Business Service Management Hub

The Hub Commentary_

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

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

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

Do you reward heros or service analysts?

Michele

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

The Hub Commentary_

Surprise cloud leaders in the F500 multi-billion revenue organizations.  These organizations are listening to their businesses and building private clouds with their vendors and learning to save and drive growth with appropriate capacity.  Understanding and driving service value into their organizations and business service management practices to reap the rewards of new technology.

Competing for the data center with the explosion of service providers starts to change the game in how IT approaches and delivers services.  This is a long over due change for IT organizations in an effort to becoming part of the business and leveraging technology to both operate and power the business.

Michele

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The way you know you’re in the midst of a technology shift and market disruption is when organizations don’t behave the way you expect them to based on past track records. Cloud computing has been filled with surprises and unexpected behavior from the get-go.  (Read Full Article…)

The Hub Commentary_

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

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

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

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

Does you IT play for Fun or for Food?

Michele

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

The Hub Commentary_

The consumerization of IT is a trend that must be watched and leveraged to grow the business and not cost the business.  Good business service management practices would evaluate each service for business value and thus cost, in this case support costs.  Just because an employee makes the capital expenditure does not dictate the business should support it.

There are data protection concerns and security challenges that must also be factored in also adding to the cost.  What is the business value of the service is the basic question.  Just because a device is available and in the environment does not necessarily mean the business should support it within the IT organization.

The real question would be how to interact with your customers through new devices and channels rather than supporting your employees.

Do you support your customers or your employees Smart phone?

Michele

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Forrester Research said most IT managers and vendors are underestimating the need for corporate mobile solutions because they ignore mobile “wannabes” and mobile “mavericks.”  (Read Full Article…)

The Hub Commentary_

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

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

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

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

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

How do you use social media to grow your business?

Michele

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The Hub Commentary_

To the point of more with less and making the right investments.  This goes to knowing your services, cost and value.  All part of the practice of business service management and I agree we are at a tipping point for Open Source solutions and not just the collaboration, management tools too.

I find this interesting as I have been using Open Office for almost 2 years now and those of us who use Open Source know that these products got it right.  They publish in both formats.  So I can take advantage of Open Office, but I can publish in Microsoft formats to share with the non-Open Source world.  That is the smart model to gain traction in the market.

Do you continue paying the tax to the big guys or invest those taxes in growth?

Michele

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IT chiefs are increasingly turning to open-source software to help create a competitive advantage for the business, according to new research from Gartner.  (Read Full Article…)

The Hub Commentary_

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

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

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

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

Is your IT business service enabling or multiple obstacles?

Michele

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

I have been asked many, many times “what is the return of a business service management project / practice”.  The answer is honestly, “it depends” on your environment, how much efficiency can be driven into it, how much consolidation, cost of outages, the list goes on.  However, I know that is absolutely the answer everyone despises and I can say by NOT tackling a shift from technology to services, it costs you 2% of revenue (at a minimum) every year.

Thus, I put my old analyst hat back on and thought as an analyst what would I do?  Create a model by which to calculate and start building out a business case.  I have put this basic information into a short presentation and have added it to our resource page.  The first link is a streaming slide presentation and the second is a self contained PDF file with sound.  The PDF file takes a few minutes to download, but you can share the file as you like.

The objective with this slide show was to bring together the statistics from many analyst papers, provide a simple model and understanding of what it costs you to not manage services.  We are at a tipping point this year with agile technology, new deployment options and competitive cost models.

This post goes hand in hand with the previous Featured Post on Finding Your Services.  Know how to identify and classify your services for service value.  The next in that series will be examples of services and the start of a service catalog.

Let me know your thoughts on this!  How are you getting to service value and what does it cost you?

Michele

Click Here – This is the streaming slide show and is just over 6 minutes.

Click Here – This is the self contained PDF download – 8M download, it does take a few minutes to download and start, but you may share accordingly.

The Hub Commentary_

Business service management practices have helped many organizations manage their IT infrastructure for the business services it supports and most importantly drives.  In my post regarding Finding your Services, this is a first step to linking services to service value within the business.

The article provides some simple, sound advice.  In fact, just last night I was speaking with a product manager about my days as a product manager and we always started new projects with a theme and objectives.  What part of the market were we driving to lead, meet or grow.  We balanced the must have customer quality as a small percentage and drove the largest portion of the spend on the next generation products that would both lead and grow the business.

IT is no different, it not a separate and distinct organization, it is the business.  It both operates and powers the business, but most importantly it must drive business growth.  Often times the case is IT spends no time looking for driving the business and concentrates solely on operating.  IT is becoming more and more of a commodity and those not driving growth and meeting the Service Value challenge in the coming year will be outsourced as the service providers know their Service Value.

Does your IT drive Service Value?  Do you know your Service Value?

Michele

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You’ve heard it before. The CFO asks “how do we know what value we’re getting from IT?” The business line leader asks “How do I measure the value of IT to my P&L, not just help desk tickets closed?” The CEO asks “How do I know our IT spend is allocated to best support our objectives?”  (Read Full Article…)

Starting any project is daunting and Business Service Management as an initiative is often thought of as big, hard and complicated.  My personal opinion is that stems from the fact that it cuts horizontally across the data center and does not reside in one sphere of influence.  However, as a long time product marketing / product manager I find it can be quite simple.  One service at a time, one service team at a time approach rather than boiling the ocean all at once.  Let’s start at the top, the service, and work our way down and back up again in a series of posts.

Start at the top, the service(s) and take them one at a time.  My usual advice is to pick 2, 1 that is absolutely mission critical to the organization and 1 that is back-office and well known from a configuration and management standpoint.  What, select my most critical?  Yes, this will have the biggest bang for the buck in making strides with the business with a higher quality of service and fast return.  Selecting something you know well insures you know the data is fairly accurate while you learn the process, but likely will not score points with the business.

The first thing to do is identify the services and categorize them – not all services are created equal and thus should not be managed as such.  Here’s what I mean,

Create 4 simple classifications:

• Growth – Services that drive and support revenue growth.  New and current services that differentiate your company in the market.
• Quality- Services that drive quality of the customer experience and customer retention in the market.
• Productivity – Services that are must have and more inward facing automating and driving efficiencies in the organization.
• Cost – Services that are must have, not differentiated in the market and must just operate as efficiently as possible.

The chart illustrates the typical key drivers for each category of service.  By first identifying your services and making a simple judgment, it will aid in determining how you will manage these services and where the priorities lie.  Simply, above the line are your Business Value, strategic services that touch your external customers and below the line are your Business Cost, operational services that are required to operate efficiently.

This classification will guide the definition of your service levels, priorities, DR and responsiveness strategies.  The approach is a little top down and a little bottom up to meet in the middle.  Identifying and classifying the services top down will define the rules of engagement with the business and the bottom up maps what you have and how the infrastructure components are related.  The connection in the middle is the meeting of the infrastructure with the logical use of the infrastructure.  In this post I’m concentrating on the top first.

Some organizations delineate this as 2 functions:  1) IT and technical configurations and 2) Service delivery and logical configurations.  We will speak in terms of one view that turns the technology silos into services, balancing the technical management requirements with business service quality requirements.  Yes, technical and logical definitions are required, but what I’m suggesting is that they will meet in the middle leveraging the same data and information for multiple purposes keeping the business and IT in synch with one another.

I had the opportunity to facilitate a half day workshop not too long ago where this division and 2 projects existed.  The first was an operational, technical CMDB project and the second was a service delivery governance project.  It took a little time, but about half way through the session the light bulb went on.  We were talking about the same CMDB project, but were layering in the availability/performance/management aspect to give it life and finally the rules of engagement from the business regarding priority, etc.  What comes as second nature to me, is sometimes lost in the silos we work in as IT organizations and just takes a little bit of a different approach.

Ok, this is step one…I encourage the service delivery folks to find their configuration counterparts and vice versa.  Next post, the top down modeling……

The Hub Commentary_

For the folks that know me best, they are snickering at how this pains me to write and not only post once, but twice about Texas Stadium.  My featured post on Friday was also about Texas Stadium and the Super Bowl and the Business Service Management opportunity facing those companies buying 30 second ads at $3M each.  I believe the might Pug stole the show!

I also included a link to this video about the data center powering Texas Stadium.   Check out this video In hindsight, Texas Stadium was geared for successful Business Service Management practices.  They were not just monitoring all the technology that powered the TV’s and point-of-sale (POS) devices around the stadium.  They were monitoring the inventory levels in the Pro Shops shifting inventory in real-time around the stadium.  They were monitoring the snack bars and offering real-time discounts around the stadium.

This was Business Service Management in action.  100,000 buyers captive for roughly 5 hours using technology to drive the highest revenue possible.  As much as it pains me, my hats off to the IT staff of Texas Stadium AND the gaunlet has been dropped on my beloved Colts and Lucas Oil Stadium for 2012!                        

Michele

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As 100,000 fans pour into Cowboys Stadium Sunday for Super Bowl XLV, the fans will have little awareness that there’s a data center serving as the technological nerve center of the stadium. But the staff at CDW and HP and the Cowboys’ IT team know how vital the stadium’s IT infrastructure is in creating the “ultimate fan experience.”  (Read Full Article…)

I can already hear you asking and scratching your heads, “Michele, what do those 3 things have in common – cmon, get real”.  Yes, I’m a long term IT nerd and tremendous football fan that remembers everything.  Heck, I fessed up to crashing a data center for 7 hours in an earlier post.  My motto:  go large or stay home or as we say in the south: ” if you can’t run with the big dawgs, stay off the porch”!

Back in 1999 Victoria’s Secret ran their first ever Super Bowl ad, $2.7M for 30 seconds.  Early days of online retail, wind back the clock and clear the cobwebs, yes, these were the early days of Amazon and the revolution to online sales and web hosting.  Then the unthinkable happened, 1M website visitors in an hour, was IT ready for this traffic?  Heck no!  Did IT and Marketing prepare and communicate this impending event, likely not.  Headlines:  CNNMoney 2/1/1999 “Victoria’s ‘Net Secret is Out” .  So can I fault them in these early adopter days, nah, I applaud them as market innovators.  However, they brought the data center to its knees.  Marketing created interest that the data center could not fulfill upon in an effort to generate Valentines sales with both men and women in an audience estimated at 100M so ~3 cent spend per customer and generated millions in orders.  Not a bad return.

Now roll the clock forward.  It was almost 10 years before Vickies (as I call them) purchased another Super Bowl ad in 2008 – USA Today 2/1/2008 “Victoria’s Secret back to Fiirt with Super Bowl”. No outage headlines this time, but this is a prime example of Business Service Management practices and IT understanding and operating with the business objectives in mind.

The moral of the story is IT and the business must link up in order to support major bursts in spend, marketing,  Super Bowl ads and traffic on the infrastructure to reap the biggest return on the investment.  This year’s ads are $3M for a 30 second slot.  Who’s “going to the cloud”?  Who leveraged the cloud for the additional one time capacity – now that is a story I’d love to read about linking Business Service Management and Cloud strategies.

Who’s going to make IT headlines after this year’s Super Bowl or will it be 2012 for the Cloud Bowl headlines?  How cool would it be to make headlines because you leveraged the Cloud for additional capacity to reap the greatest reward of a marketing spend at the Super Bowl? Business Service Management in Action!

As much as it hurts me to tell you this on so many levels, Texas Stadium is IT ready, Check out this video.

What I do find fascinating about this is that Texas is experiencing an unusual cold snap and they are experiencing power outages.  However, the news says the power outages will not impact Texas Statium, no guarantees to all the Texas TV watchers, but the event is supposed to be impact free. 100M viewers will determine that on Sunday!

P.S. – In case you  are wondering – I’m a serious Colts Fan, but this year the color of the helmet in the feature picture is no accident – Green Bay all the Way!

The Hub Commentary_

The author points out great security points in making the leap to the cloud and part of those warts not mentioned is the management of those VMs in the cloud from an end-to-end business service management perspective to manage against the risk he points to.  How risky is it to have that VM in the cloud?  How secure should you make the data and management of the VM?  What business services are at risk?

It is the end-to-end service view that needs to also be considered up front when architecting your plans for cloud deployment and that should be based upon the service value and risk of the overall service.  Mapping those services, understanding cost, risk and value will aid in making these decisions, architecting the VMs and putting the proper monitoring, management and measurement of the VMs and services in total.

Check out my Feature Post on classifying services.

Michele

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Over the past few years, we have seen a gradual transition from traditional computer center with dedicated resources to virtual machines and cloud computing.  During this time, people have realized some of the value of virtualization in termsof savings and resource optimization.  Unfortunately, there are still a number of warts in the virtualization that have followed the migration to the cloud.  (Read Full Article…)

The Hub Commentary_

In my post today, Getting to Service Value, the principles I described regarding Business Service Management are put into action here with this CEO and CIO combination.  The business is/was changing and technology was/is being re-thought and deployed to change the business.

How are you changing your IT practices with the business?

Michele

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David Steiner, CEO, Waste Management Over the last few years, our customers’ needs have started to change. When you have customers coming to you for help achieving their zero-waste goals and the name of your company is Waste Management, you’d better think differently about your business model and services. We now have an upstream business unit that helps customers reach zero waste.”  (Read Full Article…)

What is a simple explanation of what Business Service Management (BSM) is, does – let’s take the BS out of the speak.  I simply describe it as the ability for IT to communicate service performance (value) aligned with business objectives, while maintaining control over the infrastructure.  Many of my friends in the industry start to mix in the ‘how’ they deliver BSM with tools, processes, automations, configurations, etc. but I prefer to take the how out of the speak as this is just what is frustrating our organizations to seek other technology options from the multitude of service providers that are popping up this year.

I looked over some others definitions and top 10 lists of BSM principles and still see far too much IT, product, technology and processes, even in these days of IT commoditization.  So here is my view of guiding BSM principles:

1. Understand your business objectives
2. Know your market, competition and differentiators
3. Communicate service performance
4. Know your services and their value classification
5. Know your service costs
6. Govern in accordance to business objectives and service value
7. Provide transparency of services – cost and value based discussions
8. Manage services – operate technology
9. Operate efficiently
10. Be a transformer, not an obstacle, apply technology

Now with these glasses on, look at how you monitor, manage, operate, automate your data center, the processes you utilize and deployment strategies.  Service by service based upon the cost and value of the service how will you monitor and measure it?  What is the best option for deployment?  Based upon business value, how much risk can you take?

All services are not created equal, but we manage them the same in most situations because it is easier to just manage it all the same at the highest cost and the business asks and expects it because they are not presented with options.  The challenge is gathering data, turning it into information in a live, integrated view to facilitate these discussions in market time.

What is your view of Business Service Management?

Michele

The Hub Commentary_

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

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

How are you driving service value in 2011?

Michele

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

The Hub Commentary_

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

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

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

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

Michele

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

The Hub Commentary_

All the news these days seems to be about the cloud.  This is a nice summary of things to consider, however, leaves out the usual after thought that makes or breaks new technology deployment – management of it.  Business Service Management practices and instrumenting for management and measuring performance should be a factor to consider when planning a movement to the cloud.

All services, applications and technologies will be scrutinized in the coming year for suitability to be deployed in the cloud or some mixture of cloud and in-house resources.  One important factor will be the service levels and how you will measure the service in conjunction with in-house services for value to the business as well as monitoring the service provider for performance.  Without the performance monitoring and instrumentation to manage the service, it becomes a he said / she said debate regarding the perception of service quality.

Just because you move services to the cloud, you do not alleviate the requirements to manage and measure the services for service value.

How are you measuring your cloud providers?

Michele

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Everyone is talking about cloud and they want to implement the same in their companies. CIOs are the first people who will get the work on this new initiative or change. This article will give them the quick overviews on what all are the factors needs to be considered during cloud movement.  (Read Full Article…)

The Hub Commentary_

In another article earlier this week regarding Business Service Management practices and turning the tables on the discussion from cost of IT services to value provided to the business, there was a similar discussion.  Not all services are created equal and costs can be moved from one service to another based upon the value provided to the business.  However, first we must be able to cost the services to drive to the value discussion.

Again, as long as services illustrate no cost, we consume at a 24×7, on whatever device we choose and from where ever we are, but introduce cost to the business and the value becomes quickly apparent and the facet turned off many things in all likelihood for the real value add services.

Tim provides some nice examples in his Value Based Model discussion.

Michele

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In today’s highly volatile economic environment and rapidly changing landscape of IT best practices, most IT leaders are struggling with balancing competing priorities with ever-shrinking budgets. For many, it’s an ongoing debate with business executives on how to address the costs and risks associated with delivering IT services. Innovation within IT is being achieved by some; however the majority of IT organizations do not know where to begin.  (Read Full Article…)

The Hub Commentary_

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

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

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

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

Michele

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