Business Service Management Hub

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…)

The Hub Commentary_

Innovation is an overused term, I agree.  True innovation are products and services that change the way an industry does business, however, business growth through new services and products are now more than ever dependent upon technology.  As you can see from this recent survey business is relying on IT to support business growth.

Growth is dependent upon automation of the routine to free resources to move from “Bulb Monitor” roles to service providers and more agile to deploy and manage new services that will use new technologies to drive business growth.  Operationally, IT must rethink how to take advantage of technology to not only deploy new technologies, but also how to free themselves from the routine tasks too.

I’ve seen and posted many of these articles already this year and look forward to the story of an organization who is putting it into action and moving from “Bulb Monitor” to the fuel for growth.

Michele

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A new survey from SAP suggests that IT budgets should be focused on innovation – but, as Gary Flood asks, is that enough?

Innovation. It’s both a very trendy but also much abused term at the moment in IT. And maybe we’d have a better idea of what it actually means – and what it could contribute? – if we were given a chance to do some of it.

(Read Full Article…)

The Hub Commentary_

Here we go IT – another chance to redeem ourselves and service enable our infrastructure and take advantage of new technology.  The business has cracked the door to invest in technology that will transform the business and new systems management tools to communicate service performance and value realizing that new technology will take new approaches, all I can say is – Wake Up and Smell the Coffee and take advantage of the opportunity to drive your business forward!

Our businesses get it, learn to speak business language rather than ITIL language and use technology to grow your business to the next level.  We’ll talk ITIL in another post, but communicate service value because the service providers are and will eat your data center for lunch given the opportunity.  This is the catalyst that will make or break your data center, reach out and take it back!

Michele

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Intel (INTC) and SAP results and various forecasts issued this week suggest that while 2010 was a recovery year for just about all sectors of IT, enterprise software and accompanying services will be the main drivers for technology revenue growth over the next few years.  (Read Full Article…)

The Hub Commentary_

This is a really great read!  I especially applaud and agree with the yin and yang of transformation.  IT pushes back to change their job/role, but has the power.  The business doesn’t have the technology power, but welcomes new and changing roles.  The business jobs are usually those lost during automation and the IT jobs being those that stay and evolve.  Great summation, I’m paraphrasing.

Managing, measuring and communicating service performance is the transformation that must occur – totally agree.  Transform or die!  Thus the role becomes that of the analytical service provider versus the monitor of commodity technology.

Today in the press Amazon was dissed for being an innovator in supplying infrastructure services.  It is services like these, purchased on a credit card that will bring agility to those in-house staff members developing new products and services for your businesses creating an agile service development organization.  Now IT operations has to jump on board and inject the intelligence into those workloads to enable the management of those workloads regardless of where they run – service enabling the workloads.  This agile approach and transformational thinking is what business seeks.

Embrace agility, new technology and deployment options and transform……or die as they say.  Are you transforming?

Michele

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“Today, the IT infrastructure is the backbone and accelerator of a company’s business transformation,” explained Jean Cholka, CEO of the global IT services provider Freeborders. “Thereby, having the right leader in the IT organization in place is critical to a company’s success.”  (Read Full Article…)

The conversation IT has with the business must change this year and this is the year of transformation predicted back in 2003 by Nicholas Carr in his Harvard Business Review article, “IT Doesn’t Matter”.  The cloud, virtualization and the growing number of service providers with as-a-Service options are the catalyst that will force this transformation in market time during 2011.

If you have kept up with my news posts this week, I swear I was unable to find much news to comment and post on that did not have to do with the service providers and transformation.  My favorite post of all is the CIO article, “ITIL vs The Cloud:  Pick One”, REALLY?  You are kidding right?  This and another post, “Consider the Cloud a Solution, not a Problem” are exactly the headlines and mentality that will send IT jobs To the proverbial Cloud, just as Nicholas Carr predicted.

The way we manage technology and our processes today should not hold us in the past.  Amazon is doing it again.  Amazon changed the industry from bricks and mortar retail to online, almost overnight.  Transform or die, it happened and is happening again.  Amazon is offering infrastructure as-a-Service, purchasable on a credit card.  Now let’s start watching the leaders in each industry flip flop based upon those who embrace new technology, agile development AND have the foresight to service enable their workloads instead of dissing and complaining about what and how much monitoring Amazon should be responsible for.  IT is responsible for measuring and communicating service performance, instrument your workloads and inject them with the intelligence required to communicate service performance.  These will be the transformational leaders of tomorrow.

Communicating service performance is on IT, are you making the transformation?

Michele

The Hub Commentary__

Absolutely the jobs are shifting.  Technology and the monitoring, configuring and management of it is commodity.  Much of it could be run in the cloud, by a service provider, managed by SaaS offerings and open source – the choices are endless today in configuring the right sized and right sourced data center.

As in my previous commentary on the post regarding business performance and the requirements in 2011 for IT to transform itself, this is the transformation.  IT is no longer about technology monitoring and managing, it is about communicating business performance and using technology to drive business growth and performance.  This is and will shift the traditional technologist jobs to the service providers and the analytical and service management roles inside the data center.

Is your IT and data center tranforming yet?

Michele

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The U.S. Labor Dept. said that the economy added 103,000 jobs overall, and led to an unemployment rate reduction from 9.8% to 9.4%, a broader trend that also appeared in tech hiring.  (Read Full Article…)