Business Service Management Hub

I know I have been quiet for the previous month, I took a little vacation and started becoming more attune to the discussion surrounding data, analytics, security, privacy and the value of our technologically connected world. First we have to rewind to the end of August when I had my first opportunity to discuss and explore the privacy discussion surrounding the use of technology and data to enrich our lives and business on Huff Post Live, “Get off my Cloud:  Floating the Risks of Big Data Storage ” (previous Qmunity post, Cloud Discussion:  Data Privacy, Availability and Performance on Huff Post Live). All of this technology sits on vast amounts of data that awaits being cracked open whether it be healthcare, location & GPS, marketing attendance, safety, cellular, data services, etc. the list is endless.

When I responded to a request to be on a panel with Huff Post Live, my mind was in my usual place of availability and performance of technology, not data privacy.  As I stated during the discussion, I firmly believe if you use technology and electronically push information about yourself into the public, it is searchable and accessible.  The first conclusion is to jump directly to privacy and someone monitoring/watching our every move. This is also driven by the folks taking the first stab at using these vast stores of data for what I’ll call “tracking” purposes. This is usual technology behavior, let’s track things and manage our known environment better rather than coming at it from a side of value and a value-add services. Ok, let’s take a few specific examples.

Social Media:
The simplest is Facebook. I’ve had the discussion with colleagues and friends about the accessablity to this information, let’s say when you are seeking employment or acceptance into a program. If it is public,  why shouldn’t it be accessable and why wouldn’t you expect it to be searched? I do a regular search on myself to see what shows up as we have long expected background checks to be performed in the past, this is just part of a background check. If you have something questionable, why would you publish it? I was a late bloomer to the world of Facebook and social media for this reason of privacy, but it wasn’t because I didn’t understand the risk, it was because I didn’t understand how to secure and use it properly. However, I use my credentials and name as it is part of building my own brand and credibility very regularly when I publish and comment and thus how I end up on panels like Huff Post Live. I look at the value and positive side of participating in the conversation, managing and using my credentials accordingly. I do recognize it is on me to manage the data and thus how it could be subsequently used.

Healthcare:
While on vacation in the local paper, cayCompass.com, there was an article regarding a new healthcare facility and the technology going into it to provide higher levels of healthcare to the residents. One of the discussion points was doctors using data to better diagnose patients. Again, the article took the negative side first regarding the “must use” the technology for a diagnosis. I’m not sure I want to remove the human subjective element from my doctor, however, I would welcome the use of my history and an all encompassing view of my current condition, weighing that against a database of possibilities that no human could carry with them daily, to make a better diagnosis. Why not make use of being able to carry that encyclopedia of information around with you to deliver better patient care? Again, the value side of the equation versus the“monitoring” of the physicians side of the equation. Both are useful and valuable.

Earlier this week in InformationWeek, there was an article titled, “Healthcare Execs Must Prepare for Big Data“, where the same discussion continues as well as knowing the location of patients, doctors, equipment to insure a safer environment and getting people and equipment where it is most needed. I most enjoyed the Wayne Gretzky quote: “A good hockey player plays where the puck is. A great hockey player plays where the puck is going to be.”  We have embraced technological advances to assist in healing us faster, making surgery less invasive and remeding illnesses that just a decade ago were less treatable. Why is using the vast amounts of data for split second decisions any different?

GPS:
There are several technologies that fall into this category. The two that caused alarm and again I would suggest it is because it was hyped against the tracking feature as the initial focus versus the value it brings to the table. On Huff Post Live this week,  “Texas School District Reportedly Threatening Students Who Refuse Tracking ID, Can’t Vote For Homecoming“, with the crux of the discussion being the embedding of an RFID chip into school ID cards to be used for tracking attendance and insuring that funding continues to the schools. This is useful, but not the value to the public and causes debate. How many of you ever punched a time clock? I have on multiple occasions, well that was an early and crude form of attendance monitoring / tracking. Why is it now that we can use technology to more accurately track and rapidly assess to take action of value with the data different?

Flip the debate and think about some of the most tragic incidents that have occurred in our schools in the last decade and one that is close to home for me at VA Tech. When I was in school, we roamed campus freely including all of the buildings. We didn’t have cell phones, we knew our dormmates, we phoned each other on land lines, we had an idea of where those close to us were, we stuck together in groups and I knew I could phone one of the boys from the dorm to meet me and walk me back to the dorm in the dark if I got stuck somewhere alone and felt unsafe. So again, I challenge folks not to just look at it from a tracking standpoint, but from a ease of security standpoint. Who’s in the building? Where are my kids? Did they make it to the bus? The list goes on.

During my discussion on Huff Post Live it was more around the use of cellular data. I watched a television segment recently on the tracking of license plates and taking pictures of cars around a city with the purpose being repossession. Again, under ordinary situations, no one is tracking the ordinary. Under stressful situations, it can assist in regaining a safe situation and uncovering details that might not have been available previously.

We could go on for hours with this one as it generates the most debate, however, we all have location tracking in our cell phones and tablets. We like to be able to sound an alarm or find our device, pinpoint a good restaurant, provide directions in a pinch, the list is endless. There is great value in using the technology and data and we use it everyday whether consciencously or not.

Marketing:
In the Wall Street Journal earlier this week the article, “Big Brother, Now at the Mall“, discussed how a mall kiosk is using facial recognition software to estimate sex and age to present advertisements to those seeking information. This is using data to drive value to both the consumer and the retail organizations. This has been going on for a very long time. How many rewards cards do you carry and use? The ability to present items to you has been happening here for quite a while. If this use of data is troublesome, stop using the cards for the points / discounts and asking for assistance. However, the value is to both the organization and us as consumers in finding items that might interest us more than others and stocking retail organizations with items more in tune with the demographics of the location and patron buying patterns. Again, let’s seek the value in the technology and stop jumping to the Big Brother conclusion, but the answer is always simple, don’t use the technology.

Security:
I’ll end with this final article also from this week’s Wall Street Journal, “House Report On Huawei, ZTE Will Pose Security Questions For CIOs”. The article suggests that a manufacturer of a cellular device is collaborating for purposes of espionage. Whether the threat is true or not, it points out the very real requirements to take security and use of data and devices very seriously in our organizations and plan for it appropriately. This week Sally Hudson, Security Research Director, of IDC and a colleague of mine, Tom Crabb, Senior Product Marketing Manager, presented a webinar, “Security Access Governance and the New Normal”, on this topic of knowing who, where, why, etc. is accessing data you own and for what purpose as the perimeter has widened over night and is extremely fluid. They discuss the risks and how to best secure your data. Ensuring you have secured your data then enables you to leverage that data with analytics in powerful ways to drive competitive advantage into your organization.

This is only the tip of the iceberg of the possibilities that lie ahead in our digital world. As IT professionals, we must constantly think of security, build it into our services, use of data and the value we can provide to our customers everyday. Technology, including the use of big data, will drive competitive advantage and the next generation of innovation, but it must be used, managed and secured wisely.

Finally, “Technology without Imagination – Commodity — Technology with Imagination – Endless  Possibilities” is something I firmly believe and we have all benefited. I challenge this coming wave of technologists to not make the mistake of the past in first applying the use of big data technology as inward focused analytics, but seek how to create value first and secure / manage it appropriately.

I had the fantastic opportunity to participate in a live Cloud discussion: Get off my Cloud:  Floating the Risks of Big Data Storage on Huff Post Live during their inaugural week of going live with streaming news and discussions leveraging Google+ Hangouts to bring in live guests. This Cloud and technology thing might be catching on. A longstanding benefit of being a virtual worker is working in very casual wear not likely suitable for even the most casual of offices. After last week, I’m rethinking my morning routine and understanding how the home office is an extension of the overall virtual office after participating in and being live at a moments notice in a Google Hangout, or a Skype session, etc. with a webcam bringing us all together as if in the office. Oh, it’s a small world.

The host, Alyona Minkovski [ @AlyonaMink ], orchestrated a discussion with a live guest in the studio, John Villasenor, (Los Angeles, CA) [ @JohndVillasenor ] Professor of UCLA, and 2 of us via Google Hangouts, myself and John Warren (Seattle , WA). We bantered just 2 of the points to consider when seeking to leverage Cloud based services. The first was the privacy of data and who should control or define guidelines. Of course we all like to believe the service providers offer a level of security to the data that we share, but the onus of the security of your data is really on you the individual consumer or the business contracting the services. As a business, you can safe guard to some degree with contracts and defined services and service levels regarding security and penalties for breaches, however, the more risk and more scrutiny to customize the service forced upon the service provider, the higher the cost of the service. This is why I speak of categorizing your services. The commodity is the low hanging fruit to take advantage of external service providers.

Another twist to this is law enforcement and how much should they have access to via a subpeona. If your computer and records were in your home, they would subpeona access to the data to solve a crime, thus there is the ability to subpeona the service provider to hand over data – Check out the new Australian law @NetIQ tweeted on earlier this week. The twist is how much can they request and how much will the service provider hand over. Certainly the service provider isn’t going to take the time on a request that is too wide and narrow down the data before handing it over. Again, the onus resides on the individual consumer and business to understand this and make the decisions of what they choose to externalize. There are pros and cons to both sides of this debate. There is a lot of hype about law enforcement monitoring transmissions and privacy, but the flip side to that debate is someone who has been stalked and taken advantage of by a predator. We would expect that all the evidence should be examined. This is one of those topics where I tread lightly; not going too deep on, like politics and religion. So I keep advice simple, turn off your GPS, location services on your phone, your Bluetooth and stay unplugged from the internet from a data perspective if you want to insure privacy, but you’ll also lose many capabilities that have enhanced our lives.

Another piece of the conversation touched upon availability of services, especially when your business depends upon those services. Again, categorizing your services to best understand what is the most important and therefore requiring an investment in higher levels of service is your road-map to success. The challenge today is that business has hit a boiling point with their internal IT departments at a time when the competition [Cloud Providers] is exploding, providing simple buying options and the business is making the purchases and growing the New IT within the business, without the IT department. The first challenge is that they have treated all services as if they were created equal with their in-house staff, not enabling them to create standards and different levels of service. However, now the providers will impose standards and their standard terms to gain the economies of scale of shared services. This is a good thing as all things ebb and flow and just as the pendulum swings to the side of the Cloud Providers currently, it with come back to a level state when costs escalate without controls in place. The second challenge is that the business doesn’t know what they don’t know regarding best practices for Disaster Recovery, redundancy and fail over to other providers, different geographies, etc. Read more in this previous post on Cloud Availability where I discuss this topic more fully. The point is the business is making emotional choices without the expertise to deploy these flexible options with the proper controls allowing them to reap the greatest reward from the technology.

The Transformation of IT is being driven largely in part by the cloud service providers and the options that are available today that were not available just a couple of years ago and what is old is new again, management of the technology to derive the greatest benefits.

The article suggests that a manufacturer of a cellular device is collaborating for purposes of espionage.  Whether the threat is true or not, it points out the very real requirements to take security and use of data and devices very seriously in our organizations and plan for it appropriately.  The Identity and Access Management market is on the upswing with 80-85% of it being driven by the cost of security compliance and the risk of data misuse.  This topic exposes the  knowing of who, where, why, etc. is accessing data you own and for what purpose as the perimeter has widened over night and is extremely fluid.  Ensuring you have secured your data then enables you to leverage that data with analytics in powerful ways to drive competitive advantage into your organization.

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CIOs are likely to have to answer questions from their CEOs in the aftermath of comments made by the chairman of the House intelligence committee Sunday on the CBS program 60 Minutes. Congressman Mike Rogers (R., Mich) said, “If I were an American company today, and you were looking at Huawei, I would look at another vendor if you care about your intellectual property, if you care about your consumers privacy.”   Read More Here. . . 

This article discusses how a mall kiosk is using facial recognition software to estimate sex and age to present advertisements to those seeking information.  This is using data to drive value to both the consumer and the retail organizations.  This has been going on for a very long time.  How many rewards cards do you carry and use?  The ability to present items to you has been happening here for quite a while.  If this use of data is troublesome, stop using the cards for the points / discounts and asking for assistance.  However, the value is to both the organization and us as consumers in finding items that might interest us more than others and stocking retail organizations with items more in tune with the demographics of the location and patron buying patterns.  Again, let’s seek the value in the technology and stop jumping to the Big Brother conclusion, but the answer is always simple, don’t use the technology.

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Shoppers at the new International Finance Center Mall in Seoul can find their way around the four-story complex by approaching one of 26 information kiosks. When they do, they also are being watched.

While on vacation in the local paper, cayCompass.com, there was an article regarding a new healthcare facility and the technology going into it to provide higher levels of healthcare to the residents.  One of the discussion points was doctors using data to better diagnose patients.  Again, the article took the negative side first regarding the “must use” the technology for a diagnosis.  I’m not sure I want to remove the human subjective element from my doctor, however, I would welcome the use of my history and an all encompassing view of my current condition, weighing that against a database of possibilities that no human could carry with them daily, to make a better diagnosis. Why not make use of being able to carry that encyclopedia of information around with you to deliver better patient care?  Again, the value side of the equation versus the “monitoring” of the physicians side of the equation.  Both are useful and valuable.

In this article the same discussion continues as well as knowing the location of patients, doctors, equipment to insure a safer environment and getting people and equipment where it is most needed.  I most enjoyed the Wayne Gretzky quote: “A good hockey player plays where the puck is. A great hockey player plays where the puck is going to be.”  We have embraced technological advances to assist in healing us faster, making surgery less invasive and remeding illnesses that just a decade ago were less treatable.  Why is using the vast amounts of data for split second decisions any different?

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Big data, including the advent of genomic medicine, is altering how providers manage information, according to the chief executive of a major West Coast academic healthcare organization.

“Big data is going to change the rules of IT departments and beyond,” said Thomas Jackiewicz, who was named senior VP and CEO of Keck Medical Center of the University of Southern California at the beginning of 2012. “We have to become experts at managing data,” he said.  Read More Here . . . 

There are several technologies that fall into this category.  This article caught my attention as hypes the tracking feature as the initial focus of this technology versus the value it brings to the table.  The crux of the discussion is the embedding of an RFID chip into school ID cards to be used for tracking attendance and insuring that funding continues to the schools.  This is useful, but not the value to the public and causes debate.  How many of you ever punched a time clock?  I have on multiple occasions, well that was an early and crude form of attendance monitoring / tracking.  Why is it now that we can use technology to more accurately track and rapidly assess to take action of value with the data different?

Flip the debate and think about some of the most tragic incidents that have occurred in our schools in the last decade and one that is close to home for me at VA Tech.  When I was in school, we roamed campus freely including all of the buildings.  We didn’t have cell phones, we knew our dormmates, we phoned each other on land lines, we had an idea of where those close to us were, we stuck together in groups and I knew I could phone one of the boys from the dorm to meet me and walk me back to the dorm in the dark if I got stuck somewhere alone and felt unsafe.  So again, I challenge folks not to just look at it from a tracking standpoint, but from a ease of security standpoint.  Who’s in the building? Where are my kids? Did they make it to the bus? The list goes on.

This is just the tip of the Big Data, Security and Management of data and services coming in this next generation.

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Weeks after Northside Independent School District in San Antonio rolled out its new “smart” IDs that tracks students’ geographic locations, the community is still at odds with the program.

The “Student Locator Project,” which is slated to eventually reach 112 Texas schools and close to 100,000 students, is in trial stages in two Northside district schools. In an effort to reduce truancy, the district has issued new student IDs with an embedded radio-frequency identification (RFID) chip that tracks the location of a student at all times.  Read More Here . . . 

I couldn’t resist this opportunity to discuss high availability, speed to root cause, speed to restoration, security and mission critical services. We sit on the eve of the largest single sporting event that comes around only every 4 years and the recent headlines are, “Twitter Down 2012:  Service Out for Users Throughout the World”. I scratched my head wondering how this would look on the London skyline, literally as the London Eye conveys the Sentiment with Twitteras the gauge of status with color and intensity for all to see?

Read more here . . . 

The Hub Commentary_

BYOD makes the headlines, it takes just one to spoil the party.  Mobility whether internally issued or personal devices all carry management and security management concerns and challenges.

After 20+ years from the days of mainframe, to distributed networks, now to highly mobile device du jour IT organizations must break the cycle of new technology first, management later.  Headlines are always an eyeopener for a wake up call.

IT is being outsourced rapidly and must develop the discipline to manage new technology and manage it accordance to business priorities.  For instance, many engineering firms are arming their field engineers with mobile devices.  Managing that mobile infrastructure is driving the business and must be managed as such as all services are not created equal.

This is a light offense and an article worth a grin, but should be an eyeopener too.  The worst is yet to come in the headlines.

Are you managing or hoping no one spoils the technology party?

Michele

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Mimecast CEO Peter Bauer recently found himself at the intersection of consumerization and IT management, falling victim to personal data loss as the result of the internal management policy he himself helped establish.  (Read Full Article…)

The Hub Commentary_

I stumbled upon a great article written by an old friend of mine, Kevin Cunningham, from a previous software life.  Now more than ever the alignment of IT and business as I posted from an article regarding IT roles yesterday is a requirement.  The thought that IT is separate from the business is an antiquity.

I agree with Kevin, just illustrating that you can pass an audit knowing that things have changed, who changed them and were they approved is not enough.  Managing and mitigating risk while providing flexibility to apply the right technologies to drive the business forward.  New technologies and customers are driving shifts in how they expect to do business, when, where and from many devices.

As Kevin states, no one technology addresses all aspects and it will be key to bring the data together from each of the supporting technologies into a live view of the services of the business, assessing performance, availability and security.  Dynamic and mixed environments will continue to push IT organizations and will be led by the customer’s expectation of how they want to do business.  Those that embrace these technologies and put the management intelligence in place without restricting the desired flexibility will lead their markets.

How do you see the convergence and management of infrastructure and security as services to your business?

Michele

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One of the consequences of the global recession two years ago is a significant increase in IT risk facing global companies.

IT risk – the threat of negative consequences resulting from the operation of information systems – has spiraled upward for multiple reasons: large-scale mergers, acquisitions and divestitures and the resulting need to consolidate people and systems; greater use of IT hosting and outsourcing; the shift to replace full-time employees with temps and contractors; and new technologies like cloud and mobile computing. As a result, CIOs face a massive challenge: how do they balance the need for flexible and open access to their company’s IT infrastructure (so business can be conducted) with the need to mitigate IT risks associated with that access (so bad things don’t happen)?  (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…)