time
  • Service Intelligence in Real Time

IT organizations already have a wealth of data from their multitude of management tools. While I often hear, “we don’t know what our services are or we cannot map our services”. Generally, the data from several data sources currently in place can get to a 70% + service view with an aggregating, reconciling and visualizing approach and technology transforming the wealth of data into intelligent information. What is the value of this Transforming Visualizer of Intelligent Information or rather what is the cost of not having the Transforming Visualizer:

  • A single service impacting event costs your organization 1-2% of revenue
  • 85% of the time IT is Bulb Monitoring and reacting costing your organization 1-2% of revenue annually, every year
  • >80% of service impacting events are caused by poor process, lack of impact visibility and business correlation

Millions of dollars are spent annually maintaining, bulb monitoring and reacting. What if just 25% of what is currently spent is applied to the Transforming Visualizer? A 75% cost savings and the ability to monitoring revenue growth instead. This is what I still find shocking as I continue to read and speak about the same D+ grade after 20+ years.

The environment is getting more complex, the roles are being forced to change with the outsourcing of operations to the cloud and the requirement to drive business growth is an imperative today more than ever. The Perfect Storm of technology, service providers and business requirements to drive service value is in full force.

As JP points out in his recent paper, availability of services and the proactive service impact knowledge in controlling change in the environment both require the connection to business priority and objectives and plainly, knowing your services. I had the opportunity to speak with Thomas Mendel, previously of Forrester research on just these two topics in these two podcasts: BSM in the Cloud: Managing and End-to-End View Made Simple and BSM in the Cloud: Configuration Complexity Made Simple.

BSM is an imperative and will transform in focus to the aggregation of data, making the connection to the business to manage with priority in mind both for availability of services and the compliance of change to services in controlling the infrastructure. Transform your data into Intelligent Information with a business focus and a BSM 2.0 approach.

Business Service Management – Imperative or Not?

Michele

The CIO’s Challenge: Balancing Openness with Risk Management – Forbes

Tags: Business Service Management, IT Management, IT Management Tools, Security, Service Value, Transformation


The Hub Commentary_

I stumbled upon a great article written by an old friend of mine, Kevin Cunningham, from a previous software life.  Now more than ever the alignment of IT and business as I posted from an article regarding IT roles yesterday is a requirement.  The thought that IT is separate from the business is an antiquity.

I agree with Kevin, just illustrating that you can pass an audit knowing that things have changed, who changed them and were they approved is not enough.  Managing and mitigating risk while providing flexibility to apply the right technologies to drive the business forward.  New technologies and customers are driving shifts in how they expect to do business, when, where and from many devices.

As Kevin states, no one technology addresses all aspects and it will be key to bring the data together from each of the supporting technologies into a live view of the services of the business, assessing performance, availability and security.  Dynamic and mixed environments will continue to push IT organizations and will be led by the customer’s expectation of how they want to do business.  Those that embrace these technologies and put the management intelligence in place without restricting the desired flexibility will lead their markets.

How do you see the convergence and management of infrastructure and security as services to your business?

Michele

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One of the consequences of the global recession two years ago is a significant increase in IT risk facing global companies.

IT risk – the threat of negative consequences resulting from the operation of information systems – has spiraled upward for multiple reasons: large-scale mergers, acquisitions and divestitures and the resulting need to consolidate people and systems; greater use of IT hosting and outsourcing; the shift to replace full-time employees with temps and contractors; and new technologies like cloud and mobile computing. As a result, CIOs face a massive challenge: how do they balance the need for flexible and open access to their company’s IT infrastructure (so business can be conducted) with the need to mitigate IT risks associated with that access (so bad things don’t happen)?  (Read Full Article…)

2011 Outsourcing Survey: Chasing Fast And Cheap – InformationWeek

Tags: Business Service Management, IT Management, Monitoring, Performance, Service Value, Sourcing, Transformation


The Hub Commentary_

The final quote sums this up, “You cannot outsource responsibility”.  IT still owns the delivery of service.  In my many years as an analyst and consultant, you never ever outsource for cost saving.  Unless you are a hideously inefficient organization, it is never cheaper.  You must factor in 3-7% of the contract value as vendor management expenses and the provider must also make a profit.

Now you can drive costs out by accepting standards the provider brings to the table and as the article states, free your valuable resources for strategic work versus the commodity.  Deployment options must be weighed based upon the commodity – strategic nature of the service and in-house expertise.  In some cases as the article states, you may go outside to learn a new skill for a strategic service.  However, just because you have a bunch of folks that can do a commodity task doesn’t mean it is well suited for your in-house staff.

I disagree with the survey results regarding unforseen costs and poor quality.  This all points to vendor management.  IT still retains responsibility and just because it is handed over to a provider doesn’t mean IT stops managing the service.  Project overruns and delivery sit squarely with the project manager or vendor management group in this situation.

The other complaint that I doesn’t hold water for me either is “they don’t know my industry”.   Unless you are contracting for an industry specific service/application, IT management is IT management across industries.  It’s the applications and services that are different from industry to industry and thus why it remains incumbent upon IT to take leadership in managing the service providers.

The reason more and more of IT will be outsourced is because the service providers are going to the business, selling the business a service for a specific cost and value and they are making the buying options very appealing.  The downside to this is that vendor management is being overlooked.   As I’ve mentioned previously, IT owns the service and to stay out of perception versus reality debates regarding a service, IT must also monitor the service and build this into their vendor management practice.

There is no doubt the cloud and outsourcing options are here to stay and will continue to eat away at the data center.  Those that deploy, monitor, manage, and measure their services in mixed environments taking advantage of the best options will lead their industry with technology in the coming year.

How are you monitoring and measuring your service providers?

Michele

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Even as the economy improves, the reality of IT service delivery is less positive: We’re not willing to fight to hire talent, opting instead to outsource more and more, yet not investing in vital management tools and skills.  (Read Full Article…)

Amazon cloud outage derails Reddit, Quora – CNet & NetworkWorld

Tags: Amazon EC2, Business Service Management, Cloud Computing Journal, DR, IT Management, Service Value


The Hub Commentary_

Outages always make for big headlines and make for good examples of the cost of visibility and management.  I read these articles with positive thoughts and still see cloud computing as the future and those who are bold took advantage of growing business earlier rather than later.

As noted in the first article, some of these organizations would not be where they are today with their business if they had not leveraged new deployment options as fast as they did.  In a previous post, I discussed mapping your services based upon business value and cost and how to manage those services and selecting deployment options.  It’s a balancing act of how bold and how much of a risk you take to grow your business with cutting edge technology.  The balance to strike is how much you spend to have a DR or back-up plan for an event like this as you know they will happen.

Outages will occur and this shouldn’t push folks to write unwieldy service level agreements as you pay for those by pushing the risk back to the provider.  I would suggest that spend would be more wisely spent on a back-up provider to account for hiccups in a cost effective manner.

My hat still goes off to those embracing the cloud and growing their business as a result with agile technologies and there are learnings to plan for moving forward.

How are using agile technologies?

Michele

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CNET Article

A partial failure at Amazon Web Services’ cloud-computing infrastructure brought down some Internet operations today, including the Web sites of Quora and Reddit.  (Read Full Article…)

NetworkWorld Article

Amazon reports this morning that it is making progress in restoring full service to customers of its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Relational Database Service in the eastern portion of the country after a rocky stretch of trouble that began sometime before midnight.   (Read Full Article…)

It’s the Agility, Stupid! – Novell

Tags: Business Alignment, Business Service Management, Cloud, Innovation, Novell, Service Providers, Service Value, Transformation


The Hub Commentary_

I’ve commented in this similar vein on many posts this year and the cost calculation and business value is covered in my post and recorded presentation here on The Hub.  My friend Michael sums up this topic well with citations from InformationWeek and Forrester. It is not about the technology, it is about the service value the technology brings to the business, something those in the business service management practice have known for many years.

So what makes it different now and why is it so prevalent in the news?  That’s an easy answer, Competition ala service providers.  Today in fact I discussed just this topic with a global audience and why competition will be the catalyst for change or outsourcing this time.  Service providers are going direct to the business to sell their services.  They speak exactly the language the business wants to hear, make it simple to buy and this will push IT organizations to adopt a business service management practice or get outsourced.

I like the notion of a Chief Acceleration Officer.  I enjoy times and situations like this where there is a challenge to solve for and the requirement for change where I know most IT organizations are change averse.  IT has been in this cycle of 80% + spent on just keeping the lights on for more than 20 years.  This equates to 1-2% of revenue annually just running the operations and thus very little is expended to grow the top line.  This is crazy when technology should be driving business innovation and growth.

I challenge you to pick up this years Fortune 500 magazine and then pick up next years and see who takes over leading their industry and that will tell you who embraced technology to drive growth and create efficiencies within IT to shift that 80/20 pie to something more like 60/40.  I wholeheartedly agree with my friend Michael, it’s about the agility and business value that a technology brings an organization.  Efficiencies are good, but should not be the only focus.

How are you driving service value and agility to be the change in your organization?

Michele

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With the promise of cloud computing splashed across every headline today, it’s easy to lose track of where its greatest opportunities lie. Yes, saving money is important. It can help nudge the dreaded 80/20 maintenance-to-innovation ratio in the right direction. But when you’re thinking about the cloud, don’t stop there. It’s agility that can drive business growth and innovation, turning IT leaders into heroes.  (Read Full Article…)

My First 48 Hours with iPad 2: One CIO’s Story – CIO

Tags: Business Service Management, CIO, iPad, Service Value


The Hub Commentary_

As the iPad2 came to market and there were many articles regarding the use of employees bringing their own devices to the work environment saving capex spending.  My challenge with this is the hidden cost of support and security of data.  Just because the employee can bring a device in does not mean it should come in and be supported without a business reason.

I was seeking a genuine business reason that these devices become a business value add, justifying a new deployment option.  As I started to read this article it sounded more personal preference and that this CIO still had a secondary device too.  Just as I arrived at the end of the article there were a couple of great examples for use.

The medical field and the sharing of a simple device with access to patient information with the ability to access personal calendars and email that is portable for the shifts of the medical staff.  Now add file sharing and synchronization services where the data is backed-up elsewhere and accessible by many from many devices and I’m on board with true business value changing the way business is conducted improving patient care and creating efficiencies for the staff.

How are you using new devices for value and efficiency for a good business service management practice?

Michele

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One CIO who has already made the iPad a critical part of his organization shares what he liked – and still wished for – after his first couple of days with the iPad 2. Read on for his take on FaceTime, Apple’s not-so “smart” cover, and more.  (Read Full Article…)

Organizing IT for Excellent Service – Baseline

Tags: BSM, Business Alignment, Business Service Management, Cost Reduction, IT Management, IT Management Tools, Service Level, Service Value


The Hub Commentary

If you want to avoid IT silos and provide more value and transparency back to the business this is a worthwhile read.

Randy

Building IT around the business services it provides, rather than around assets or activities, pays off.   Learn more about the direct benefits…

Evolving towards a Business Assurance Center – Doug McClure

Tags: Business Alignment, Business Service Management, IT Management, Service Value, Transformation


The Hub Commentary_

It is time for IT to evolve and bring together the right information from the right sources for creating the right actions for management and service performance communication within the business.

Nice article and no doubt nice presentation by Doug.

Michele

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As technology changes rapidly around us and as more and more companies begin to adopt smarter, dynamic infrastructure, services and applications to support the goals, objectives and expected outcomes of the business, technology and business operations and support organizations must also evolve to support these changes.  (Read Full Article…)

The Virtues of a Living Conversation Versus One Frozen in Stone – EMA

Tags: Business Service Management, Change, Cloud, EMA, IT Management Tools, Service Value, Transformation


The Hub Commentary_

I came across this piece by my friend Dennis this week and thought how appropriate in reflection of the many articles I read, post and blog about regarding the tremendous change under foot for IT organizations this coming year.  IT is facing competition from the multitude of cloud based service providers who are selling services directly to the businesses because they can communicate a service, cost and value and they make it extremely easy and attractive to purchase.  IT must make this change in communicating their services if they plan to remain strategic within their organization.

The other facet to this article that pops out to me as I recently experienced this in my own daily working is that of the software or technology being the problem.  In my case it was software being blamed for not working and being told this is how the software works.  I am the customer wanting information out of a system to measure the effectiveness of a marketing campaign.  I don’t care how the software work even though I work for a software company, I could care less if the system runs on a mainframe and is written in FORTRAN.  I want visibility of the data passing through the system without getting caught up in how the software works.  I also stated it isn’t that the software doesn’t work, it’s the implementation – garbage in, garbage out.  In this case, it is an incinerator and nothing comes out.

The business doesn’t care how many monitoring tools, networks, boxes, applications it takes to process transactions.  They want to visibility to the performance of their services requiring IT to implement end-to-end management views or business service management views.  This requires a top down approach in looking at your infrastructure and what makes up the service, requiring integration of data, transforming it into meaningful information by which to run the business.

All of this will require change for a change averse culture.  This will be a tough year for many IT professionals as Dennis points out.  They will need to:

  • Learn to communicate
  • Communicate in terms of service versus technology
  • Embrace new technology deployment options
  • Be catalyst for flexibility and agility
  • Can do change agents
  • Seek tools that enable, automate and help them

 

How ready is your IT to be the agent of change?

Michele

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EMA consulting once did an analysis of why strategic service management initiatives fail.  These ranged from cross-domain performance management initiatives, to configuration management initiatives with CMDB/CMS enabling foundations,  to company-wide asset management initiatives to name a few.    Of the top ten reasons for failure, only the bottom two (Integration and Discovery) were technology-related.  (Read Full Article…)

Cloud Chasers Podcast – Cloud, IT and Business Alignment

Tags: Business Alignment, Business Service Management, IT Management, Service Providers, Service Value, Transformation


Sean Larner CEO of both l’arbre solutions and Broolz, chats with Michele Hudnall of Novell on how the cloud and new cloud-based vendors are impacting the business services landscape. They also explore the ways these new offerings are competing with internal IT to provide the business with the services.

I had the great opportunity to speak with a good friend on Cloud Chasers a little over a week ago now on April Fools day. A very good day to catch up with friends and chat about the competition cloud based services are presenting to today’s IT organizations. I started my career as an IT outsourcing service provider with virtualized mainframes, I find that what’s old is new again in an even more flexible model than previous used.

We’ve spoken about the shift that IT must make in delivering and communicating service performance, rather than technology performance for many years. The catalyst for change is competition and it is heating up in the market. The service providers know their costs and the value of their services and are bypassing the IT organizations and selling directly to the business. This presents an interesting dynamic – does the business really know how to manage the service provider well? and should the IT organization serve as the gatekeeper?

These are the opposing forces. As new services come to the data center or old ones are updated, the delivery mechanism should be evaluated. Adopting cloud isn’t really the objective, but driving business growth is the objective and can a cloud based service deliver a business service for higher business growth, is the question.

Come listen to my friend from across the small pond discuss his thoughts on the topic as a CEO of a cloud based collaboration service for the enterprise on Cloud Chasers.

Michele

Michele

To Unlock the Power of the Cloud, Rethink IT Management – Forbes

Tags: Business Service Management, Cloud, Integration, IT Management, Service Providers, Service Value, Transformation, Virtualization


The Hub Commentary_

This is a nice synopsis of the challenges of moving to the cloud and virtualization into production.  I enjoy the start of the article regarding when we lost our switchboard operators and the shift we’ve made with the telephone.  Just a year ago, the east coast was hammered with 3 – 3 foot snow storms leaving me to telecommute from my home, built 30 years prior.  I learned far more about the telephone than I wanted and my favorite acronym was POTS (plain old telephone system).  Yes, it is true. Long story short, I went through a full upgrade to fiber, digital phone service and a full duplex digital phone to better enable my communication capabilities from the home office.  There were multiple components to consider and upgrade to gain the full performance I was expecting.

What this article subtly uncovers is the usual cycle of management following new technology adoption.  The short term bang for the buck with new technology is generally the removal of short term hardware and software costs with physical components and licenses.  This time the challenge is further aggravated within the organization through competition with the service providers that are going directly to the business and bypassing IT knowing they can make IT as the bad guy and obstacle.

The article uncovers the flexibility cloud and virtualization bring to an environment, but also the requirement for an integration platform to make sense of the configurations and the monitoring alerts at the component level into business services as they are consumed.  This is the driving force behind the business service management imperative this year that the author also notes.

Operations is holding the business back from the promise of cloud computing because operations is struggling to manage the infrastructure and have no visibility across the infrastructure to insure availability and use the cloud for the agility of improved availability.  Business is demanding the intelligence and communication of service performance, not components, and are seeking to leverage the cloud strategically in their organization as a growth enabler and it is imperative that IT seek to support and make the initiative successful.

If IT continues as the obstacle, the competition is knocking on the business door to take that business.  It is not a single management technology that will solve this challenge, it is the integration platform that provides the end-to-end view and enables building in intelligence to set thresholds to monitor service performance aligned to objectives.  I like to call  it, “the glue and a view” that will make sense of the environment that is the imperative to successful IT operations management in this coming year.

What’s your strategy for Glue and a View?

Michele

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It’s been nearly 50 years since the telephone switchboard, staffed by an “operator,” was phased out as automated phone-switching technologies were introduced. In automating the process of making a call, phone companies removed a burdensome manual hindrance from what was soon to become a much more convenient and ubiquitous part of modern life.  (Read Full Article…)

Reaching Service Level Nirvana . . .

Tags: Availability, Business Alignment, Business Service Management, IT Management Tools, Service Level, Service Value


Ok, so we aren’t there yet.  The first part of getting over a problem is admitting that you have one.  How can we resolve the issues I brought up in my previous post?  Let’s talk about that now.
1.  Too many tools…
You are never going to reduce the number of tools you have down to 1.  Someone will always need this tool or that functionality.  So, to resolve this you need a tool that can pull data from multiple sources through integration.  Databases, APIs, web interfaces, traps, etc.  These tools do exist.
2.  SLA monitoring via trouble tickets
As I mentioned in my previous post, there is a lot of potential for human error here.  I would suggest to you that trouble tickets back up or provide the background reasons why the service level agreement (SLA) was violated but they should never be used to be those SLAs.  You also need your SLA to potentially have different thresholds for different parts/pieces.  Once you have integrated to the sources of information in item 1, then you should be able to build out your SLAs based on the business service taking into account the different parts of the service and areas where you have redundancy versus single points of failure.  Then being able to roll all of that up to a dashboards where you can see the results.
3.  SLA status based on Network availability
Total network availability should never be part of an SLA!  Your SLA should only include the parts/routes of the network that your service depends on.  The network availability is important, but not as important as the service availability.  Ultimately the SLA is there to insure that the customer can use the service.  If the service functions then the SLA is good, from the customers eyes.  You need to build a model for the service so that you can take into account all of the parts of the service both physical and logical and include a synthetic transaction to confirm that the service is functioning.  One last point here, if the service is available and it takes 5 minutes to log in, the customer sees this  as the service is down.  A well defined SLA looks at all SLA components from the customers point of view.
4.  Can’t get the data
This can be a hard nut to crack.  If you have the ability to get the data but because of political reasons you can’t get the data, then you have to involve the customer or customer advocate.  Ask things like:  How important is it to you?  Point out the holes and the areas you will be blind to.  What happens if this part fails and we don’t know it?  Ultimately this is either a big deal or it isn’t.  If it isn’t, fine.  If it is a big deal then you can leverage the pain that the customer conveyed to you to get at that forbidden data.  Use the customer as the club to get at the data if needed.  No one can argue (successfully) against providing good service to the customer.
5.  Technical vs business data
You have integrated your data from the different sources and built out a model of the service but the customer still complains?  Look at the service from a business point of view.  What tells me that the service is functioning?  Things like: transactions processed per (time period), web hits, database rows update, etc.  Now use this as data you need to integrate to.  Pull in this data along side your model to validate the technical with the business data.
6.  Data is too bad
Ok, valid point, but everyone starts somewhere and if you don’t start now, maybe your successor will do it.  To overcome this one, simply do everything as above only don’t show the results to anyone.  Instead use this data to improve the service, validate the model, confirm the SLA hours of availability, etc before the data is shown to the customer or management.  Use this time to improve your monitoring and functionality of your environment.
7.  SLAs just a punishment tool
Although I am sure you have seen this, it doesn’t have to be this way.  Instead of struggling to meet the SLA, change it, further define it, eliminate the false information.  Include the business information as mentioned above in item 5.  I have seen companies do this well and been willing to up the penalties they would pay during business hours, because they eliminated all of the non production information that they were paying for that had nothing to do with the SLA.  They also were able to exactly define the SLA hours, when 5 9’s were needed and when 5 7’s was fine.  This can give you some breathing room as well as allow you to more easily meet the defined SLA.  This can also allow you to setup different levels of SLA that then can enable you to charge more for those services that ‘must always be available.’
8.  SLA’s are only historical and I need real time
I hear it all of the time, I can’t worry about SLAs.  I am trying to deal with right now.’  A well defined SLA allows you to see the state of how things are right now AND they can give you predictive warnings as well.  Allowing you to be notified not just when there is an outage but also when (if nothing changes) you will violate your SLA in X hours or n minutes.  This can then take the service you provide to a whole other level.  Allowing you to see potentially customer impacting issues before they violate your SLA.  How can you afford NOT to set up your SLAs?
At the end of the day, well defined, monitored SLAs can improve how you are perceived by the customer and improve the service you provide as well.  Can we ever get to SLA nirvana?  Yes, I think we can.  It’s just a process that, when managed well and the correct information is gathered, really functions for you.
Lee Frazier