July 2008 Archives

Sometimes people learn to live with pain. The pain may be real, enduring and chronic but people choose to ignore the pain -- which isn't the same thing as making it go away.

I was speaking with a prospect recently about our BSM solution, and though after listening carefully to our presentation this person’s first reaction was "we just don’t have the pain" to drive this sort of initiative. However, as conversation evolved, we began to uncover that not only was this organization living with pain -- the pain was in fact excruciating and had a direct impact on the highest levels of IT leadership. They had in effect, chosen to ignore the pain. Here’s the story as conveyed:

We have a heterogeneous IT management environment. Our tools report silos of information that must be manually correlated to understand the overall health of the IT infrastructure. As such our users usually provide IT with the first indication that there is a slowdown or outage. For example, a user in California will call the helpdesk in New York to report that an application is running slow.

Upon receiving the call, IT looks at their tools, but the screens are all reflecting green: IT can’t see the problem. Frustrated their issue isn’t being resolved, the users begin to assume IT isn’t worth their salt, and consequently stop calling to report incidents or problems.

Later our CIO goes on a company-wide townhall tour, to visit users and better understand how IT can support the business. He’s taken aback when he gets blasted by users during a meeting (ambush?) at the California office because the PeopleSoft application has been running slow for weeks.

Determined to get to the bottom of this issue the CIO returns to the office with this anecdote and thoroughly questions his staff. "Why wasn’t this problem addressed?" he demands, noting how critical the application is to the business. "No one reported the incident," is the response.

This is a quintessential business case for BSM if I’ve ever heard one. By integrating those existing IT management tools, BSM can consolidate those silos of information and link the underlying infrastructure components to the service being provided (in this case a PeopleSoft application). The benefit of doing this has been proven time and time again: IT will be able to rapidly determine root cause of incidents and problems, often before their customers are even aware, and dramatically reduce the mean-time-to-repair (MTTR). This supports the overall organization’s maturity to move from a reactive to a proactive IT organization. Why not eliminate chronic pain instead of learning to live with it?

As for my prospect, well, we have a second meeting soon and the CIO will be involved.

- Randy

As the first company to embrace the term, business service management (really, do a Lexis-Nexis search), we’ve observed market entrants are repositioning themselves in the BSM space at an increasing rate. As a competitive vendor, we find this trend has both benefits and drawbacks.

For example, we find a level of satisfaction in the validation of what we have long since envisioned to be a market for BSM, but as new vendors enter the space, they also tend to creatively redefine the market to better fit their solution. While this is a fact of life in a competitive and free market, we find sometimes our customers and prospects rightfully seek clarification.

Here are a few industry leading definitions of BSM:

Gartner: BSM is a category of IT operations management software products that dynamically links the availability and performance status of underlying IT infrastructure and application components to business-oriented IT services that enable business processes.

Forrester: Software that dynamically links business-focused IT services to the underlying IT infrastructure. A business-focused IT service may be a specific IT service or part of a business process, but it must support a significant, visible business metric for a business owner.

Enterprise Management Associates: BSM is a strategy to align IT and business goals by helping business managers to understand how the performance and availability of IT resources affect and power their business processes. BSM fuses the goals of IT and business, providing real-time monitoring of business service health and status, using a set of tools designed to help organizations meet their corporate objectives and business goals.

Freeform Dynamics: Business Service Management (BSM) is a strategy and approach for linking IT components to the goals of the business. It promotes understanding and prediction of how technology impacts the business and how business impacts the IT infrastructure.

ITIL: An approach to the management of IT Services that considers the Business Processes supported and the Business value provided. This term also means the management of Business Services delivered to Business Customers. (ITIL v3, Service Operation).

CSC: BSM measures how a business’ IT services are performing and delivering business value. It is a model where IT services are fully aligned with business objectives, requirements, metrics and results.

Some of our own customers have characterized BSM as follows:

1.  Maps technology… to applications… to the business

2.  Creates a trusted source for IT and the business

3.  Turns data into powerful intelligence

4.  Makes visualization relevant to a diverse community

5.  Is a platform of information that illustrates the impact of IT with respect to the business -- it is the holy grail of IT

Several other blogs in the industry have also consolidated some meaningful definitions: For example, Adrian Bridgewater wrote on ZDNet that, "BSM translates event data - that is, data about the status of an individual component - into impact." Ryan Shop provided an excellent post summarizing some of his findings, and Doug McClure offers the BSM community this: BSM is the integration and consolidation of systems management with business management.

Though all of these definitions have similarities, we tend to favor those provided by our customers, which raises an important point: you should determine what definition of BSM best suits your purpose and compare the different vendors against your requirements.

- Jim

Daily updates keep rolling in and all indicate that our Early Evaluation Program (EEP) for myCMDB continues to progress nicely. We have been contacted numerous times by both customers and internal employees with feature suggestions, questions and bug reports. A handful of folks with whom we have never spoken with previously have even sent inbound requests to give the software a try.

In many ways, the EEP has also become an extension to our QA department. Many people find that it is fun to find a bug and to report these to us. While we don’t necessarily “like” having to fix these bugs since we would rather be working on features -- we know this is a vital part of the process and are very happy to find them early in the development process where the overall cost to fix is dramatically lower.

We have been following standard practice by categorizing the enhancement requests and bugs and placing them into our ticketing system so that they can be reviewed and addressed by the proper personnel during the proper time in the schedule. We are working to manage these fixes in between preparation for our next “formal” code drop for the EEP. We have been updating the code periodically during our maintenance periods for a few fixes we deem necessary, however, we are not delivering additional major features to the product until our next code drop in August.

Currently we are aggregating overall usage data and it will be interesting to see if there are significant trends: What type of user logs in most frequently? Who uses it less frequently? Who is leveraging the community aspects? Are the CIM standard for CI’s useful or have they constructed their own classes? Stay tuned. 

- Adam

For example, a recent poll at Gartner’s IOM conference found that 33% of respondents are currently implementing a CMDB -- another 19% plan to do so in the next six months -- while another 12 percent will do so within a year.

A separate study summarized in this article by EMA’s Dennis Drogseth found that "50% [of respondents] are in active [CMDB] planning and 50% are in deployment." Results may be dependent on a number of variables, but what’s remarkable is that both surveys show a marked contrast from another poll conducted a year ago by searchdatacenter.com which found that almost half of all of respondents had no plans for a CMDB.

While the numbers are interesting and certainly something to which we as a vendor pay close attention -- we find how this market is evolving most interesting of all. The nearby graphic indicates how we at Managed Objects have seen things shape up.

Yesterday was a big day for the myCMDB team. We launched our initial code drop for the myCMDB Early Evaluation Program. The team is eager to get some feedback from our participants.

Overall the launch has gone very well. We had very few problems with user account setup, DNS problems, or any other technical issues. In fact, we have been surprised (and pleased) by the number of people that are already using the application.

We are eating our own dog food for this program so we can easily monitor statistics and auditing of the system: we can watch as people login, logout, and perform other activities. This was vital to our program so that we can monitor usage accordingly as part of our feedback.

We also setup myMO -- our  Web-based portal framework -- as the front end web site for all communication to the participants of the myCMDB EEP program. The site contains an overview of the program, instructional movies, beta documentation, a Blog site, calendar of events and other cool stuff to provide an easy means of communication between the participants and the myCMDB team. Personally, as the project manager, I am interested in hearing feedback on both the product as well as the Early Evaluation Program in general.

So far, my favorite thing about this program has been watching the community feeds as people register CI’s, update attributes, join communities, etc. In fact, it looks like a bit of competition may be brewing between the participants to see who can register CI’s the fastest. Interesting thought for those wanting to foster usage and coverage with a CMDB.

- Adam