Business Service Management Hub

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 . . . 

IT Transformation is and has been a hot topic for >20 years. Wow!  I was speaking to one of my analyst friends at Forrester not too long ago and we were chatting about how much waste exists in annual IT spend just “Keeping the Lights On” and how these metrics haven’t changed in >20 years. The answer has been simple, no competition, no catalyst for change.

This week I was reading an article from the NY Times Technology section, “Information Technology Spending to Hit $3.6 Trillion in 2012”, supported by information from Gartner and it pointed to this pent up demand for transformation within IT organizations. Much of the increase in spending is going to Cloud Service Providers and Consultancies even with economic challenges in Europe and China. There is an increase in Public Cloud spending by 20% representing considerable computing power and more efficient IT Systems due to complex systems, cloud computing and analytics. My reaction as I read the article was Wow again. Ironically, this comes on the heals of articles from the previous 2 weeks regarding the outage of the cloud and Amazon’s Ashburn, VA data center.

My first comment is no one outsources services because it is cheaper. Services are outsourced to create change that cannot be achieved from within. So let’s break this down into the great change that is underfoot and IT Transformation based upon cost, value and innovation.

Read full story 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 . . . 

I live in the Washington, DC metro area, specifically the 51st state – Northern VA or better known as NoVA.  Fortunately, I was not affected by the storms and power outages of a couple weeks ago.  However, Amazon and their Ashburn data center once again.  Once again, many of us social media users found the pain of the outage.

How many outages do we have to endure before these folks put together better monitoring and DR plans?  The outage begs the question of how important are these sites in the grand scheme of things as it relates to human life, power outages, tainted water and housing destruction during a storm.  My response is all in how you look at the situation.  One way to look at it is this is their business and livelihood, so DR should be relevant.  Another is that many of us use these sites during times of destruction to communicate with the rest of the world, not just for fun or business.

As a marketer and business persoin, I find it interesting none of them have found it a competitive advantage to have the best plan and be alive when their competition is down as Okta exclaimed over this last outage, but security is their business and they must be alive at all times to retain customers.

I’m excited about all of the change with technology underfoot, but control and flexibility must be weighed.

How are you preparing to manage your mixed environment?

Michele

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Travis just posted, “Unlike the Weather, You Can Choose Your Cloud”, discussing the recent power outages we experienced here in the Northern VA area last week. As a native of this area, thunder storms and hurricanes do pass our way and affect us during this time of year. Late May of 2008, we had a storm very similar to this one and this isn’t the first Amazon outage, “Amazon EC2 Outage Downs Reddit, Quora“ April 2011, nor will it be their last. Intuit’s SaaS QuickBooks was down 36 hours in June 2010, “Update:  Intuit Sites Outage Strands Thousands of SMBs“. Or just this past Tuesday Salesforce.com was down, triggered by a power outage at an Equinix data center in Silicon Valley. Each time one of these outages occurs, it gains big headlines that the cloud has failed.  (Read more here …..)

I have posted a couple of new posts on NetIQ’s Qmunity and wanted to share here as well.  IT is under great Transformation to get to Service Brokers who can manage Service Governance.  This is the convergences of Development, Operations and Security functions within IT.  In the first post I discuss the convergence and the second post is on the topic of Service Governance and new research from Forrester.

Enjoy!

Overhauling Service Management – Developing, Operating and Securing

Previously I posted, “Why Service Management” discussing the melding of IT and the business for common objectives in managing, measuring and communicating service performance.  The recent Gartner Infrastructure and Operations Management Summit (IOM) also provoked the status quo of IT Operations andCameron Haight began to challenge and discuss a new term, DevOps, where development and operations are more closely aligned.  The post event Trip Report provides a glimpse into the many thought provoking challenges and discussions of the week.  continue reading…

 Communicating Service Performance – Beware of the Competition

We’ve discussed service management and the transformation that IT is undergoing with the catalysts being the cloud, service providers, SaaS, social media, collaboration, mobility, BYOD, etc.  The root catalyst is choice and options in the market and the competition speaks in terms of service value and service performance. I posted a question in LinkedIn regarding how much of your services are in the cloud today and expected to be next year?  Join the discussion.  The first answer was as I expected, a law firm that isn’t in the cloud and isn’t going there because of security concerns.  I responded as I bet they use services that are internet based, research likely, and thus they are in the cloud.  Just like a recent customer discussed having hundreds of apps in the cloud that now need to be reconciled, rationalized and managed for cost.  How did they get this point?  Easy, credit card subscriptions – cheap and easy to do business with.  continue reading….

The Hub Commentary_

I’ll start with, those that lead their markets, lead by a lot.  It is no surprise the leader of the Top 25 Social CIO’s is SAP.  Oliver Bussmann not only leads by >20% over the nearest follower, but by >80% over the #3 competitor.  Just as I mentioned in my previous post this morning, the next generation will be our future leaders, workers, buyers and customers.

I love when I can manage to triangulate and hit the trifecta of 3 blog posts in one day (Metrics, Top 25 Social CIOs and this article).  This is an IT department that doesn’t measure number of tickets closed or server uptime, but product innovation, interactions with customers, etc.  This is the difference in a CIO that “keeps the lights on” spending 1-2% of revenue annually just operating, from one that counts the financial aspects of business transformation and the one that leads strategic innovation and growth of the company.

I think back to 2007 and my entre into social media marketing.  I had a forward thinking marketing co-worker, Frank Strong, who was always on me to post a blog driving our companies presence in the market.  I must say, I would avoid him in the hall.  Then I didn’t have a Tweet account, much less Facebook, etc.  Then I needed to figure out how to build awareness for a product in a family of dozens of products and how would I make this small fish standout in the market – Social Media.  That was late 2010 / early 2011 ….. The BSM Hub had a Facebook page long before I had one personally.

Today, I communicate with my network via LinkedIN, Twitter, Facebook, etc. from my TweetDeck console over coffee and lunch each day.  I have had customers reach in and I have had a few prospects do a bit of research via the Twitter that I’ve attended to personally, long before a sales executive is involved.  Oliver is correct, putting a face to the product and company, making it personable is much more the norm than a customer working directly with a sales executive these days.  I know I would never hear from my baby nephew if I didn’t learn to text, Tweet and Facebook!

This is how the next generation works and buys, are you social and personally available to your customers, workers, prospects and the market?

Michele

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Picture yourself as an Executive in 2017, struggling to make sense of how many of your peers failed to become social. Many of them pushed aside by their more savvy underlings who built up both internal and external social networks.  Their large networks wield tremendous power, collective intelligence and the ability to influence both employees and customers. Many of the executives that didn’t adapt were caught in a type of ‘vocational innovator’s dilemma’; where they stubbornly refused to change despite the warning signs.  (Read Full Article…)

The Hub Commentary_

I couldn’t pass on this post this week.  What is interesting is the amount of commentary and the chord the author struck.  What I would find interesting is juxtaposing this list of CIO’s against their competition in the Fortune 500 list for 2012.  Do they lead their industry?  Are they on the move?  I suspect they are.

For those naysayers about the Social CIO’s, I have to mention that how the leadership acts, tells you a lot about the organization.  How personable is the organization regardless of size? Are they Tweeting for sake of Tweeting or is there content linked to the Tweet that is insightful?  There is method to the madness of jumping into the social media marketplace to advance your organization.

This is a whole new generation, they expect to surf the web/Tweets, quickly access data and make a decision about where they buy and why.  These are the future buyers, workers and leaders in the business world.  It’s time us old timers understand. learn and use these tools in a very competitive world.

How is your organization entering the Social World?

Michele

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The transformation from traditional business to social business is incredibly difficult. As is the case in any organizational metamorphosis, making technology decisions must take worker behavior and corporate culture into account, since people and culture are by far the biggest obstacles to change (Read Full Article…)

I’m back from a couple of weeks of travel and most notably, the annual  Gartner Infrastructure and Operations Management Summit (IOM) the first week of June.  There were more than just a handful of aha moments, much churn in what has been a mature market and many great conversations on the solution showcase floor and hallways.  Let’s start with the opening keynotes on the first day:

10 Emerging Trends that will Impact Infrastructure and Operations – David Cappuccio

The trends are in last week’s InfoWorld article, “10 for 2012: Gartner’s Top Emerging Infrastructure Trends” and are as follow:

• Consumerization of the Tablet
• The Infinite Data Center
• Resource Management
• Mobility
• Hybrid Clouds
• Fabric Data Centers
• IT Complexity
• Big Data – Big Problems
• The End of Service Desks
• Virtual and Software-Defined Networks

David opens with the statistic of >75% of IT budgets are spent just keeping the lights on, operating, not driving the company forward.  IT didn’t see the (or didn’t want to see) the tablet coming to the workplace.  Just 5 years ago 1G of storage cost $7995, today it is 25 cents – that was yesterday! and I was 2 years away from my first cell phone, still had a pager!  We have LOTS of data to secure, not hardware or devices to manage, the focus must shift from the device to the information and data.  The Cloud will replace storage from the PC / Workstation to be accessible from any device, anywhere.

Even this old timer, slow adopter (me) is synching 3 devices via the cloud to share data across devices without the help of my company and I share that data with outside parties as appropriate due to the size limitations imposed by IT.  We all find a work-around!  At a minimum we each have 4 devices, yes, I have 2 phones, an iPad and a laptop, 5 if you count the Kindle I stopped using – have to keep Microsoft and Apple, Google and Blackberry all in check.  😉  I still live with the “Blue Screen of Death”, but have been seen checking the weight of that boat anchor of a Mac Book Pro.  🙂

The expectation is that no matter what we are using, it “just works”.  IT lost control of the environment a long time ago, now is the time to embrace the next generation and the self service culture.  Companies are now considering a stipen to aid in funding a device of the users choice lowering support and break-fix costs.  My bet is it happens within the year.

Another interesting statistic was for every 25% of functionality added to the current infrastructure, there is an increase of 100% in complexity.  The cloud is here, the business is subscribing with or without IT as I’ve posted previously out of frustration to deliver innovation over just operating.  We in IT are in catch up mode and need to move quickly.  With that said, we all need to be wary of the hype and focus on the value delivered and concentrate on the right delivery model for the value.

Of all the trends, the one indicating the end of service desks surprised me most from this conservative crowd and having spent the early part of my career in this market.  The more I have pondered this trend over the past week the more I agree and see it.  I have often posted and consulted that IT needs to stop turning support into a custom adventure and at 10% of an IT Operational budget, it is well suited for SaaS and/or outsourced.  Customers expect service now (no pun intended 🙂 and IT is diminishing it’s own value in the loss of productivity, especially with the next generation of workers.  IT needs to become proactive, embrace new technology and begin focusing on the right deployment options and securing the data / information, rather than device support and lock down.  This shift has occurred very quickly and the war already lost by IT.

Applications 2020:  The Impact on Infrastructure and Operations of Current and Emerging Trends in Applications – Valentin Sribar

To my surprise, an old friend presented this session, Val, and was quite an interesting topic and approach from an Operations outsider in front of 800+ Infrastructure and Operations leaders.  The first half of the session focused on the next generation worker and their expectations of technology.  I had to think about my baby nephew during this session (now 17) who grew up with a whole different view of technology and it’s capabilities.  Who, by the way, is the only person I’ll “text” with as it is his only means of communication and a communication method I dislike.  I think of one of the first applications I provided for him, a Crayola painting application.  My father and I watched a 3 year old at the time drag and drop the primary colors into his paint tray and paint a picture.  I with, my back to him, asked, “create and use purple, my favorite color”.  Sure enough he does it without question to my father’s exclaim, “how did he know he could do that?”, (dragging and dropping red on blue) I said, “because he didn’t know he couldn’t”.

This generation expects devices to just work, expects them to work together and expects to easily share data and applications across platforms and devices and communicate instantly in 140 characters or less.  My nephew doesn’t understand that if he texts me while I’m driving, what’s the delay.  Connectivity is instantaneous and global.  I travel globally, my nephew hears the action of a car race on the phone, turns on the tv to see it live, we text and IM across the globe as if I’m in his house daily and part of his daily life.  When he was born and I lived 10 hours away, I wanted to be sure we had a tight relationship.  Little did I know that in 6 short years the world would change and in a couple more years, distance would no longer be a challenge.  This is the next generation worker, not hindered by device, time or distance.

Development for the mobile world should be the default and workstation minority as an afterthought.  The user experience from these devices will be like jewelry, a microphone, speakers, cameras, gamification of applications, scoring and choice of applications, etc. etc. etc.  These workers expect an AppStore, not IT, to choose, download and just use in an instant – it just needs to work.  Apps and options are not one size fits all.

STOP what you are doing today and turn it upside down.  Reduce costs at the bottom to add value at the top and get away from one size fits all and join the value add discussion.  This is where Val provided several insightful slides and a paper (G00147079 – Application Leaders:  Stop Eating Profits and Capital with the Unnecessary Operational Expenses).

Both of these sessions set the tone for the remainder of the sessions and 3 days of the Summit that I’ll save for additional posts.  What this all points to is Change is inevitable, with Change comes Complexity and with Complexity and the need for speed comes Risk.  We all need to embrace the Change, learn to manage Complexity and mitigate/control Risk to take advantage of new technology and deploy innovation into our organizations.  As someone in the Service Management or Business Service Management market for quite some time, this was music to my ears.  The Cloud is the disruption creating the urgency for change, as well as the next generation.  Ignore the hype, focus on the value and choose the right deployment and technology options that will drive your business into the future.

The one thing that did strike me odd in most of the sessions was the use of the term “User”.  The reason this struck me odd was that the focus should be on the customer, less on the internal users, and driving the business.  Working to drive the business is about the organization in support of the customer.

As I entered the workforce, a southerner was transplanted in Boston and a year and a half later relocated to Texas with a New York co-worker and friend .  At that time our confusion was a result of different words and concepts like Round-abouts, The Green Monster, The Garden and BBQ of which I had no idea what the first 2 were, the third I thought was a botanical garden and the fourth was of course stringy pork with a vinegar based sauce and coleslaw sandwich versus steak on a bun.  We had dumb terminals and PC’s were off in the distance.  Change has come lightening fast.

I walked away from the Summit knowing it is about the service, driving revenue, embracing technology, ignore the hype and concentrate on the value, securing an unknown perimeter and creating freedom of the imagination.  Technology with Imagination – Endless Possibilities.

Thoughts?  Were you at the Summit?  What struck you the most?

Michele

I traveled the globe from October to February meeting with customers and our sales teams discussing NetIQ’s IT Operations Management (ITOM) value and solutions, then I traded in wings for a bit.  Now it’s time for one of my favorite battery re-charging conferences of the year, the Gartner Infrastructure and Operations Management Summit (IOM).  I enjoy the Summit to see old friends in the vendor community as well as many old analyst friends, but this year there is a lot of buzz around the Summit and ITOM has become the talk of the town again.  Here are few quotes and phrases from the opening pages of the Summit Agenda:

• “Delivering Accelerated Business Value:  Cloud, Mobility and More”
• Hot Topics:
  • Enterprise mobility
  • Private/Public cloud computing
  • Moving beyond server virtualization
  • Cost optimzation
  • Data center space, power and cooling
  • ITIL and process improvement
  • Improving IT service quality
  • Business value
• “The reign of the PC is over.  A new era is emerging, one that will require enterprises to fundamentally rethink how they deliver services to users.”

There are many sessions on the power of these emerging technologies, how we will manage them, how we will deliver value to the business and how technology is no longer just operating the business – technology is powering the business.  At least that’s what our businesses are expecting in the coming couple of years and how the competition with the service providers is stacking up and pushing the IT Wake Up call.

I’m jazzed to start my day tomorrow with 3 back to back keynotes with a couple of old friends:

• 10 Emerging Trends that will Impact Infrastructure and Operations – David Cappuccio
• Applications 2020:  The Impact on Infrastructure and Operations of Current and Emerging Trends in Applications – Valentin Sribar
• The IT Operations Scenario – Ronni Colville & Deb Curtis

Then we move into lunch, come see us at the NetIQ solution showcase to chat about the sessions with my old friends and how we see their insights coming to life in our every day worlds.  I’ve been posting on the need for IT to better align in how it speaks of technology in the business as services and driving top line revenue rather than just bottom line with cost savings for a while now.  In the last bullet above from the opening pages of the agenda, the one thing that did strike me odd is “deliver services to users”.  I would restate that as it is how we will “deliver services to our customers”  to drive revenue.  Yes, driving efficiency into the organization is part of the IT balancing act, but the first focus has shifted to the customer and value.

Then I’ll finish the afternoon with:

• Top 10 Strategic Technologies for 2012:  Will You Be Able to Manage Them? (Before They Manage You?) – Cameron Haight
• Compuware, VMware and Dell will provide simultaneous session with a App Performance, Cloud Mgmt and a CIO Panel, repsectively – How will I choose?
• 2 More Choices to Make:
  • VDI and other Virtualization Strategies to Securely Support and Manage a Dynamic Workforce – Neil MacDonald & Philip Redman
  • Leveraging Mobility, Content and Communication in you Business Processes – Bern Elliot
• 2 More Final Choices to Make:
  • Lessons Learned from Early Adopters of Social IT Management – Jeffrey M. Brooks & George Spafford
  • Networking and Mobility Trends for the Next Decade – Tim Zimmerman

Then we are back to wrap up at the NetIQ solution showcase with a head spinning with many new viewpoints and ideas.  I look forward to speaking with many of the attendees to gain their insights into the sessions, stop on by and join the conversation, follow us in real-time on Twitter and send your comments to these posts.

As you can see from my agenda for just the first day, many new trends to wrap our management arms around to provide flexibility with balance of controls.  Change is coming fast and furious and managing it with controlled risk will be the key to the successful in the coming year.   I have some choices to make tomorrow regarding the sessions I can attend, but look forward to hearing about the risks and value of new technologies applied to our business challenges.  You even see a little Social Media has creeped into IT Management.  Wonder what that’s all about?  🙂

I’ll send a few early comments on Twitter tomorrow during my adventures.  Follow:  @BSMHub this week and catch the real-time insights, at least my perspective, of the conference.  I’ll post my take aways each evening.  Drop me your comments, I’d love to hear what’s happening out there in the real-world.

Michele

In my last post, Eat or be Eaten – IT Transformation Underway, I discussed the transformation IT as we know it is undergoing. Last week I had the opportunity to listen to my good friend Eveline Oehrlich of Forresterpresent Reboot Service Management as hosted by ITSM Academy, confirming many of the discussion points from my previous post and had me thinking about my next series of posts.

The IT is being dropped by more and more folks in the industry and ITIL is being discussed less and less due to negative feelings surrounding it.  Business has reached the point of frustration hearing too much about IT, technology silos and processes at the same time the market has opened up with new buying options removing the perceived lack of competion IT has enjoyed for so long.

I initially was going to start this series with Why Business Service Management, however, after last week’s discussion led by Eveline, I also agree, to shed the IT and business delineations of the past. Now I ask myself what is it we need to focus on? Why is this transformation underway? The answer had hit me quite easily earlier this year, it’s simple. At the end of the day we need to answer a couple of simple questions:

• Are we open for business?
• How are we performing?
• What is our current level of risk?
• Are we operating efficiently?

These are the questions at the crux of this transformation into a center of innovation driving the business and a small operation managing the commodity as efficiently as possible. In slide 7 of Eveline’s deck, she discussed how technology demand is up even with declining revenues because organizations see the power that technology can bring their organization. There are 3 facets to this: Demand for technology, Growth of revenue and Decline of costs. The next few slides and discussion supported a complex environment, self service and support of technology and technology savvy workforce. The technology is moving to the business with the business buying their way into a center of innovation, leaving old IT to commoditize and operate the legacy. The credibility gap between the technology savvy business and the current IT organization is growing and thus the shift empowered by new, easy buying options.

Very few organizations perceive their current IT organizations will drive growth for their organization because most feel their IT organization does not understand the business. Businesses are seeking growth and customer loyalty far above just driving out costs in the current environment. The businesses are seeking guidance in applying technology to drive growth and are spending to see that happen. These will be the leaders of their industry in the coming year.

The most interesting chart in the conversation last week was slide 22 and where IT is placing their priorities. IT prioritizes efficiency and cost where they have a great opportunity to drive revenue, customer loyalty and competitiveness for the business in the market. I assume the folks attacking driving growth are in the minority as it is the greatest change for the current IT organization. The level of complexity to manage technology increases the more the business subscribes to their own disparate services across business units. As this gap grows, this is the point of inflection where I believe the new center of innovation will evolve from to centralize management again, but in a business fashion versus an operation fashion as we have today.

As the discussion began to come to a close, we look at slide 59 and 60 and see that 45% of organizations will have SaaS services by the end of 2012 and 60% by 2013 with businesses shifting from managing cost and focusing on business agility. This is why I found slide 22 interesting as most IT organizations are still focusing on cost. This is where I believe the center of innovation and operations for the new IT will evolve from because the current IT cannot answer the questions above and have no idea how technology impacts business. Most IT organizations manage all technology the same, box on / box off is equal to severity 1, when they should have visibility to business impact setting priority and how management focus of resources are applied.

So Why Service Management? To know if you are open, performing well, managing risk and operating efficiently. It’s about the service of your business, not the technology and the business is seeking roles, employees and service providers that drive growth, customer loyalty and market competitiveness. The question is will they hire the talent from the outside or will the inside evolve to transform the organization and become strategic to apply technology rather than just operate the technology.

It’s not just about contracting cloud services for the sake of it, but a strategy of applying the right technology, deployment option and manage it and bake that management into the service to manage and grow the business.  In the next posts I’ll discuss each question in further detail focusing on:

• Are we open for business?  Availability and service views and management
• How are we performing?  Performance of the service both from the technology & business perspective
• What is our current level of risk?  Risk both operationally and from a security perspective
• Are we operating efficiently?  Leveraging automation and standards

I believe technology will fragment and decentralize before coming back together with centralized management, but it will be management of services and the application of technology to drive growth, thus the center of innovation. The business is already creating this capability, it’s just a question whether the inside folks are part of the strategic movement or left with the operational management.

How is your IT organization evolving?

Michele

The Hub Commentary_

Great analogy, The Silent Killer.  Even the name IT (Information Technology) is dated.  IT as we know will go through significant transformation, if it stays in-house, in the coming years.  Often IT is outsourced to create change and thus the race to the cloud.  Today’s IT needs to die to come back to life as the center of innovation that drives business growth, customer loyalty and competitiveness in the future.

IT folks tend to avoid change, but I do not understand why this change is not being.  The roles are changing and changing to remove the commodity functions and boost the opportunities of those who remain with more strategic roles, but it does begin with the leadership of the organization.

The article ends with a prediction that 50% of initiatives will drive revenue by 2016.  As these barriers are crumbling and evolving into centers of innovation,  will history continue to repeat itself and leave the management as the after thought? Those who are successful with quality of service, innovation and growth will instrument and bake the management into these services, investments and strategies.  There will no longer be silos of technologies, but rather service performance.

How are you combating the Silent Killer?

Michele

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Priorities of CIOs and CEOs are often so far apart that it can impact business growth, said Gartner analyst Ken McGee. But the analyst said CIOs can help reverse this course by working on projects that will generate financial benefits to their organizations.

(Read Full Article…)

The Hub Commentary_

Nice article last week walking through many of the security and management considerations when evaluating services appropriate for public cloud.  Security and Operations are coming closer together as architecture for services are considered for organizations.  This discussion illustrates the transformation that is occurring within organizations – the movement from operations to innovation.

The decision to move services to the cloud considers business impact and value in architecting and deploying services as well as security and management.  The service provider is providing the infrastructure, but the service is still owned by the contracting business and must be instrumented for management.

Likely not a thought of the author, but management of systems and services has always been a follow-on to new technology deployment and use.  I found the irony in the article that security was first and the management discussion followed.  The race to the cloud is fueled by the notion it is cheaper, but when the fall back is we can do it manually, write a few scripts, manually keep track of configurations and compliance, etc. I have to ask, how much cheaper can it be if automation and management are manual.

Management tools available today were built with different technologies and uses in mind.  The right management tool for the right technology should still be used, but what is surfacing is the requirement to stitch the fabric of the service, how it is deployed and managed together to gain a holistic view of the service.  The days of an atomic service on a single platform are long gone and waiting on management to catch up to manage all combinations of solutions and platforms will be an endless wait.  The best approach will weave together the fabric of service components with the proper management tools.

How are you stitching together your cloud strategy and is management an afterthought?

Michele

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CSO — Many enterprises are reluctant to move critical cloud applications out of their own data centers and into the public cloud due to security concerns. Yet the same automated, consistent provisioning that is essential to managing either public or private clouds (as well as to the process of thinking through a cloud deployment) can also offer the fringe benefit of improving security.  (Read Full Article…)

The Hub Commentary_

I find this piece interesting for a couple of reasons.  The first being the application of technology to drive business and change the business, the second for the use of technology internally for productivity and the final interesting component are the comments that follow the article.

Most of the comments were not very positive, but they illustrated their point and opinion and created a conversation in a social media channel with the comment.  How we interact inside and outside our organizations is changing and will continue to change as new technologies arrive and they are applied in new and different ways.

I’ve noticed a change in many businesses I interact with in my personal life.  Many are becoming reachable, personable and are fostering the customer relationship more than ever before.  Some better than others and represent both small and very large organizations.    I’ve been surprised by those that are in touch with their customers and those that are not so in touch.

We all use the internet to read reviews, find product comparisons, provide feedback, ask questions, etc.  Why wouldn’t we expect the growth of social media channels and tools to grow exponentially in the coming years?  The companies that embrace, manage and exploit it will be the ones with the most loyal customers.

So what does this have to do with IT and BSM?  Our technology organizations must be leading the charge in applying new technology in our organizations both for productivity, but most importantly to drive competitive advantage and growth  Technology organizations as we know them today are transforming as business takes on the function of applying technology and driving innovation.  I suspect in the not so distant future we will have centers of innovation rather than IT organizations.

How are you applying social media channels and tools to drive your business?

Michele

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When Red Robin Gourmet Burgers introduced its new Tavern Double burger line last month, the company had to get everything right. So it turned to social media.  The 460-restaurant chain used an internal social network that resembles Facebook to teach its managers everything from the recipes to the best, fastest way to make them. Instead of mailing out spiral-bound books, getting feedback during executives’ sporadic store visits and taking six months to act on advice from the trenches, the network’s freewheeling discussion and video produced results in days.  (Read Full Article…)

The Hub Commentary_

I cannot pass on this article today.  Last Friday I closed the week with a bit of humor on Qmunity entitled, “Eat or be Eaten – IT Transformation Underway”.  As a long time application developer and once with EDS and IBM have often known the revenue is driven by the services and software side versus the hardware.  In fact, I once had the opportunity to work for an insurance company who received their first life insurance programs (ALIS – Advanced Life Insurance System) which was free when this company purchased it’s first mainframe hardware.  

As is called out in the article, the world is upside down these days and the device, HW just facilitates the real value add of the service.  As soon as the Kindle came out, I suspected the price would drop as it is more about the subscription than the device.  Much like Cloud services, provide an easy mechanism to purchase and hope no one monitors the consumption.  High transaction volume, low price point model.

Michele

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Lately I’ve been seeing a quote by Marc Andreessen everywhere. It states that “Software is eating the world” which he declared in an article for The Wall Street Journal last summer. His argument was that “more and more major businesses and industries are being run on software and delivered as online services.” Which I completely agree with. At the time he pointed to Hewlett-Packard as an example: It had announcemed that it was exploring jettisoning its struggling PC business in favor of investing more heavily in software, where it sees better potential for growth as a prime example of this trend.  (Read Full Article…)

The Hub Commentary_

Outsourcing has never been for a cost saving measure.  You must manage the vendor and once in a service agreement, anything requested beyond the originally contracted service comes with a fee.  Let’s face it, additional services and service requirements begin to change as soon as the ink is dry and where the providers starts making their profit.

Cloud computing provides platforms, infrastructure and commons services, but affords flexibility to they buyer in the management of the services without owning the infrastructure or technology in place with the cloud provider.  This does put the ownership of service management on the contracting organization.

Cloud computing is disrupting the traditional outsourcing model as well as in-house IT organizations which drives innovation into organizations.  When properly instrumented and managed, organizations have much to gain in re-thinking their sourcing and IT infrastructure strategies.

Where are you with your sourcing and infrastructure strategy?

Michele

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For CIOs, the halcyon days of IT systems and architecture that were built and managed entirely in-house, or partly outsourced to a few mammoth vendors, are gone. In its place a hybrid model rises — one that maintains elements of the traditional IT foundation, but also takes advantage of new technology and platforms as they emerge.  (Read Full Article…)

The Hub Commentary_

As I began reading this article I thought there is a CIO in tune with her business.  R&D is the heart and soul of pharmaceutical companies and IT needs to work to drive business growth and cost saving in these days of transformation.  AstraZeneca is on the outside of the recent Fortune 500 list, but if innovation continues with this strategy in mind, I would expect to see growth out of them in the coming years.

I found the commentary interesting that follows the article.  Sales organizations have one and only one metric, are they selling and did they hit the number.  Sales professionals know this and while AZ may have lost members of the sales organization for a variety of reasons, I suspect, I applaude the Angela’s strategic thinking and confidence not to take a back seat in driving innovation into the organization with technology.

I ask, how are you driving innovation into your organization with technology?

Michele

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The strategic review undertaken each summer by pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca acquired additional significance this year in the wake of a first quarter in which sales fell by 11%, to $7.3 billion, and earnings plummeted by 44%. Resultant investor criticism cost chief executive David Brennan and chairman Louis Schweitzer their jobs in recent weeks.  (Read Full Article…)