Business Service Management Hub

Below are some of the common reasons that CMDB implementations fail.   They are in no particular order.

Lack of Management Buy-in

Face it, one group is going to be the buyer and installer of the CMDB, there are many other groups/departments that will be needed to help maintain the data as well as use the data.  If there is no edict to leverage ITIL processes, there is a good chance that the CMDB project will fail or more accurately… not get used.

Owner of CI’s do not have easy access

I’ve seen several times that the change management team/group are the buyer/install/owner of the CMDB.   There is nothing wrong with that, the problem comes in that they do not have buy in from the CI owners to help maintain (or validate) the CI’s, or the CMDB solution is cumbersome and it is implemented in a manner that makes it hard for the CI’s to be maintained.  The Change Management team doesn’t want to own the CI’s (and can’t/shouldn’t), but the owners are not able to easily access the CMDB.

Garbage in, garbage out (and/or stale data)

There are lots of sources of data to populate and maintain the CMDB, exporting XML from one system and importing into another system is only part of the process of ensuring data accuracy.  XML exports are not the only ways to integrate with other sources also.   Make sure the vendor has ways to filter out noise (who cares about an SSH session from an admin workstation to the server, it’s not a dependency).  If the there is to much data, it may be hard to find anything, if there is inaccurate data, no one will trust the CMDB.  Find the middle ground.

Lack of third party Integration

There are many reasons to connect to the products to pull in additional details.  You can think of some of these applications like mini silo CMDB’s.  The HelpDesk system knows anything and everything about customers, the asset system knows tons-o-things about servers.  Integrating with different sources is a great way to get started as well as ongoing maintenance of a CMDB.

100% or NOTHING

Do not fall into the trap of holding back releasing the CMDB to the company until it is completely done.   I understand that there needs to be a certain level of data witin the system before there is value, I understand that there needs to be processes in place to maintain the data and then there is the accuracy challenges.  The point is, pick a few slices of the entire pie, define what it is, set the expectations, roll it out, get some internal wins (and learn from it), then go after a few more slices of the pie.

Hard to search/find things

The interface must be intuitive, the end users shouldn’t have to understand a database schema in order to search for CI’s.   Many of the users will only log into the CMDB a few times a year.  A user should be able to hit some internal website, get forwarded to the CMDB interface, issue a search, press print and run off to their DR planning meeting (or Solaris migration project, etc).

Over designed/engineered Schema

For those doing a roll-your-own CMDB, good for you, it is nice that you are spending time to design the database schema and planning for the future… don’t get stuck planning for 2020, your plans for the CMDB and schema WILL NOT BE ACCURATE, accept it.

One Stop Shopping

We are looking for a CMDB, this is a good time to purchase a new Change Management System, Problem, Help, etc, etc, etc…. and you have just delayed purchasing and rolling out anything for the next 18  – 24 months between the pilots and lengthy executive signoffs due to costs and implementation time frame.   Again, good idea, they need to work together in harmony, you need a plan, you need interoperability, but you also need to solve some business problems sooner.

Bottom Up = WRONG approach

If you’ve ever talked to the builders or owners of a CMDB, many times it quickly gets down into the weeds of attributes, relationships, types of CI’s.  This is all interesting information and details but… who cares.   In the end, who is the target audience, what is it that they will need to get out of the CMDB.  Take a top down approach to the implementation.  If you have a clear vision (or atleast a goal of a vision), in turn it can clearly define the types of CI’s you will initially need, potentially the specific attributes and dependency information.   It probably help you determine what types of integrations the CMBD might need with other system in order to populate and maintain the CI’s.  If you take a bottom up approach for the implementation of the CMDB, you will get stuck in the weeds and you may not have a clear answer if the design/approach/solution/product/etc will meet the end users vision/goals.

Okay, for those of you not counting, I only listed 9, in the comments below… give me your 10^th one.  Don’t be shy, share a 10^th one or a funny story about one.

Tobin

Free Summary – EMA Radar for Business Service Management: Service Impact Q3 2010  – Enterprise Management Associates(Read Full Summary Report …)

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 Hub Commentary_

Well written piece and what this leads me to is that as services require updates or new service development begins in businesses, services will be evaluated as to the best deployment option.  Those options may be to subscribe to a SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) provider for the full application and infrastructure with the low hanging fruit being commodity processes like:  IT Service Desk, HR , Collaboration, etc.  Another might be IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service) to add capacity on demand, to run workloads for a given service in it’s entirety or maybe merely as infrastructure for the development organization.

Just because something can run in the cloud, doesn’t dictate that it should.  What I disagree with in the article is the heading and statement that “cloud allows IT decision makers to drive business strategy”.  IT must be driving value into the business strategy regardless of deployment option and communicating service performance and cloud computing or any other technology is not the answer that drives that behavior.

Cloud computing must be embraced, evaluated and deployed strategically – Cloud will not drive business strategy – Cloud is a tool that will enable agility in business strategy.

Michele

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Cloud computing may be defined as location independent computing whereby shared servers — for the purposes of this article, external to the enterprise — provide resources, software, and data to computers and other devices on demand. Cloud computing may have started out as an emerging trend that only IT professionals could get excited about (or fear), but it has quickly become one of the most important paradigm shifts in business today.  (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_

“Visionaries have an innovative and disruptive approach to the market, but their services are new to the market and are unproven,” Gartner  Yes, this does describe Amazon and EC2, but does that mean it is 2 steps behind the Leaders?  Not often are there times to truly innovate and redefine a market.  Amazon and EC2 are redefining an industry regardless of internal enterprise IT or the consumer market.  Their customers are a mixture now over the traditional IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service) IT service providers.

To the innovator go the initial spoils, revenue in the market.  Will or can they sustain that leadership will play out over time.  Given where we are in the life cycle of this disruptive technology (mostly development and test) in Enterprise IT shops, EC2 brings just the agility required for businesses to drive agile development of new products and services and move to market faster than ever before mimicking the consumer market.

In order to take these early development projects to production, yes, more formalized monitoring and management will no doubt need to be baked in.  Now the question becomes, who bakes that in and supplies that information?  Isn’t that agent part of the workload that is packaged and shipped out to the cloud to run on the subscribed to infrastructure?  I call this service enabling your workload and injecting intelligence into it for purposes of monitoring, securing and communicating the performance of the workload the subscribers responsibility.  Right?  The provider is responsible for the infrastructure your workload runs on, not what’s going on in the workload, that remains the responsibility of the subscriber.

I applaud Amazon and say keep challenging the status quo.  IT and the traditional proven providers need to think a little out of the box to meet the demands of market dynamics in market time! What do you think?

Michele

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Gartner’s Magic Quadrant report has placed Amazon’s cloud computing service in one of its lower tiers, saying that for all of Amazon’s commercial success it is “visionary” but “unproven.”  (Read Full Article…)

I ran across this article the other day by Doug Mueller and it reminded me of the multi-layer Service Catalog.  I’m not sure if this is an actual term or not, but it’s a good description of what it is.  If you take a very large organization that is broken up into distinct areas such as the teams that support:

• Hardware & Operating Systems
• Technologies (web servers, databases, messaging bus, etc)
• Applications (email, timesheet, payment processing)

For mature IT groups, they typically will drive towards a list of supported hardware and support operating systems, they will also typically drive towards a list of support technologies that will be supported within the environment.  On top of these, some common applications (or services) are then provided to the employees such as email and the corporate web server.

If you walk through this, each of those teams has their own Service Catalog (and as Doug said, a Service Request Catalog).   Someone in the technology area, after significant research wants to make this new technology available for sharing documents.  The person requests from the hardware group for hardware and an operating system to be provisioned for this technology to run on.

Someone in the application area then decides to tie the document sharing, email, web and video together for a collaboration solution, so they in turn request services.  The end users then request access to the collaboration service.

I have seen a few different approaches to this such as different links on the internal website to request hardware w/OS and another set of  links to get applications/technologies installed to simple help desk requests.   Regardless, while it may not be a full fledge electronic Service Request Catalog at each layer, there are lists of approved hardware, operating systems and technologies for many companies.

Tobin

The Hub Commentary

The opening statement of the article says it all and what I heard is, “the technology and services are incompatible with our processes” and resistance to change and why I predicted the service providers will feast on data centers in 2011 in my predictions post and why I also predicted first in the list that ITIL will wane in the conversation.  Data  center staff has to wake up and smell the coffee, so to speak.  Technology is commodity, driving business is the value.  Think of it this way, when you go to the bakery do you care how they make the chocolate cake or do you just want to buy a chocolate cake?

It is no longer about the monitoring and managing of technology and configurations, that’s the commodity and those jobs are with the service providers.  The IT jobs are analytics, business performance, using technology to grow the business.  All three of my posts today are articles referencing the impending transformation that the data center must embrace in 2011 or be outsourced.

Business is frustrated with IT because IT does nothing but talk and impose “how” to manage technology on the business rather than delivering and driving services.  When you outsource (cloud, as-a-Service, take your pick), you are purchasing a service, not managing the infrastructure and how they manage their processes.  Define the contract, service expectation, reliability/performance/availability considerations and what you expect during an service impacting event.  That’s it.  The service provider is tasked with meeting that service contract and defining the processes that insure they do.

Now I also state in these conversations over and over again, many of these start-up service providers are one outage away from being out of business because they do not have good practices in place.  Yes, as a customer you should quiz and probe to gain comfort that they do know how to run the business (you notice I said run the business – not manage problem tickets), write the contract and manage to the contract.

I have several service level agreement posts and cloud service provider posts.  ITIL (I am certified) is advice on processes, not SEC filing rules for public companies.  ITIL and it’s followers will slowly fade into the woodwork if they do not embrace changing market dynamics and technologies.  The single biggest problem with ITIL that I will blog separately on is that it is still stuck in defining a life cycle, a process for the service and not how to deliver service value driving business value.   More on that another day…

2011 is the year of the cloud, virtualization, service providers, analytics for business performance and mixed /complex environments, not ITIL in the least.  Communicating performance inclusive of right sourced components as part of the service is the transformation goal.   No one will care how the data center communicates business performance, only that they do and drive value!

Are you communicating business performance and driving value or still communicating how you manage a data center resistant to the cloud because it changes a process?

Michele

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The Cloud is fundamentally incompatible with ITIL — the most widely accepted framework for professional IT management.  (Read Full Article…)

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…)

The Hub Commentary __

Beth’s opening statement regarding the Aberdeen findings sums it up, mid size organizations are under performing larger organizations.  Pick up the Fortune 500 list as I do each year and look at the top 5 in each industry.  There are 3 things that always standout:

1. Those that lead, know how to harness the commodity of technology to not only power, but drive business.
2. Those that lead, lead by magnitudes greater than their followers.
3. Those that innovate, change how a market functions, don’t always stay on top.  Check out where eBay is for example.  The innovator often gets leapfrogged.

Beth references a previous article my good friend Glenn O’Donnell of Forrester is quoted offering the following 5 pieces of advice:

1. Consolidate management tools
2. Invest in Network Change and Config Mgmt
3. Application awareness
4. Pay for analysis, not monitoring
5. Get more from existing tools

2011 will be the year IT transforms to measure business performance and ties the analytics to the data to drive business performance, not IT or technology performance.  Use technology for the mundane and routine, measure performance, reduce costs, do more with less and measuring the network and application performance regardless of where it resides will be key to having that complete view of business performance to use technology to improve that performance in clever ways.

Michele

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If you’re overseeing performance management initiatives at a midsized organization — one with annual revenue between $50 million and $500 million — then you probably have a thing or two to learn from your counterparts at larger enterprises.  (Read Full Article …)

So you have a console that has your Business Service Management views.   You set up the views to show the key Services you are providing to your end customer(s) (EMail, Databases,  CRM, etc).  You somehow are bringing in monitoring data in order to light up the service views in order to show some type of condition and health. You figured out how to measure the Service Levels and provide all of these details back to the end users and management in a dashboard.  The question is, how do you maintain it?

If you have been following ITIL, one approach is to integrate the BSM solution with the CMDB solution (assuming they are different solutions).   The CMDB probably has discovery populating it with new CI’s and updates to CI’s.  The CMDB should have inputs to other systems for additional details around the CI’s.   In the end, the CMDB is the location for the factiods around the Services such as all of the CI’s comprising the Service, relationships between the CI’s, current configuration of the CI’s and so on.   If those details are available, why wouldn’t you use it to drive the way in which IT is managing the environment.   As things change within the enterprise, the CMDB is updated and in turn the BSM views should auto-magically update also.

Tobin

If you are reading this, then there must still be some questions in your mind on what Business Service Management (BSM) is, I’m not going to give you the elevator pitch, there are lots of companies with different flavors of those, I’ll take another angle on it that might help.

There is this large shipping company, they ship thousands of packages a day.  One of their critical operations is in a large hanger at an airport.   Planes and trucks are unloading packages and they need to be sorted and loaded back onto different planes and trucks.   There is significant computer automation that moves these packages along their way and in turn, these systems need monitoring.  Having an end to end view of the unloading, sorting and reloading of packages with a realtime update on volume, outages and other metrics is important to them.  Some might say that this end to end view is a very technical view and not BSM, to this shipping company, shipping packages is their business and being able to see this piece of the Service is important.

A large financial firm has many traders, it is important to ensure that all of the trading systems are up and running, network links to the outside world are required for these trades as well as the traders workstations and how well they are performing.  Having an end to end view of the complete trading application with up to date availability, trading volumes and other metrics is important for them to understand if they are making or losing money.

The typical BSM for a company is to be able to set up end to end views of the important corporate applications like EMail or CRM, but that is not the only example of BSM, shipping, trading, manufacturing, banking, there are endless examples of managing the environment in a manner that aligns IT with the business they are in.  By IT leveraging the BSM approach, they are ensuring that they are looking at the things that are important to the business, in turn they are providing value to the business.

Tobin

The Hub Commentary  __

A tweet pointed me to this post today and what a great post and analogy.  I, in fact, kick off most presentations by stating Business Service Management is EASY!  In fact, you hold the key to the most valuable insurance policy in your company.  Business runs on technology, it is commodity, like electricity, we count on it being there to conduct business.  I have a previous post on just that insurance policy in hurricane season on the east coast of the United States where the call center becomes the hub of activity for the power companies.  Customers phone in outages, crews are dispatched  and power is restored more quickly with better monitoring of the technology supporting the call center and dispatching crews.  Technology cannot stop an impending natural disaster, like a hurricane, it contains the effects of the natural disaster as described in the linked to post.

As with the oil spill that my friend JP references, early warning can aid to avoid an event or contain the event as was the case with the the power outage in the North Eastern US a few years ago.  This CIO once told me it took only 8 seconds for that outage to cascade from Ohio to the east coast.   Avoiding it at that stage was not possible, containing it becomes the goal.  After the event as JP describes, they implemented a monitoring system that correlated data from their grid monitoring system with their technology management tools for that complete picture to avoid events by reading the early warning signals and better contain events when they do occur.  An article is posted here describing the integrated approach this electricity operator took, just as JP describes.

I work with companies every day to justify the insurance policy we know of as Business Service Management.  In tough economic times when spending is reduced, justifying a spend becomes difficult when it is not reducing costs directly.  The cost of the approach and tools is far smaller (even when maintained over time) than the disaster of an outage or spill.

Can your company afford a game of high stakes poker when it depends on technology to operate?

Michele

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The Gulf oil spill of April 2010 was an unprecedented disaster. The National Oil Spill Commission’s report summary shows that this could have been prevented with the use of better technology.  (Read Full Article…)

A true story, names not revealed to protect the innocent and a Dilbert in the making.  An illustration of Business Service Management, rather than a Wiki like definition, of technology impact and calculating costs and value.

Early in my career, green and wet behind the ears, about 8 months into the job working the 4:00 – 12:00 shift solo (the shift where stuff gets done, but not discovered until 7:00 am the next day) in a distributed data center.  You know what I’m talking about and likely already sense the pain that is about to come.  I knew how to run the jobs, I didn’t know what they were really doing or how to fix things if they went wrong – at least not until one fateful summer night.  I was working for an outsourcer processing insurance claims for the customer to pay the beneficiaries.

The Set-up:

I worked my shift, I left at midnight, jobs done, reports printed, tape back-ups done, the girl working midnight was about to have an easy night.  That is until about 6:30 am when she would attempt to bring 3 mainframes online for the next days claims processing.  Yes, she was greeted with more error codes than she knew what to do with, The Boss received an early alarm/wake-up call, I can’t bring Rodney to life (that’s the nick name of each of our mainframes) HELP!!

The Solution – Scavenger Hunt:

I arrive at work at 4 to chaos, looks of anger and irrecoverable damage on your shift yesterday.  I look around, machines are humming and I say it was not irrecoverable, Rodney is up and running.  The phone rings, I answer it, my friend Richard in a distant location, he asks how are you, I say worst day of my life, he says, “it was you!”, meaning he had helped restore service, but no one ratted me out as the root cause.

Richard walks me through my previous night’s shift and what I did and didn’t notice.  I trashed a bunch of  files.  Not a big deal if you have back-ups, which we did, just hang a tape, reload the files and restart Rodney – 5 minutes.

The Cost – my Penalty:

The Boss comes into the data center and waves at me, come take a walk with me.  I figure I’m about to get fired, afterall, the data center was down for 7 hours, not a single claim processed, beneficiaries didn’t receive checks, my company missed an SLA, dozens of people worked 7 hours to fix my mistake, but there was something even worse I was about to experience.  At 20 something, I couldn’t calculate the number of zero’s for the cost of my simple error.

The Boss walks me through a room with the folks that input claims and reminds me they get paid by the claim, meaning the number of claims they key each day.  My simple mistake caused a 7 hour outage, a team of people to find the root cause in order to restore service, my company may have been slapped with a fine, beneficiary checks were delayed, but most heart wrenching to me was that I impacted the paychecks of more than 100 folks that were paid by the number of claims they keyed each day.  As I walked through the room, they didn’t know I was the root cause, but they were glaring at us none-the-less.

The room seemed the length of a football field that day.  As we exited the room The Boss simply said, “are you going to do this again?” and I quickly responded, “I hope you fire me if I do!”.

Business Service Management – claims processing was my business, my company caused an outage of significant cost.  This happens every day, the cost is quite easy to calculate and the insurance policy to mitigate the risk is far less costly, however, as IT professionals we have a difficult time justifying service enabling our data centers with proper management until there is an outage.  A single outage can cost 1-2% of revenue and a solution to avoid it can be a fraction of that cost.

Data centers are growing more complex, virutalization and cloud computing are seen as low cost options by removing hardware and software costs, however, the cost of support is overlooked and we are entering a familiar cycle of short sided savings over long term cost to repeat the dotcom bust of the 90’s with the hosting providers and web services.  Service Enabling infrastracture with an end-to-end view to pinpoint root cause, visibility to read the indicators before impact so that restoration can be minutes – not hours greatly reducing the cost of an outage has to factored into the solution.  By service enabling with management upfront allows you to take risks, be agile with new technology by having the right management in place to monitor for thresholds, errors, etc. avoiding and mitigating outages.

I know my Boss wasn’t really mad that I was the root cause of an outage, he’s was mad that a 5 minute fix relied upon a 7 hour scavenger hunt!  This is my Dilbert – what’s yours?

Michele

To cloud or not the cloud, that is the question .  Todays IT needs to be agile and responsive to their customer, most of the time the customer is internal and they need more processing power added to existing services or the need new services provisioned.   There is also a high expectation that change within the enterprise is done in a safe manner to avoid future outages.   Managing the enterprise from a Service perspective, understanding the individuals parts that make up the entire service is a fundamental requirement.

One of the ways for IT to be able to quickly grow or shrink the footprint of the services is to adopt virtualization and build an internal cloud and/or leverage outside cloud providers.  Virtualizing is a way to have well known configurations rolled into production and in turn reduce risks to outages.  Virtualizing also provides a type of Disaster Recovery (DR) it also provides a way to add more nodes to an overtaxed cluster quickly.   I’m not saying virtualization is for everyone, but there are many value-adds it brings to IT as well as value to the business.

Tobin

The Hub Commentary __

New technology that removes hardware and thus tangible cost savings is always a short term win.  Managing it long term is generally the afterthought.  Not that I’m against the virtualization and more efficient use of hardware resources, I’m for it.  I am encouraging of planning for the upfront service enablement of it with proper management, however.

Management technologies will be the secondary market, more specifically the integration platform and strategy that brings an end-to-end view of the physical, virtual and cloud infrastructure delivering services.  Many articles are about IT organizations seeing virtualization and cloud as a problem where I see it as just another technology to embrace, deploy and and manage.

Client virtualization is an even more complex environment that will dictate integration, management and the end-to-end visibility of the infrastucture.  The cost savings are great and with a bit of planning to implement the right visibility, those savings can be realized without pain.  Remember the customer calls in because they cannot access something or something is slow, they have no idea how they connect, what runs where, that their desktop image is really a virtual machine running on some server, etc.  The job of the service desk to pinpoint and restore service is impossible without the proper visibility.  So thus, management/integration platforms will become the secondary market of the virtualization explosion.

Regarding the midmarket, I find this curious as they have minimal IT staff and have been in the cloud far longer than most.  Remember the Intuit crash last summer (2010) for several days, that was all about the Quick Books subscribers in the midmarket.  Enterprise organizations could take a queue from the midmarket on embracing the cloud and virtualization.

2011 is going to be an interesting year for us in the data center without a doubt!

Michele

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The new year is starting off well for VMware, which saw its stock jump to a new 52-week high of $94.19 Monday. It then dipped a bit to close at $92.97, which is approximately 4.6 percent higher than its previous closing price, Investors.com reported.

(Read Full Article…)

Setting up a tool that performs some type of end user performance testing is not enough, it is a type of testing that provides a view of the end user experience of using a part of a specific service.   Adding Service Level Management on top of the testing is still not enough.

Business Service Management is a bit more encompassing, when there are slow response times, which piece of the supporting technology is the culprit, is this something that can (or needs to) be addressed now?   If we were to take this slow database offline in order to address the issue, what impact would that have on the enterprise or end users.  Business Service Management helps with these problems and more.  End user response time measuring is just a piece of BSM, it might be a good starting point, but don’t be fooled, you are not done.

Remember there are several layers in the OSI model and having a health indicator from each of those layers (or several at least) is going to provide a better picture end to end of the health of the service.  The big management tool vendors typically compete against each other, the typical model is rip and replace, they sell you new tools and get you to stop using the old tools… very expensive and disruptive proposition.  Since there is no single vendor that is the best of breed for each of the OSI layers, then a single vendor for the end to end management doesn’t make sense.   It makes more sense to purchase some of the tools to do specific types of monitoring, leverage opensource to monitor some of the other aspects and then roll all of these together into a single end to end view.   This approach allows you the ability to swap out tools when they become dated or when the vendor is trying to hold you hostage at renewal time.

Having a single console that is able to integrate with all of the underlying technologies managing the environment and providing an end to end view is a better way to manage the enterprise, using a response time tool and crossing your fingers that everything will work out is risky.

Tobin

I like to do searches on the internet from time to time to see the type of hits produced around specific terms such as Business Service Management and Cloud Computing.  Sometimes just changing the search slightly, you get drastically different results.   So today when I searched on “Managing the cloud”, I noticed that the most recent article was from Feb of 2009, in fact, many of the results were from 2009.   My first thought was the problem must have been solved if there are no recent search results.  I think it is that we are at the point that we have a better understanding of the cloud and are not as worried about it as much as we were before.  Sure, there are still some concerns, in fact many areas of concern, but they are manageable.

I know I am probably simplifying it, but managing the cloud has a lot of the same characteristics of managing the enterprise.   You need to be able to control access to the data/system/server, you also need to be able to keep tabs on the health and availability of things running in the cloud (internal or external cloud).    The cloud and business service management are related in some manner, where and how you run your services includes the term cloud, and how you manage those services is within the Business Service Management space.   Vendors that provide tools for managing the enterprise are going to end up being some of the same vendors that provide tools to managing the cloud, but keep in mind, monitoring the health of the server or service running in the cloud is only one part of it, there are other areas of managing such as service elasticity, governance, compliance and general provisioning.  It is time to start to look at a more holistic approach within IT to solve some of these management problems.

Tobin

The Hub Commentary     __

I tend to agree with the increased focus on performance and end-user monitoring and believe it will be driven by the requirement to monitor the service providers as cloud services are incorporated.  Controlled change management with an end-to-end view of the complex infrastructure will work to mitigate risk and both will rely on an integration platform and strategy.

Open Source monitoring for the commodity will also rise in popularity and implementation, but I don’t agree with building more into the monitoring tools or waiting for one vendor to build a single framework.  A single vendor framework is and has never been built ground up to monitor and manage the data center.  The big four all grow through acquisition of many technologies and cobble them together through data layer integrations.  No offense to my vendor friends, I’ve been a product manager for one of them and did exactly the same thing after an acquisition was made – it’s the quickest way to claim integration victory.

I believe we will see data centers leveraging Open Source, Cloud services for both Services (commodity management – ala ITSM tools) and Infrastructure (to test out excess capacity and demand flexibility options); rise in both availability and performance monitoring for new technology and delivery methods; and end-to-end visibility requirements to mitigate risk and speed restoration time.  All of this is solved and future proofs the data center by considering a  sound integration platform and strategy pulling together the physical, virtual, cloud environment into a single view for monitoring, managing and measuring.

Push your suppliers to build the best monitoring/management tools possible and leverage an integration platform to bring the best of your investments together to transform your data center into a service provider.  Oh yeah, 2011 will be the tipping for data center transformation into a service provider – not technology manager.

Michele

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Depending on where they stand in the overall environment, network and systems management companies hear different concerns from their enterprise IT clientele. Here’s a look at how the year will shake out in a number of different areas … (read full article…)

The Hub Commentary __

A few interesting results from this survey of over 700 respondents.  Nothing shocking, more with less, improved business efficiency and drive business growth.  New investments on the rise and operating expenses on the decline.

I consider investments in the management, integration and infrastructure visibility enabling service delivery a key component to new investments.  In many of the the articles about new technology, the management component is an afterthought and it is the key to the success of the strategy.  It’s the whole package of leveraging new technology, delivery models and how you monitor/manage/measure it.

In these dynamic times integration is often mentioned in much of the dialog, however, I sense it is often overlooked.  I caution you not to overlook your integration and management strategy as part of your future investments to drive growth to the top line as is expected with all new investment strategies.

Michele

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In our fifth business technology survey, executives say they want more immediate value from IT and forward-looking strategies from technology leaders that support growth and innovation.  (read full article…)