Business Service Management Hub

The Hub Commentary_

This is  a nice post from Marc of Forrester.  He outlines well the things that need to be considered as contracting with service providers and purchasing technology moves around an organization as part of a business transformation (BT) initiative.  Recently on a Cloud Chasers, Sean Larner bantered where this responsibility might lie.

As Marc describes the functions that need attention, I’m not a fan of continuing with IT as a gatekeeper or perceived obstacle to progress of business transformation, however, it points to Service Managers.  A formalized role between the business and IT.  These folks would manage the services, required levels of service and working with the technology specialists to insure proper security, standards and volume purchasing.

There is also a need for vendor management which is a combination of contract management and service management.  There is a happy medium between well managed services and agility to the business.  Self service portals for ordering every day equipment can empower the business and those longer term, less routine services should be managed by Service Managers insuring quality service, managed costs and proper standards, security and support practices are considered.

The Service Manager should be an enabler, not a roadblock or obstacle.

How is your business transforming? Where are your Service Managers?

Michele

___________________

An empowered BT model includes the idea that end users will take on some functions that are typically performed within an IT organization. These may include selecting and deploying applications, buying mobile devices, and contracting with services firms.  (Read Full Article…)

The Hub Commentary_

What does this continue to tell IT organizations?  Two things, the cloud is here to stay and business is seeking outside alternatives.  If technology and management spending were up, I’d have an aha moment, IT is getting it and turning that corner of transformation and change to leverage technology to grow the business and is harnessing the power of agile computing.

Right sourcing the environment needs to occur, but as with any new technology trend many are racing with short term cost savings in mind as we have discussed many times here.  To those bleeding edge organizations will go the spoils of going first, if done with the right objectives and plan in place.  Many forget that managing and monitoring the performance of the provider goes hand in hand with the sourcing options.

What do you read into this increase?

Michele

___________________

IBM tops again with 7.1% market share.  Global spending on IT services increased by 3.1% to $793bn in 2010, compared to 2009 revenue of $769bn, according to market research firm Gartner.  (Read Full Article…)

The Hub Commentary_

I tend to agree with James and have written often on the same subject.  Those leading their industry this year, likely won’t be the ones leading next year.  The question is are you trying to merely drive down costs or fuel growth?  Even with the Amazon blip of a week or so ago, those fueling growth are unwaivered in their approach.

Define and leverage the cloud as a deployment option with the right objective and measure it accordingly.  There will be blips in service from service providers, have an alternative plan for those occurrences based upon the requirements of the service.  Having the proper monitoring and management in place to monitor and measure services will be key.

Just because you push services to external providers does not mean you have alleviated the accountability for the service.  Management of the providers has to be factored into the cost of the service.

I look forward to comparing this years Fortune 500 list to next years and find the movers and shakers of their industry.

Do you run for cost or fuel for growth?

Michele

___________________

Is your cloud strategy centered on saving money or fueling revenue growth? Where you land on this question could determine a lot about your experience level with cloud services and what guidance you should be giving to your application developers and infrastructure & operations teams. According to our research the majority of CIOs would vote for the savings, seeing cloud computing as an evolution of outsourcing and hosting that can drive down capital and operations expenses. In some cases this is correct but in many the opposite will result.  (Read Full Article…)

The Hub Commentary_

I agree that costs need to be managed, however, there comes a point of no return.  Justifying the business value and return on investment is the shift IT organizations need to make in order to be competitive with the cloud and SaaS providers.

There needs to be focus on cost cutting where possible, however, there needs to be more focus on the delivery of value and growing the business with technology.  It is great to spend on technology when you can illustrate gains in revenue through the use of technology whether it be customer retention and quality of service or a differentiating service in the market.

Are you merely counting pennies or spending to gain?

Michele

___________________

Companies overspent by more than $207 billion on technology and telecom purchases last year, according to NPI, a consulting firm specializing in the management of IT spending. Many enterprises were dealing with budgets that had been slashed during the Great Recession, even as new projects were expected to drive the innovation necessary for growth.  (Read Full Article…)

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

___________________

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…)

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

___________________

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…)

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

___________________

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 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

___________________

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…)

The Hub Commentary_

Nice article and similar to a previous post of mine on Finding your Services. In that post I described mapping your services based upon cost and value to the organization.  Keeping those differentiating services in house and evaluating other deployment options, like Cloud, for those that do not differentiate your organization.

A component called out in this article is usually the obstacle that keeps these projects from being right sourced, fear of losing jobs.  It’s a job evolution as the author describes to a service provider, business analyst, value add analytics driving growth into the business.

The model is much like that of the manager of managers.  IT becomes the manager of managers and analyst of services and will require the tools to aid in turning data into information.  There becomes the requirement for the integration platform that pulls data from the various monitors and service providers, as well as the value/volume of transactions being processed driving growth.

IT becomes “glue and the view” into the services they provide and their performance to the organization.

How are you preparing to evolve your data center staff and services?

Michele

___________________

When CIOs take calculated risks, choosing emerging technologies from less established companies, the payoff can be enticing. We take you inside the journey of two established organizations for a deeper look at this success.   (Read Full Article…)

The Hub Commentary_

Cloud ROI of 80%, I must agree – NOT.  This is exactly what creates hype and those short term cost savings in hardware and software manifest in long term management and monitoring.  Measuring business services and growth to the bottom line of your organization is a better measure.

As the author describes, cloud based computing brings agility to the organization to be flexible and respond in market time to changing conditions and leverage economies of scale in a shared infrastructure.  The second savings is not managing systems that are common to all organizations and provide no market differentiation for your organization.

However, in the rush to the cloud many are leaping, falling off, the cliff by not planning the management, monitoring and measurement in during development.  Agility is a great thing, but adds complexity and requires a strategy in measuring business services and monitoring the performance of your service providers.

No doubt there are cost savings and when deployed strategically, cloud computing will be the innovation that could drive growth into an organization.  Deployed tactically under the hype umbrella of short term hardware savings will only push some organizations off the cliff of doom.

What is your realistic expectation of ROI for your cloud deployments?

Michele

___________________

A recent Microsoft “study” claims an 80 percent savings by using the cloud. This news hit the blogosphere with a big splash — it’s another positive outlook for cloud computing, and it provides some pretty compelling reasons to move to the cloud.  Not.  (Read Full Article…)

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

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

___________________

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…)

The Hub Commentary_

Bernard has put out a great piece for operations and development teams pragmatically discussing the development, implementation and operations of cloud projects.  Development of new services is the fit for new technology, otherwise, it becomes disruptive and costly to the whole of the IT organization.  Goes to that old addage, “just because you can, doesn’t mean you should”.

Business service management practices help you to weigh the cost and value and most importantly, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”.  Until an existing service outlives it’s usefulness or becomes a costly support burden, these services are not suitable targets for cloud infrastructures.

The three use cases are accurate and eye openers for the operations folks.  The time for push-back is over and it is time we work to become agile organizations.  In this case, Platform and Infrastructure-as-a-Service providers exist and are easily accessible with a credit card.  This is an expensive bypass, but the options exist and the crafty developers will most definitely go around operations to develop new services.  Then the time comes as Bernard points out, when the service needs to go into production and the infrastructure isn’t there and operations is not able to monitor, manage and support the new service taking more of a black eye.

The one thing 2011 has is an abundance of sourcing options and is the year we work toward common business goals and put the management systems in place that will help us to achieve these goals.

How agile is your operations team?

Michele

___________________

Organizations looking to deploy private clouds must understand where they’re headed. A development cloud is an appropriate start, but consider these three scenarios for how use of your cloud will evolve — for better or for worse….. (Read Full Article…)

The Hub Commentary_

While this is more of a post promoting a conference, I have had many conversations with co-workers of late while working on how we speak about Business Service Management and how do we break it down into simple speak and most of all why is it relevant.

We hear a lot about IT and Business alignment, which I completely disagree with.  This is the only industry I can think of where we talk about one group needing to align to it’s business.  What I equate this with are the youngsters that show up at work these days and tell me what their work schedule will be and what they will do.  I shake my head and think when did this change?  You go to work and do what you are told and work toward the common goals of the business, why has IT always been different and why?

Businesses that lead their markets, don’t make this delineation.  Also, what does this really have to do with the data center and operations anyway.  Operations doesn’t build new services and architectures, we just support them.  That is is exactly the point.

We spend 1-2% of revenue merely “keeping the light on”, operating and reacting to what is happening.  We spend another 1-2% of revenue on outages, yikes, that is expensive.  The impact to operations is improving these stats and spend.  Setting ourselves up to embrace, manage, measure and communicate technology as services as fast as new services and architectures come at us is what we in operations need to do.

Think about how you automate and provide early warning signals regarding the infrastructure like a high performance sports car before technology meltdown.  This is the power operations needs to embrace in managing, measuring and communicating services with the business objectives in mind.

Are you ready for new services and technology in operations?

Michele

___________________

IT leaders are at a crossroads. To thrive in today’s — and tomorrow’s — rapidly changing digital world, they must move beyond the elusive idea of business and IT alignment, where business leaders are in the driver seat and IT leaders play a supporting and lagging role. Rather than plodding along in alignment, it’s time to jump in the copilot seat.  (Read Full Article…)

The Hub Commentary_

I agree with Don and his summary of this topic as it hits the core of any business service management practice – it isn’t IT and then the Business, IT is the business.  In some cases it is more prevalent that technology is driving revenue with online order processing and customer interactions.  In all cases I can point someone to how IT is the business in the supporting functions that drive the efficiency and effectiveness in a more behind the scenes nature.

There are 3 things Don calls attention to regarding IT and the focus now on driving revenue and lining up with business objectives: 1) Innovation where IT drives revenue very obviously, 2) Competition from the cloud providers and 3) Cost cutting driving bottom line margin.  We have focused too long and too much on the last, driving out costs, without automating so we can focus on the first one.  The catalyst for the “why now” question is the obvious, the second piece – the competition.

IT has not balanced growing and operating well in the past and has created opportunity for competition with new technology and buying options from the many cloud providers that are growing exponentially this year.  Investment must be made to automate the mundane operating to create intelligence for higher quality services, but also freeing resources to concentrate on innovation.

Are you balanced between growing and operating?

Michele

___________________

InformationWeek has been out and about talking up their most recent CIO survey and keeps calling attention to the fact that one in three CIOs see creating a new business or business model as a driver in 2011. This is not a new phenomenon, but one in three is more CIOs than I would have intuitively thought, so I started to think about it.

(Read Full Article…)

The Hub Commentary_

The ebbs and flows of break-up and re-marry are alive and well in the Telecomm sector.  While this is interesting in the telco industry, I hear you asking, “Michele, what does this has to do with Business Service Management?”  It’s one sentence buried right in the middle of the article, lack of competition brings , fewer choices, higher prices and less innovation.

IT is in exactly the opposite situation these days with virtualization going mainstream and cloud providers popping up daily.  Due to the high cost of IT, lack of ability for the business to influence new services, flexibility and the delivery of services in market time, competition and new options have become available to meet those requirements.

Organizations have the opportunity to dig out of the hole of stagnation and illustrate a nimble approach in delivering new and higher quality services to the market while leveraging new technology.  The IT organizations that do this effectively and manage service value in lock step with business objectives will be next year’s leaders in their industry.

How are you driving innovation?

Michele

___________________

It’s clear that AT&T’s proposed acquisition of T-Mobile USA would reshape the U.S. wireless market by combining the country’s No. 2 and No. 4 operators. What’s not clear is whether the deal, which is subject to regulatory approval, will actually go through.  (Read Full Article…)

The Hub Commentary_

Today, I might agree that Cloud is somewhat disruptive, but for the right vendors it will be sustaining.  The mere fact that Amazon led the charge to change the purchasing model indicates that there is a desire for change in the industry just as they changed online purchasing forever.  The conversation that shifts this from disruptive to sustaining is the business service management discussion regarding cost and value and the appropriate deployment option.

This comes down to the planning and the best use of service providers and technology in your environment to deliver high quality services and drive value (revenue) for your organization.  We tend to focus way too much time (85% of the IT budget – 1-2% of revenue) on just operating rather than driving revenue and innovation for the business.

It’s not about The Cloud, it’s about using technology to drive revenue and differentiating services for your business.

What are you doing to drive growth for your business?

Michele

___________________

If you’ve read this blog over the past couple of years, it should be no surprise that I am a huge advocate of the theories of Clayton Christensen, author of “The Innovator’s Dilemma.” Christensen and his book were brought to mind this week by the cover story in Forbes about his severe health problems, his experience with the U..S healthcare system, and his prescriptions for how to fix it.  (Read Full Article…)

The Hub Commentary_

Social media marketing to your customers is a no brainer and makes sense.  Use within the organization becomes sticky as the article points out regarding broadcasting to the external world, internal projects.  So what is the answer to leveraging this real-time communication trend within the organization?

Novell has built into it’s Configuration Management System a social media interface watching the trend and adoption of social media back in 2008.  It provides the opportunity to share information during projects as well as post project inclusive of a tag wall.

Configuration management databases are notoriously difficult to maintain and often fall out of date when not used.  The concept in developing this system was to provide open access and, much like Wikipedia, enable many people from various roles to add to the data regarding configurations

While this addresses one component within a data center, I expect that more and more avenues will be adopted as we move through transformation.  Many development organization already use wiki’s and twiki’s to interact and track information during projects and most organizations have long since been using some form of Instant Messenger.

I predict that in the not so distant future we will see Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) versions of Twitter and Facebook for use internally to the organization as communication tools.  This will require cost and value discussions as with any business service management practice and will require some education to become useful and powerful tools without becoming toys and distractions.

Having grown up with the telephone and prior to the internet, I see the value to instant access to folks I know who could provide a quick answer real-time via an IM, etc.  However, I do believe we lose far more than we gain by losing the live interactions and organizations will need to work to maintain healthy, productive environments.

What is your social media implementation inside your organization?

Michele

___________________

Social Networking has always existed in different forms. In the distant past, people communicated face-to-face or wrote letters to each other. With the advent of the electronics age, social networking took different forms: phone calls, emails, texting, IM, etc.  (Read Full Article…)

The Hub Commentary_

The link to read the article below merely requires you to set up a sign-on with McKinsey for free.

Nice article to take heed to as we ebb and flow with new technology.  A doesn’t pass that I don’t read an article regarding bringing the mobile devices to the workplace and expecting support as an example.  Business service management practices have to govern the cost and business value of doing so or we end up spending more to support without a business value.

David speaks of joining as CIO into an organization that had grown fast, had many systems, decentralized, spaghetti strings of complexity to manage and support.  We all sit on the cusp of this reality as many seek to take the short term gains of new technology (cloud, virtualization, consumer devices, etc.).

It’s great when things ar booming and business is good, everyone overlooks the reality of what is progressing in IT.  In fact, we do it to ourselves because we do not have or take the time to step back, plan and take the time to do the long term right thing strategically to sustain long term growth.

I experienced this once in my career as well, the cost of doing business starts to overshadow the IT organization when it grows in this manner.  The business enjoys the revenue growth, but they too are looking at the spend against the revenue as margins and thus IT while seeming to support the growth is dragging down the business.

It is easier to measure twice and cut once up front than to create change as David did here and I commend him and his efforts.  I also see and understand that it took the team from the business and IT to come together as one unit and drive business goals and objectives to make this successful.  Often times creating change like this is difficult for the business and why it is often outsourced.  If outsourced, they would not have realized these savings.  The savings would have gone to the margin of the service provider and the business to manage the relationship.

This team achieved a 50% reduction in IT budget over 2 years and 65% in data size and cost in 3 years, that is truly phenomenal and also shows it can be done when the team comes together.  And as David looks back in the close of the story, he indicates holding firm to standards earlier would have made it more successful.

Thus putting the proper business service management strategy in place while in growth mode and service enabling the infrastructure as it grows and leverages new technology may take 5 minutes more, but in the end saves and grows the business faster and more successfully.  Awesome article!

Are you growing your business and service enabling the infrastructure at the same time?

Michele

___________________

Since TalkTalk’s inception, in 2003, the company has grown both organically and through acquisitions to become the United Kingdom’s second-largest broadband provider, serving more than four million customers. Rapid growth, however, left the company with fragmented and inflexible operations and IT, which raised operating costs and made it harder to manage the customer base and maximize revenues across brands.  (Read Full Article…)

The Hub Commentary_

Business service management practices have always known business and technology are one and not ‘and’ one to another.  Designing services above the silos based upon desired business outcomes is absolutely the right approach, I wholeheartedly agree with Randy’s assessment and this has been at the heart of all business service management projects and practices.

Measurements – if you cannot measure it, it may not be worth monitoring and managing, let the business outcomes be your measuring guide.

Mapping – now map your underlying infrastructure to the top line services.

Automation – what automations and improvements can you make to the supporting infrastructure that will improve the top line outcomes.

Innovation – look at how applying new technologies can improve the capabilities in driving top line outcomes.

This is the transformation that the data center will need to move through in the coming year with a concept that is not new, business service management.

Is you data center IT or Business focused?

Michele

___________________

Stop designing IT architecture around applications and start designing for business outcomes, says Forrester’s Randy Heffner. He shares five key questions to get you started. (Read Full Article…)