March 2008 Archives

I recently posted an entry about Good to Great IT organizations and I had the opportunity to speak to a strategic thinker in the industry regarding innovative organizations and those that stay a step ahead of their competition. So in my travels this leads to the question of whether or not BSM is a “nice to have” or a “must have".

First, let’s take a quick look at the difference between innovative organizations and leading organizations. “Innovative organization” is a term that is used far too often and rarely true. Innovation occurs when an organization changes the way an industry transacts business (e.g. Amazon changed retail, eBay changed the yard sale, e*Trade changed financial services). In each of these examples, the company has leveraged a new technology, time to market was critical, cost was no object and quality can be so-so.

These points in time occur far and few between yet when they do occur, and become mainstream, then leading organizations emerge because they offer the services with their customers in mind managing cost, quality and features better than their competitors. There is far more opportunity to lead an industry by understanding keys to the business driven by your customers.

As I previously posted, IT organizations that are integrated and act in lock-step with their businesses understand what drives the business, how to apply technology to create value for the business and understand the impact technology has on the business are those that lead their competition in their industry. So to answer the title question we only have to look towards this week’s headlines of the Netflix outage, last year’s Turbo Tax eFiling outage on 4/15, this year’s repeated Blackberry outages, etc.

In the mainstream where leading businesses are delineated by narrow margins of competitive advantage through the way they conduct business and customer satisfaction, the answer is simple: BSM is MUST HAVE! These leaders know the impact (good and bad) that technology brings to the business, how to use it to advance the goals of the business and how to deliver customer satisfaction when customers interact with their organization.  BSM technology is key to proactively monitoring and managing “the business”, not technology in a silo.

To answer the question for your organization, it’s simple, what did the last technology impacting event cost your organization? Revenue, customer satisfaction, stock price, brand image? How many hits can your organization afford to take? Leading organization’s can not only answer these questions, but manage to intelligently build the equity of their organizations.

What do you think?

-- Michele

It is important for development organizations to stay informed on industry standards and to continually review them (new and old) for applicability to technology selection and problem resolution. Staying knowledgeable of standards is critical for selection of internal software components as well as providing outward interfaces and other benefits for both customers and engineers.

Recently I was reviewing some of the latest Java standards published over the last year to see if any standard resolutions had evolved to a development challenge on which my team was currently working. No dice. As it turns out, many other vendors had met and solved this very same challenge however no approach had been standardized. As a result, I’m now weighting the pros and cons of implementing a solution of our own that I’ve been noodling in my head.

But it got me to thinking even if a standard approach had been adopted, it does not mean that the standard solution would be the best development decision. Why? Because while standards generally do provide many benefits, they can also pose new problems which are what I classify as standards freeze.

If a standard is not open and flexible, it can stunt innovation and provide a speed-bump rather than an expressway to productivity. For example, standards freeze happens when an engineer or product manager finds he or she cannot add a new feature or function without breaking the adopted standard. It leaves the development team in the difficult position of either skipping the new feature or breaking the standard – both of which can have political consequences.

Thinking outside of the box does not always go hand in glove with standards adoption. Developing competitive differentiators many times means thinking outside of the box, and thus outside of the standards. It is crucial to take the time to research and ensure that the standards selected by a development organization or product allow for flexibility within the standards so that the product and/or organization can continue to grow without an expensive and time consuming overhaul.

The next time you feel yourself itching to download that open source project and use it because it will save you a few days, make sure you’re also thinking through the standards it was developed on and ensure that you can think outside of the box while staying within the standards.

-- Adam

Doug McClure’s at it again. The former Muse-man turned Tivoli guru has posted a thoughtful seven-step program to becoming a BSM Superhero on his blog. Doug’s blog is an excellent resource on the topic of BSM – be that ITIL, CMDB, or Discovery. Though he’s a true IBM-er, his vendor-neutral approach and efforts to stimulate public discourse is commendable.

It is in that spirit of dialogue that we offer an alterative 7 step program – the “just enough” approach - just-enough being a concept popularized by Forrester Research:

1) Identify the purpose of the project

2) Choose a one or two critical applications or services

3) Model the service or services

4) Integrate federated data from asset management, service desk and other tools

5) Define rules and analyses

6) Create analytics and reporting, and

7) Define role-based views.

When a BSM is carried out in a top-down manner with a just-enough orientation in mind, design and implementation can be easier – especially when approached with a service-oriented perspective. Need 10 Tips of a Successful CMDB? Click here.

-- Greg

The consultants have been at it again. If you haven’t met them yet, strike up a conversation about a CMDB project and you’ll quickly find one interrupts. These consultants reinforce a conventional wisdom that says that building a CMDB is a linear process – with a beginning and an end – but as the saying goes, it’s the journey that’s most important. Those who endeavor on the CMDB journey should realized that the trip actually started long ago, perhaps before they even realized it and certainly before the advent of discovery tools.

Beginning a CMDB or even a BSM project with discovery is akin to drinking water from a fire hose: the data discovered is vast, often duplicative and difficult to filter, and moreover does not really identify meaningful relationships. A CMDB project is the base for creating and storing a “DNA map” of relationships between infrastructure, application and the business. To this end, the value of duplicative data for this type of project is questionable.

If not discovery, then where should the project start? My customers tell me that upwards of 70 percent of the data needed for a CMDB already exists in their enterprise. Where? It’s stored in existing IT management tools – in Service Management solutions like incident, problem and asset management. This makes existing tools a good place to start a CMDB. What’s needed isn’t more data, but rather a way to integrate existing data and rationalize relationships.

Discovery or application mapping tools are most valuable when they are used to complete the picture – to understand what has changed in the relationship structure, the configuration of each element, or if new elements have been introduced to the DNA service map. To put it another way, find out what you know about your infrastructure first by tapping data in tools like Tivoli, OpenView and BAC…later you can add discovery to find out what you don’t know.

Having just come back from the field where I spent considerable time with our customers – both in North America and in Europe – this is perhaps the single most important lesson I have learned. The most successful CMDB projects did not in fact start with discovery – they started by tapping existing data from tools they purchased and implemented years ago. Europe has discovered this important lesson and perhaps that’s a critical reason why IT management concepts seem to lead North America from across the Atlantic.

-- Siki

The recent outage in Florida is reminiscent of the blackout that crippled the Northeast in August 2003. What’s more the effect is the same, cascading events. Ability to correlate early indicators in both cases could be considered root cause in each case in containing the events.

A NERC investigation of the 2003 blackout found that failure of the system monitoring and control functions over the electricity grid were contributing factors to the blackout. Such failures caused operators to either delay or altogether miss corrective measures for which the company managing that portion of the grid was responsible. The consequence? Events cascaded and rapidly spread across the region.

According to Reuters, reactors in Florida shut down following “an under-voltage event caused when two power lines between Miami and Daytona tripped following an equipment malfunction in a Miami substation.” In other words, as the Tampa Bay Tribune wrote “a malfunction at a single electrical substation caused a cascading blackout that shut down a nuclear plant” and “briefly cut power to about 3 million people in Florida."

Though not directly affected by the outage, one electrical provider saw the blackout in 2003 as a good reason to proactively upgrade its alarm management system. Control room operators teamed up with the IT department at Ontario’s Independent Electricity System Operator (IESO) and tapped technology vendor Managed Objects to consolidate both IT and grid management system resulting with a flexible and integrated central alarm system correlating information and pointing operators to corrective procedures. The IESO’s project is profiled in the March/April 2008 issue of Electric Energy T&D magazine – it both makes a good business case for BSM and makes for an interesting use-case Intelligent Energy System.

- Michele

Oh, what doom and gloom. The forecasts for IT spending seems destine for more cuts. The Incredible Shrinking Tech-Spending Forecasts laments the headline from The Wall Street Journal. While the Journal is technically correct, several IT research firms have indeed lowered their IT budget forecasts, it overshadows some important details.

As our CTO pointed out in a recent article, AMR Research reported that IT departments plan to spend 9.3% more on performance improvement than in the previous year, which contrasts with plans for an overall IT spending increase of 5%. One pundit’s well-reasoned analysis is that IT thinks it “can deliver almost twice as much bang this year for each new IT buck compared with their colleagues in the wider business.”

This jives with other analyst forecasts including Enterprise Management Associates. EMA has a soon-to-be released report indicating that spending on Business Service Management (BSM) is “poised to surpass” is more mature precursor of Service Level Management (SLM).

All this goes to show that IT simply spending its pennies more wisely in an effort to meet its two lasting, if not dichotomous, priorities to improve service quality and maintain or lower costs.

- Randy Jones

In a recent article in CIO Magazine, “IT departments do not deliver ‘great’ IT, say CIOs”, a survey of CIOs and IT Directors revealed that almost half do not deliver “great” IT. “Great” IT is defined by 3/4ths as being able to to add real value to the organizations strategy and bottom line.

I am always amazed when I speak to leaders of IT organizations for enterprise organizations that may know what sector of the market their organization falls into, but cannot describe to me what the business units do day-to-day and how they determine success for the business unit. I find often times I may know more by reading annual reports and surfing the company websites prior to a meeting than the IT leaders I meet within the organization. So I ask how would an IT organization believe it should have a say in strategic decision making within the organization without basic knowledge of what drives and grows the business?

Alignment to the business has almost become a passé phrase due to the lack of meat behind the initiative and the continued siloed, technology focus of many IT organizations. True alignment will only be achieved when IT organizations immerse themselves into the business and become fully integrated. A recent Information Age article quotes: “There is no such thing as an IT project: all IT’s activity should be about business projects.” The only way an IT organization can better manage change and impact is for it to be immersed and integrated in the business. This is not to suggest that IT organizations become distributed by business units, rather there are emerging roles of service managers that work side by side with the business teams on projects leveraging technology to the success of the business.

I often work with organizations on “IT projects” and the business case for an “IT project”. These are always problematic because most are “soft” in their cases of cost management. Cost saving projects that reduce hardware and software licenses are easy cases with hard savings. It’s the CMDB, SLA, ITIL process improvement, etc. projects that are difficult and I would point the finger at the root of the problem, these are typically internally, IT focused projects without links back to the business they support. I’m often looked at like I turned green and grew horns if I ask questions like, “How does this improve performance of the business? What impact on the business will this project have?”

I find ITSM (IT Service Management) projects that have a focus on managing business impacting events and can be quantified as such for business driving applications are easy cases. BSM (Business Service Management) projects that also bring in business data providing analytics regarding the effectiveness of the business providing information during the quarter versus a financial report after the fact after the quarter also have greater success. My humble advice is to always error on the side of the business and find the high impact services and understand how the technology can be better applied or improved.

IT has a difficult job in managing two sides of a coin: efficiency internally managing costs and effectiveness externally improving the business. Often times IT organizations error on what we know best, IT, but by better understanding the impact to the business and integration to the business provides the greatest benefits all the way around the business speeding up projects and decision making of projects.

– Michele

In his eye-catching article, Hunting the Elusive CIO Dashboard, Michael Biddick rightly indicates that “ …a CIO dashboard is one of those transformative projects that comes along only rarely and can make or break an IT organization.”

And yet, as he also points out, “If there's so much pent-up demand [for CIO Dashboards], why the lag in supply? In a word, complexity… implementation and integration will be difficult, and customization is inevitable.”

Virtually all Global 2000 companies today have acquired – through either growth or acquisition – disparate multi-vendor IT management tools for network, systems and application management – and integrating these tools together into a CIO dashboard can be very difficult, if not approached correctly, with the right technology: “The technical challenge of providing hooks into several vendors' reporting tools is huge, requiring SOAP or XML bridges.”

You see, each IT management tool creates its own data silo – consisting of availability, performance, or other IT information – and the Big 4 software vendors (BMC, CA, HP, and IBM) are very protective of their silos. As a consequence, without a number of consultants integrating, normalizing and correlating data across multiple tools from the Big 4 vendors is problematic and expensive, to say the least.

But there’s an easier way – whether you’re looking to build a CIO dashboard, or implement a CMDB, or start a BSM initiative, you should place heavy emphasis on a software vendor’s capacity to integrate your existing multi-vendor data. By selecting a vendor that takes an agnostic approach to data integration – at an API level – you gain three important advantages:
-- You can leverage your existing investments in IT management tools – no need to throw away what you already have or migrate to a single IT platform.
-- You can more quickly build the CIO dashboards your executives require – garnering you big points on the ROI curve.
-- You can build CIO dashboards that can actually interact with the IT environment – not just monitor it.
 
So, to make building your CIO dashboard a reality, be sure to select a vendor that can prove its mettle by integrating all of your existing silos of IT management data – perhaps through a proof-of-concept – only that way can you be 100% sure you’re making the right investment.

–  Dustin McNabb

In 2001, when the tech bubble burst, I had just graduated with a Computer Science degree, and was looking for work. To say that things weren’t exactly peachy back then is an understatement. Luckily for me I happened on an interview with a company that was privately funded and which understood that in times of recession some excess fat needs to be trimmed – but not the muscle that drives a company. That company went on to produce very strong results less than a year later due to a superior product – a direct result of continuing to invest in hiring exceptional talent while avoiding the overindulgent tendencies of richer times.

Unfortunately in times of economic uncertainty such wisdom is uncommon. With all the recent talk about a recession being around the corner there is a lot of fear in the tech industry, especially among startups which are struggling to compete with new attractants for venture capital such as the likes of alternative energy exploration. The problem with this approach is that when the economy slows or stalls, some corporations think only of near-term. This usually leads to cost cutting across the board, but most prevalently in initiatives such as technology, software and IT staff that are not perceived as necessarily contributing directly to the bottom line.

This is a mistake for the simple reason that these cuts inevitably lead to a less motivated workforce that finds it self stretched beyond its means as a result of trying to maintain the same level of service, less budget and therefore with less tools and less people.

Technology is a key driver of business these days, so dramatically cutting IT budgets can actually cost more in the long-term than the benefit of savings achieved in the short-term. This long term loss manifests itself in many ways, but most immediately in the loss of knowledgeable IT staff and the shaky infrastructure that accompanies a departure from IT maintenance.

This takes us back to the title of this post. In times of financial uncertainty it is necessary to tighten belts and trim some fat off an organization. This can be achieved by cutting back on unnecessary items like kickoff meetings in exotic locations, business class travel when coach suffices and so on. But to trim the muscle that drives an organization by failing to maintain infrastructure and letting go qualified staff that will only need to be rehired and retrained once the economy turns around is a long term mistake.

If we have learned anything from the first tech bubble, it is that these are the times to consider projects like automation, integration and federation, as some of the highest costs of running an IT reliant company are in the high levels of obsolescence that accompany the good times. Corporations need to use a slowdown in the economy to their advantage and build a stronger, more resilient, infrastructure that will help them overtake the competition when the economy turns around.

-- Jonathan