Business Service Management Hub

The Hub Commentary_

Nice article!  Just because you can measure it, doesn’t necessarily mean it needs to be measured.  Number 5 in the list is the one I snap to right away.  IT measures technology like baseball stats.  As my father always said, “baseball is a team sport that allows individuals to excel, but they must all excel at once to win the game”.    I believe IT measures technology as if those measurements prove they are doing something and creating value, when the company says, “so what?”.

The worst part about these measures is that it drives the wrong behavior.  Let’s pick on the help desk as an example.  Counting the number of calls, number of closed tickets on the first touch and the number of tickets closed in <15 minutes.  During my first software job as a professional services consultant, the first bit of custom code I had to write was for a customer to keep the help desk analysts from “cherry picking” the easy calls out of the queue and force the top of the queue to be selected.  Really?  This is because of how they are measured and we wonder why the business is unhappy with service and the end of the service desk is near according to the Top 10 Trends from Gartner.

These metrics are not driving quality or quality of service, but how many tasks I can do and how fast I can do them.  I cannot believe in 20+ years these metrics haven’t changed and it is just now that Forrester is publishing this article.  This is why IT is being outsourced and how the cloud is driving change into the organization.  See number 11 in the list and behavior.

Number 13 is classic and reminds me of my first position with EDS and a manager telling me, “you can make any chart tell the story you want to tell”.  Meaning diagrams from spreadsheets.  Yes, this is correct.  Why on earth would I push a chart that illustrates poor performance?

These measures are all the commodity of IT and why it is outsourced.  Instead of justifying and seeking to measure against benchmarks (number 9) as I was often asked as a former Industry Analyst for META Group, why not work to change the 1-2% of revenue that is spent just keeping the lights on – operating – which is what these traditional metrics measure.

Kudo’s Forrester, let’s start measuring value, driving the top line revenue with technology and innovation and improve the bottom line by reducing the amount of revenue (1-2%) that is spent just keeping the “lights on”.

How are your metrics changing with the advent of the cloud and driving value?

Michele

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In a recent Forrester report – Develop Your Service Management And Automation Balanced Scorecard – I highlight some of the common mistakes made when designing and implementing Infrastructure & Operations (I&O) metrics. This metric “inappropriateness” is a common issue but there are still many I&O organizations that don’t realize that they potentially have the wrong set of metrics. So, consider the following:  (Read Full Article…)

The Hub Commentary

We’ve all had to “do more with less” in ever changing IT environments.  Cloud computing offers up an encouraging promise that we can actually “get more for less”.  But more of what?  Access to more applications, more compute power, more flexibility, more agility and certainly more innovation.

Randy

Cloud computing is more about agility, cost control and being able to do things previously impossible rather than increased productivity doing what the organization has always done.  Read more

The Hub Commentary_

This article inspired me to write a full blown feature on the subject of vendor management, service level measurement/management/communication and basic business service management practices.  The net of it, IT you own it – no shifting blame to others and no government intervention to set up terms and conditions.  This is outsourcing, plain and simple – manage your provider.

Read the feature commentary in this post.  I do predict there will be a very large outage in 2011, it will be a brand name company, there will be hype based headlines and buried deep in the article disguised in hype will be the root cause – poor contractual terms and conditions, poor vendor management and complete lack of service level measurement keeping perception in check with reality!

Michele

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Back in December, after Amazon summarily pulled the plug on WikiLeaks using its servers for alleged violations of terms and conditions, the CTO of Fujitsu Technology Solutions wrote that the action constituted a serious threat to the business of cloud computing…. (Read Full Article…)

Face it, we all blame our siblings for everything that goes wrong, in my case my baby brother – who towers over me.

Today I’m writing an article instead of just sharing the news having spent a little time consulting and reviewing major sourcing contracts for customers and being trained in the Ross Perot bootcamp of outsourcing early in my career.  What I always find amazing is how much trust a subscriber puts in the provider during the contract negotiation.  On one hand there is trust (I call it naivety) and the provider was successful in creating a relationship, playing on emotion and expertise in the market.  On the other hand it is a recipe for disaster,  a lose – win situation for you the subscriber.  Know your rights.

Cloud computing is still just outsourcing, however, agile and dynamic technology enables a more dynamic purchasing option than in an early adopter phase.  What differentiates the providers at this time is their maturity to manage the services and service level agreements and the flexibility of their services.  When the market matures, we will reach a state of similar services, standard agreements and get down to price based decisions.  Price based decisions currently reflect the “buying” of a customer base and immature operating processes.  Buyer beware in these situations of early adopter buying and low cost options – shame on you the buyer.

Here’s my usual SLA and sourcing advice.  Outsource the commodity, the services that are absolutely the same regardless of industry, stop being unique, special and different and accept the standard and low cost option.  Go back to my Service Value chart.  Remember you still own the services and you can’t blame your sibling.  To that point, you own the service level – availability, performance, response, contract termination, etc.  Just remember the more stringent you are with the terms the greater the risk to the provider and the higher the cost.  Evaluate their standard terms and fill in the gaps, but fill them in appropriately based upon the value of the service.  Do not tell the provider “how” to deliver the service or how to manage the infrastructure, you are outsourcing for a reason.

My prediction for this year is that a major customer will engage with a major provider and there will be a major outage this year and there will be front page headlines creating noise how the cloud fails.  I will point back to front page Wallstreet Journal news of just about 10 years ago.  IBM, Seibel and SAP fail and Hershey misses Halloween – their largest candy selling season.  Pages and pages of an article playing to the hype of the big names and the market and failure.

I remember exactly where I was when I read the paper, waiting on my relentlessly late co-worker in the lobby of a San Francisco hotel.  Net of the story, change management and testing issue and Hershey found we are not loyal to chocolate.  We will go to another drugstore for a brand of toothpaste, but when we want chocolate we will take what is on the shelf.  Moral of the story was Hershey missed Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, Valentines and most of Easter to sort out their order to distribution challenges for what they thought was “14 days, we can fix anything in 14 days”.

I predict the same hype will occur here and it will boil down to a mismanaged, lack of defined and monitored SLA’s.  Just because you subscribe to a service does not alleviate you from the responsibility of the service and contract.

Monitoring, management and measuring cannot be an afterthought – how are you monitoring your service provider(s)?

The article that riled me up for this post is the following:

Cloud Computing (still) Needs a Bill of Rights – ZDNet

Back in December, after Amazon summarily pulled the plug on WikiLeaks using its servers for alleged violations of terms and conditions, the CTO of Fujitsu Technology Solutions wrote that the action constituted a serious threat to the business of cloud computing:  (Read Full Article….)

The Hub Commentary_

Ahhh the yin and yang of new technology.  The short sided cost saving and time saving view, we don’t have to buy and configure hardware and the longer term view of operationalizing the workloads by service enabling them to be supported.  Virtualization should be embraced and deployed as a cost saver, absolutely.  As with any techno gadget, it should be evaluated for good use and enabled to be supported to reap the greatest rewards.

Technology for the sake of technology and the short cut returns, never gets anyone anywhere very fast.  Measure twice, cut once and you will reap even greater cost savings.

Michele

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While the delivery of virtual machines is indisputably faster than deploying physical machines, it is often assumed that this also streamlines the process of deploying IT Services (applications).  (Read Full Article…)