Business Service Management Hub

The Hub Commentary_

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

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

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

Do you reward heros or service analysts?

Michele

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

The Hub Commentary_

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

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

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

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

Is your IT business service enabling or multiple obstacles?

Michele

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

The Hub Commentary…

Several good  insights into effective ways to quantify the cost, quality, and value of IT in a way the business understands.

Randy

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Recently, we brought together 60 CIOs and IT leaders from the Fortune 1000 for our bi-annual “CIO Technology Business Management Council” meeting. The purpose of this event was to provide participants with an opportunity to learn from their peers about how to transform their IT organization into a services oriented organization and run “IT like a business.”  Read full article

I’ve seen a bit in the news about support, the consumerization of devices in the workplace and virtual desktop infrastructures that has brought this post together.  We seem to ebb and flow with new toys in the workplace and standardization of support.  The plain truth is that the standard environment is the most cost efficient.  If the role did not dictate that a given device be provided by the company to the individual, why would we assume we must support it?  I understand it did not come with a capital expenditure and made the employee accessible, if they choose to be, however, it does carry a significant cost burden that is often overlooked.

Service and support is commodity.  It is something that can and should be easily outsourced and the service provider will either standardize the support or will tax the customer for the varying types of devices that are supported.  I know that sounds harsh, but in these days where we should be seeking to spend less on operating and more on innovating this is one of the easiest and biggest cost saving area.  In most IT Operations budgets, the service and support function represents about 10% of the budget.  Tools no longer need to be in-house and custom if the business would rather not outsource, there are good SaaS offerings on the market to at least alleviate the burden of supporting the tools, paying the big boys maintenance taxes and paying for customized support of a commodity function.

I’ll make another bold statement, we care too much about the “end user” for the wrong reason.  No one outside of a data center even really knows what an “end user” is, but we all know who is our customer.  IT has to make this transformation to drive business growth and this is one of those starting places in knowing who is really the customer.  Whether or not our “end user” in the business is really happy or not with IT services is a debateable point.  The most important factor is whether or not we are able to transact business and support our buying customers that grow the business.  This is the mindset shift that needs to occur.

So supporting the latest version of iPhone from whichever provider and carrier and how happy our “end users” are when we re-image their machine because it is far cheaper to re-image to standard than figure out what they downloaded that broke something.  It’s about keeping the business productive, growing and making the customer of our goods and services happy and buying.  We should be automating the operations and shifting this attention, focus and resources on the growth side of the see saw.

I know this post is a bit controversial.  This is something that happens with each new toy that comes to market and budgets loosen, we forget the good efficiency practices we put in place in lean times.  I’ve answered hundreds of inquiry calls on this subject just before this function gets outsourced, the services are cheaper because the service provider will impose a standard and tax for the luxory.  We should be doing the same with good business service management practices shifting our focus and resources to the growth of business.

Are you taxing for the non-standard or spending more reacting and maintaining?

Michele

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Network World — Cost-saving technologies remain a priority for IT in 2011 and virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), with its ability to streamline operations, is one of the technologies at the top of the list.  (Read Full Article…)

The Hub Commentary_

I challenge folks to put on their strategic business service management practice hats when they approach extremely strategic projects like VDI.  This is an area that has the large cost savings potential or biggest failure and money sucking projects.

Yesterday, I came across a couple of articles regarding the support of any device an employee has to avoid capital expenditure.  My mid career roots are deeply planted in the service and support arena and the human cost of supporting non-standard infrastructures is the biggest misuse of resources in a service and support organization.  VDI projects are about standardization and cost reduction, but that will only occur successfully with the proper management baked in from the beginning.

I agree with the article considering the network impact and security, etc. are all areas to explore and plan for, but the management of the infrastructure and a view for the service and support staff is a must have planning and design consideration upfront – not an after thought for implementation.

We had the opportunity to work with an extremely large retail organization this past year for the purpose of putting the face on top of the VDI infrastructure for the service and support organization.  Huge cost savings are realized with standard images, lighter desktops and a face to the infrastructure that indicates where the failure is when the business cannot access an application.

How do you visualize and manage your end-to-end VDI?

Michele

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Network World — Cost-saving technologies remain a priority for IT in 2011 and virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), with its ability to streamline operations, is one of the technologies at the top of the list.  (Read Full Article…)

Hub Commentary

I’m putting my money on Watson!  After all the world’s most famous supercomputer runs on IBM’s high-performance, high-capacity Power servers and SUSE Linux Enterprise is the fastest operating system on POWER7.   Let’s see how it all comes out on Feb 14th!

Randy

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An epic showdown of man vs. machine kicks off Feb. 14, 2011. That’s when “Watson ,” a computing system from IBM, will face off against “Jeopardy!” superstars Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter. Can an artificial intelligence-driven machine overcome championship-level human minds? With Watson, the key challenge isnt a command of statistics and factoids. Its a matter of programming a computing system that can pick up the subtle nuances of the game show.  (Read Full Article….)

The Hub Commentary_

Open Source is gaining in adoption.  I find this part of the business service management swell and transformation trend to evaluate the automation and driving down of operational costs to focus on the use of technology to drive business growth.  Just look at “Watson” on Jeopardy, powered by SUSE Linux.  It’s the Watson analytics that is relevant, not the cost of an operating system to drive it.

This same transformation will cut across the whole of the IT commodity monitoring and support functions with SaaS service and support tools and open source monitoring tools that have been on the market for quite some time and proven stable.  If you aren’t leveraging it, I guarantee your competition is using it.  It’s time for IT transformation and re-thinking that which is commodity and that which drives and differentiates your business.

Have you stopped paying the Big Boys the taxes to monitor your command center yet?

Michele

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Vendors of proprietary software are fond of warning potential customers that open source software isn’t ready for business, typically citing subpar features or a higher total cost of ownership (TCO).  (Read Full Article…)

The Hub Commentary_

The title caught my attention as I can relay a very similar story and entered the job market the same year as well.  Yikes!  However, I didn’t aspire or become CIO as Diane has done.  The one aspect of the article that I would debate is supporting any device in the organization.  The article describes a business service management approach at Intel in understanding the business and knowing how technology supports and drives the business growth, however, then takes a left turn with the roll your own approach.

Let me explain.  The consumer market without a doubt drives IT and how we as technologists should evaluate technology for business application.  Where I scratch my head and even argue with myself is in supporting every one’s personal device.  If for business purposes Intel did not require specific roles to need a smart device or tablet, then why take on the cost and burden to support it.  Intel didn’t take on the capital expenditure, but the human support cost in the end can exceed the cost of the device and defining a standard device may in the end have been cheaper.

I know that this also goes to the work environment/culture and I do not have visibility to their support costs and it also made employees more accessible to work by their own decision, so that is where I debate with myself and it may come out to be a wash in this case.  I’m using it as an example of the things that should be weighed before signing up to support anything just because the employee makes the capital expenditure.  Like Intel evaluated security, there are very real other concerns to weigh.

Outsourcing and the service providers are more appealing with their subscription models because they define a standard for the commodity and do not deviate.  So while the Intel story sounds appealing, I would not suggest it is for everyone.  This is the exception – not the rule.

Michele

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Diane Bryant never intended to go to college, let alone become a top executive at Intel, the world’s largest chipmaker. She joined the Santa Clara, Calif.-based company back in 1985 and has held several positions over the years, including silicon design engineer and general manager of the server platforms group. About three years ago, she became Intel’s (INTC) chief information officer.  (Read Full Article…)

The Hub Commentary

SaaS as the article describes is followed with a ton of hype in these days of the cloud and transformation to business service management versus the commodity at the lower level.  The short term cost appeal with the subscription model and ease at which you can subscribe generates a lot of the hype.  I believe in the model and again always suggest first going back to basics and identify your services and classify them giving you a sense of what you need to service and support.

Once you understand the value of a service to your business, you can start evaluating whether it is a commodity process or specialized, market differentiators for your business.  Specialized services do not lend themselves well to these types of models.  Well defined and common services/process es are well suited for these models and should be used for that purpose.  In fact, they should be employed to drive standards into your organization and right size your service and support, which is hard to do from the inside once high levels of service have been delivered.

Another factor to consider is not all software was developed to be effectively used in a shared model and may not offer the economies of scale that a true shared service can offer.  As the folks at Forrester indicate, the commodity management, monitoring and lower in the stack items are well suited for this model as they should be standardized and common so your valuable resources can focus on driving business growth with technology over monitoring “box on / box off” lights.

Michele

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Given all the hype SaaS (software as a service) has garnered, you might be inclined to think every category of software will be delivered predominantly from the cloud at some point. Not so, says a new Forrester Research report.  (Read Full Article…)

The Hub Commentary_

I would agree that IT is commoditizing and the role of IT leaders is evolving much like my good friend Siki indicates where commodity services can be done elsewhere and which then frees the evolved IT resources to sit at the table as Diane describes to apply technology to business choices.  This is the practices of business service management in action.

In the featured post, Finding your Services, I describe first classifying your services based upon their contribution and cost to the business.  How you deliver (source) that service then becomes the next choice.  Just because you have technical capability in-house to deliver the service does not mean you keep it in house.  Many services are becoming commodity and should be shipped out of the data center.  On the other extreme, where you are seeking to deliver new and innovative services to the market to drive growth, but you may not have the expertise in-house to deliver it timely enough, you may also choose to seek outside assistance.

Again, it becomes a balancing act between operating and growth and weighing the cost and value of in-house versus external options.  Then the new role of IT becomes that which is described by both Siki and Diane, one of the facilitator of services that both operate and drive the business.  We are in unique times of role evolution and this will become uncomfortable for the traditional IT staff.

Are you driving business with technology or just operating?

Michele

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This week I saw two articles that captured the two visions of IT that will dominate the future. Both were interviews with senior IT leaders, one a CIO of a major technology company, the other a senior executive with a leading system integrator. One article depicted a vision of IT as a future of standardized, commodity offerings, while the other portrayed IT as a critical part of every company’s business offerings.  (Read Full Article…)

The Hub Commentary_

This headline caught my eye as I will be the first to debate that IT is not a profit center.  However, this is a prime example of IT realizing and classifying services based upon Service Value and applying Business Service Management practices.  In an effort to first cut support costs from old systems, right sourcing decisions and partnerships were established for industry must haves and I applaud these decisions.

I’ve seen this consortium model a couple of times in my career and it can be successful when set-up like this with the outsourcer as the intermediary managing the infrastructure and service with the ability to market, sell and replicate the solution across the industry.  The service is an industry standard and not specific to the business and thus no competitive advantage across the industry.  However, what usually keeps it from being successful is the size of the market that it can be sold to and how easily the others in the industry can just plug into the service.

The tipping point to concentrate on growth investments for IT and decrease the IT spend for cost saving measures may be enough to push to consortium like success for these types of services in the coming 12-24 months.

Michele

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Give a man a fish, the proverb goes, you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish, you feed him for a lifetime. Turns out there’s a quasi-corollary for corporate IT: Give your company a more efficient system, and you cut costs; give your industry a better way to operate, and you increase revenue.  (Read Full Article…)

The Hub Commentary_

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

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

How are you driving service value in 2011?

Michele

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

The Hub Commentary_

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

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

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

How are you measuring your cloud providers?

Michele

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

The Hub Commentary_

IT by the numbers and with Business Service Management.  In lean times, we need to get the most out of what we have, look at lower cost alternatives for the commodity and make the investment in the things that will drive value to the business.  Delivering real ROI has been something IT has been notoriously poor at executing because they manage by technology and not by the business service and lack the understanding of the cost / value to the business.

We are entering a time of growth and expansion of technology and the time will come to reimagine IT as business services and manage them as such.  Investing in new, agile technologies also require the right management baked in.  Last week the press was all over the Gartner report dissing Amazon for not providing enough monitoring.  Whose responsibility is it to manage your workloads in the cloud?  Service enabling those workloads and instrumenting them to manage as end-to-end services will be key in taking full advantage of agile technologies and opex subscription services.

Time has come to think in terms of Business Service Management of the infrastructure.

Michele

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You can’t run a company without technology, but you can’t invest in technology without the blessings of the finance department. And thanks to the stagnant economy, the pendulum of power between Finance and IT is swinging decidedly toward the chief financial officer’s door these days.  (Read Full Article…)

The Hub Commentary_

Computer Technology Industry Association just released results from their latest survey indicating that:

• Global IT spending up 4% in 2011
• 45% of US IT firms are increasing spending on new products and business for the next six months
• 43% plan technology related investments

All great news!  IT time to line yourself up as a service provider and compete for your data center business.  IT can do it cheaper than the service provider who has to build in margin, however the question remains, can IT do it faster and better than the service providers?

Is your data center competing with the Service Providers effectively?

Michele

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IDG News Service — Members of the U.S. IT sector are more confident now in their business prospects than they have been in the last year and a half, according to a new survey released by the Computing Technology Industry Association.  (Read Full Article…)

Earlier this year I suggested a prediction regarding the waning discussion of ITIL and this week I expanded upon that prediction in a post, “ITIL will be the end of ITIL”. The same day I posted my discussion, I received my brochure for the HDI Conference where Malcolm Fry is set to speak on “What’s up with ITIL?”.  The description starts with questions regarding the dying of ITIL, what’s going on, etc.  Defense – first indication that a wave is starting to swell in the market.

I received many great questions and discussion, which still says ITIL is alive and well in the ranks of IT organizations, trainers, consultants, certifying organizations, etc.  I do want to mention again, I do not see the practices and advice dying, going away or becoming replaced, just that the outward facing conversations will and need to stop being about ITIL and need to start being about the business service, value and performance.  ITIL is merely advice on how to manage your internal operations efficiently.

The catalyst in the market is the cloud and the explosive growth of service providers.  They need to have good operational processes in place or they are one outage away from being out of business.  However, the difference is they are not talking about ITIL, they are talking about the benefits to the business and the simplicity of running and subscribing to services in The Cloud.

The business leader has an internal organization  talking about justifying a CMDB project and a cloud provider talking about monthly subscriptions to online purchasing systems at a monthly or usage fee and here is a rate card, use it like a credit card.  Did I just see that leader walk away from the project justification discussion table and walk off into the sunset all googly eyed with the cloud service provider?

Last night I pulled another article from CIO regarding the innovation expectations the business has for its IT organization.  Embrace the development of innovating services and automate the commodity, routine, mundane that merely powers the lights – free yourself to drive growth.

I had a discussion with a very large and mature cloud service provider organization this morning on just the topic of providing the value add transparency on top of their services – the dashboard view that will communicate service performance to their customers.  The providers know that the business wants transparency and the providers want to insure that there isn’t a perception challenge regarding service delivery and the ones that will be most successful are baking it into there infrastructure and services from the beginning.  IT, are you or are you still talking about ITIL?

I’ve digressed, but the example is clear.  Those that sell technology services for a living know how to speak to your business leaders and how to bake proper service monitoring, management, measuring and communication into their services.  Steal a play from their playbook – implement and deliver the communication of service performance and service value into your services and sell your services, not the process of building services.

Are you communicating Service Value by selling the car or are you still selling the parts and directions as to how to build the car?

Michele

he Hub Commentary_

Ok, I know you are asking, Michele what does this have to do with BSM?  It’s one of those fun articles I just couldn’t pass on as an old COBOL programmer.  The previous news has been about driving innovation into the data center and focus on company growth, even COBOL is going to the Cloud!  I love it!

COBOL – To The Cloud!  A new marketing slogan born!

Michele

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IDG News Service — Micro Focus has updated its developer platform for the Cobol programming language, adding the ability to run Cobol applications on Microsoft’s Azure cloud service.  (Read Full Article…)

The Hub Commentary_

The theme of driving growth, innovation and value based upon the customer experience continues.  2011 will be a year of innovation and next year’s Fortune 500 list will see organizations swap places for the lead of their industry.  Very refreshing to see focus on technology again for innovation over back office automation.

My post of yesterday regarding ITIL generated many questions both in the Twitter and on The Hub regarding what replaces it and why did I post such blasphemy.  This article again solidifies the opinion.  The focus is the customer you sell goods and services to, not the end user in your company, technology for growth and innovation will be king in 2011.  Those focused on justifying ITIL projects will be left behind.

Again, I’m not against process for efficiency and there is a balancing act as this author states at the end of the article.  For far too long IT has been inwardly focused and thus turning up the heat of frustration by the business to drive to focus on services that your business offers to the market and driving growth.

I find this curious as technologist or maybe I’ve been on the software development side for far too long.  I thought most of us liked to work on new, cool, gee whiz things rather than just keeping the lights on.

Are you just keeping the lights on or driving innovation?

Michele

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Most of the CIOs I speak with are looking at the year ahead as an opportunity to drive innovation within their organizations, usually by automating back office activities. That’s a good place to start.  (Read Full Article…)

Service Value is the Next Generation!

Time for ITIL.  Year-end is always a good time to watch the predictions fly and I too had to add 4 to my friend Richard Whitehead’s post with his top 10.  In my post I made a prediction that this would be the year that ITIL begins to wane as a topic of conversation for a couple of reasons.  Last week reinforced one of those beliefs with a CIO article I commented on, “ITIL versus the Cloud:  Pick One”.  Even this week, I still cannot wrap my head around this article and this is where my reasons for ITIL waning is deeply rooted.

First, I will mention I have been ITIL Foundation certified 2 times (version 2 and version 3) and was around in the service desk world during the days of all the little books for version 1.  Yes, I started working when I was 12.  Seriously, ITIL is prescriptive, not a remedy.  It is guidance about processes, not a mandated set of principles by which to govern an IT organization to the point of suffocation.  I have done my fair share of consulting and once folks get past the hurdle that it is merely advice, adapt it to what makes sense in their environment without suffocating, then the sessions are more successful.  However, I find that ITIL is one of those topics I would rather not discuss in mixed company, much like politics or religion, as it brings out very passionate debates and you need to know the party lines to consult.

Why do I believe it is really waning, it’s an inward facing operational process that is expected, it is a consulting and training industry.  Business doesn’t want to hear about how you do your job, just that you do it, do it well and do it efficiently.  It’s like this, as consumers we take our cars to the shop for routine maintenance and fixes when things break and what we are most interested in is how much will it cost and when will it be done.  We don’t really care what processes and procedures the mechanic follows or how many certifications he/she has to perform the job, we just care he/she can do the job, do it well and cost efficiently.  So why is it as IT professionals we go to work everyday and speak jibberish to our business colleagues?

I would find it a safe bet that your business would love to hear you come in and tell them exactly how implementing an updated service, a new technology, or automating a process will reduce XYZ cost, will drive XYZ additional revenue and this is how we will monitor Service Performance mitigating risk of service impacting events.  Just as this article implies, ITIL is very silo focused still.  Sure version 3 speaks of a service lifecycle, lifecycle not so much on the service performance and value to the business.

Here is a picture to help explain, click on it to enlarge it.  ITIL is going through a process maturity as well.  Here are the stages:

• version 1 – Processes Identified as individual processes
• version 2 – Processes Integrated
• version 3 – Process Lifecycle
• version 4 – still to come and already too late

I’ll end with this, I’m not against ITIL if it is taken as a prescription, training, examples.  However, when it becomes the way we speak to our business and customers and our sole focus, I find it like new technology for the sake of technology.  When I read articles about How to Justify an ITIL Project to the Business, I know the service providers are knocking on your door to take over your data center because they speak in terms of creating efficiencies, saving money and driving revenue.

We have lost all focus when we start speaking in terms of a new technology not fitting ITIL and choose one.  In that situation, I’d leverage new technology and work to service enable it to manage it, control it and communicate the value it is delivering to the organization over ITIL as it is, again, merely training, prescription and examples

The only thing I can guarantee is change and technology evolution are sure things.  As technology professionals, we must be seeking automation, technology and methods by which we can start communicating to our business in their terms.  Communicating Service Performance, Growth and driving Value into our businesses is the focus of those that lead their industries with technology.

I believe the explosion of cloud computing and the service provider market will be the catalyst described by Nicholas Carr’s article, “IT Doesn’t Matter”.

I know this controversial, give me your thoughts!

Michele

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…)