Recently in Change Management Category

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”

>> Roughly 10% of the audience raised their hand when asked “do you know what BSM is?” – Lisa Erickson Harris, “BSM and Best Practices, Elevating the Role of the Service Desk”

>> IT investments will continue to grow, but they must either produce cost savings in the supply chain or improve the customer experience – Charlie Feld “Enabling 21st Century Business Model with IT”

>> 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

Martin Atherton’s recent blog post “Are your systems falling down on resiliency?” calls out some alarming survey results that all corporate IT and business executives should pay attention to. Chief among these is the finding that 20% of today’s companies have significant, business impacting IT disruptions each and every quarter. It’s even more alarming when these results are juxtaposed with a similar survey conducted by Managed Objects in June of 2007 which found that up to 50% of large enterprise companies have significant business impacting outages up to 5 times a year. Among the Retail Banking sector this percentage goes up to 67%.

It’s tough to look at these results and say that we’re getting any better – besides as a business colleague used to tell me: “you need at least three data points to make a trend.” And yet, when the layers of the onion are peeled away in the Managed Objects survey, respondents felt that a good percentage of these outages were caused by changes to the application configuration. In fact, about a third of Retail Banks responded that between 25% and 50% of IT outages were caused by application configuration changes.

And while this further affirms Martin’s call for better focus on application development processes, it also brings into play the need for better process and technology focus applied to IT Operations change and configuration management. Even with the best designs and most careful plans, well-built production business applications can deteriorate in quality over time as fixes and enhancements are applied. So, while IT service quality improvements can be obtained through better development processes and technologies, process and technology improvements need to carry through to today’s IT operational environment as well as to achieve long-term IT service quality improvements.

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

Recently Edward Lorenz who popularized the concept of the "butterfly effect" passed away. The butterfly effect, according one article, is when "small differences in a dynamic system, like the weather, could trigger vast and often unsuspected results." In other words, Lorenz theorized a mere flap of a butterfly’s wings, while generally insignificant, could, given the right set of conditions, cause a subtle change that sets of a sequence of events that leads to a raging thunderstorm.

In the world of technology, those thunderstorms are often rendered in the form of an application slowdown, or worse, an IT outage. The butterfly that caused the outage can often be traced back to change, whether that change was planned (as in software upgrade) or unplanned (as in a fault failure). More often than not, someone pushed a button, turned a dial or pulled a lever that caused an IT outage. In fact, Gartner's research "consistently shows that 80% of mission-critical outages are caused by people and process issues, not by technology failures."

Yet process or best practices alone is not enough. Despite being an avid proponent of ITIL, one of our customers was challenged by the fact that 60% of incidents were caused by planned or approved changes. What’s the solution? Visually model the dependencies among dynamic IT infrastructure components to better understand the potential impact of planned change before they are made - even if that change seems insignificant, like the wing flap of a butterfly’s wing.

- Siki

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