| Worldwide Sites | Careers | Contact Us | Site Map | SEARCH |
 |
||
 Syndicate   Authors
|
September 2008 Archives
When I saw the Yammer present (and subsequently win) at Techcrunch 50 earlier this month, I immediately signed up Managed Objects and sent out invites to the people I communicate with most, including the rest of our management team. What’s a Yammer and why was I all over it? If you use Twitter or other microblogging services user, skip the rest of this paragraph – the short version is that it’s a communication platform that allows for the exchange of short messages between individuals as well as broadcasts. You can have threaded conversations as well as topic-focused ones using hashtags (e.g. #marketing, #myCMDB, or #competition). The idea is that instead of status meetings, or reading email threads, I can tap into a river of quick updates on various topics. Everyone I invited recognized the inherent value of Yammer, largely because we have a few Twitter users in-house such as myself and Frank and we’ve talked it up. So why didn’t more people sign up and start using it right away? After stripping away the usual objections about another site to use, maintaining another social graph, luddite like fears of another Enterprise 2.0 fad and so on, the core issue turned out to be security, and more specifically trust in the cloud. What it came down to was that everyone was concerned that we would adopt a communication system that although very valuable, resided outside of our firewall, in a service that was new, with no clear references to indicate that we could entrust our company’s confidential data. For the record, Managed Objects subscribes to a number of SaaS applications including Salesforce.com so we’re not averse to the model, we just need something to get over the Trust Hump (new term?). Although it would be a great place for everyone to keep track of and discuss topics like our myCMDB product development activities, tips on handling specific competitors, partner/channel news, industry news, key sales activities and more, I don’t have a good answer on the Trust Hump. The testimonials on the Yammer website are great and reinforce the value side of the equation but don’t help with my issue. The mashedlife approach to answering this question is a great start. What's the solution? An inside-the-firewall Yammer solution would be great. Having it hosted in a trusted cloud (is there one that is recognized as such?). Or integrating it with a service that we already use. For example, a Salesforce.com + Yammer combo where account names are automatically used as hashtags? That would be awesome. If you have suggestions on handling the Trust Hump, alternate solutions, or ideas about other integrations, leave a comment. - Abbas
It seems inevitable that IT budgets will face greater scrutiny as the global economy comes into question. After all, if increasing corporate costs and slowing or uncertain spending impacts revenue, then budget cuts will become a fact of life in the quest for profitability. Proven cost-reducing IT measures (i.e. layoffs and investment cuts) will be no-doubt be adopted, while less traditional areas like SaaS, virtualisation and outsourcing should all flourish even more from this turn of events. Indeed in its recent “The State Of IT Services: 2008”, Forrester reported that while budgets have been slashed, demand for outsourced services remained high. However IT is done, whether in-house, in the cloud or otherwise, it needs to be done with minimal cost. But while hardware and software costs have consistently fallen throughout ‘IT history’, operational costs like salaries have consistently increased. One benefit of business service management, is that it automates time-consuming processes like root cause analysis and it can project the potential effects of change on IT services. The attraction of such automation becomes particularly apparent when considering the looming squeeze on budgets as it presents a clear way of circumnavigating the predicament. What is clear about this period of economic uncertainty is that businesses are demanding even more transparency over IT, both in-house and outsourced and IT downtime is likely to be scrutinised at a far higher level for far more firms than in the past. With IT downtime presenting potentially business-threatening cost, IT operations will increasingly find themselves mandated to take a more strategic approach to preventing downtime.
For example, in one session on CMDBs, in excess of 50% of the audience (by show of hands) said they were currently implementing a CMDB. Two-percent admitted they were on their second try having failed the first time around. No surprise integration was routinely cited as the main culprit and that’s an area Managed Objects has certainly mastered. StackSafe has posted some notes from the show here – and we’d like to offer some bits and bytes – mostly paraphrases – as well: >> Congratulations to Cindy from Hallmark (photo nearby) who won our Wii raffle. >> IT is good at measuring performance, but poor at measuring quality. A help desk that aims to solve 60% of incidents on the first call is really just encouraging staff to close a ticket with a poor answer and reopen a new one with another call. – Malcolm Fry, “CIO and the 366 Degree Circle” >> A well run IT department is like air – it’s taken for granted. – Dennis Ravenelle, IT Service Continuity Management, Where do I start? >> “An inaccurate CMDB is worse than no CMDB.” – Richard Peasley, Building Decision Support Systems that Work - Abbas
Jason Stamper’s recent blog post “10 best technologies to beat the downturn,” highlighted some ideas for IT professionals to streamline budgets by using affordable technology rather than cutting back on IT resources. The economic downturn potentially represents a great threat to IT -- yet to businesses which are dependent on IT (and this is increasingly the case); any unexpected or ill-conceived cuts to IT resources may have a profound and adverse impact on IT services. Business survival, particularly in certain sectors, will necessitate cost-reduction; one of the quickest ways of realising such an objective is by reducing workforce. This puts a greater strain not only on the people who remain, but also on the quality of the IT services. Because of the business’ increased dependence on IT, a drop in service quality in today’s environment will likely result in more severe business impacts than in the past. Consequently, many quick cost-cutting fixes to the ICT infrastructure may prove more attractive than worthwhile. To truly understand how to reduce cost, IT professionals need to change their approach more fundamentally and adopt a service perspective. Rather than buying seemingly cheaper hardware/software for their network or laying off staff, IT leaders need to focus on how the different parts of IT relate to service and what value those services derive so that the consequences of decisions, particularly in terms of business impact and potential risk to quality of service are always thoroughly understood. Only then will they be in a position to identify the areas worth investing in and reduce spending to others accordingly. To put it simply, when they understand what tools they have in the box and can map the dependencies of their IT machine, they will be well placed to be that ever-beneficial step ahead of the CFO. As one author opined, “Careful With That (IT) Axe, CFO!” - Jim
Some time ago I was working with a customer who was new to his organization. His sole responsibility was to administer Managed Objects software – and was tasked with modeling his business’ most important services. It might defy expectations, but this new hire was made responsible for modeling the service dependencies for an organization he knew little about. We worked together for about a week and I like to believe I gave him a lot of good advice and training. Consequently, he wasn’t exactly humored at the quantity of work that lay before him, but he gotten some good ideas on how to begin. About a year later, I spoke with him again and to paraphrase, this is what he told me: He was viewing his Managed Objects BSM operations console and saw a critical problem -- one of their Oracle servers had thrown a critical error. He walked over to the network operations center to see what they were doing about it. In response to telling the ops guys that Oracle was down on one of their critical apps, he received blank stares. “Huh? No, Oracle isn’t down, it all looks okay.” And then just as the ops people were saying as much…they saw he was right. There was an error. Their question to my customer was, how did he know that, and more importantly how did he know that before they knew? The answer is simple: he asked the hard questions about what the service dependencies were and then was able to model them. He didn’t model every service, but he modeled the important ones. He asked questions of managers, operators and developers. He read standards. He pieced together information to develop a picture of how the systems work, and then going back and asking more questions. In context, and against some fairly tremendous odds, my customer pieced together how the key systems they monitored actually worked. This story is cliché amongst my co-workers. They all have had instances where customers have related similar experiences and seen it themselves. - Tom |
| Contact Us | Site Map | Legal | Privacy |
| Copyright 2008 Managed Objects, Inc. All rights reserved. |