Recently in Integration Category

Sometimes ingenuity leads to alternative uses of new products in ways the original designer never imagined. The classic business school example is 3M’s Post-It note which was originally conceived as pressure sensitive adhesive – a novel idea with few practical uses until someone slapped the adhesive on a piece of paper and found utility in a reusable bookmark. 

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

IT governance is a main motivator for corporate entities in their decisions to create compliant IT systems that include CMDBs. The CMDB is supposed to model (as closely as possible) a "vision of the truth" about those corporate entities’ IT systems. To that end I would like to discuss the governance of how a CMDB is constructed. By CMDB governance I mean: the performance, risk assessment and compliance of a CMDB to the actual true state of the IT system being modeled; I might also add to this the confidence in that CMDB as it relates to its accuracy in modeling the IT system.

How then are CMDBs constructed? The best way is to tie together existing data and complement that data with discovery tools and old fashioned data-entry. The latter may be done through the use of various scripts or the mining of databases that hold certain aspects of the system, but in large part these would be grouped under ‘formal methodologies.’

At this point the CMDB construction is already fraught with danger, for example holes in the data, or data that is inaccurate or stale. The confidence factor of such a CMDB may be quite low, which makes it rather useless. This problem is exacerbated by that fact that building it can be a very time-consuming and difficult procedure. There is a very well known decision matrix called the ‘Impact/Effort’ matrix. The idea is that if an activity has a high effort, but a low impact, then that activity is not worth doing.

This is a major problem in creating a useful CMBD. What to do?

Well, before I attempt to answer that question, let me introduce a different way that CMDB’s can be created: social networking tools.

The idea is that the IT systems knowledge (at least on a high level) is contained in the heads of many human beings. The raw data can be managed by the discovery tools and formal tools, but the structural knowledge and ability to correct or fill in knowledge requires constant, dynamic human intervention.

That’s why tools like Managed Objects myCMDB that allow ‘Wiki’ like intervention into the construction of a CMDB are so useful. This works by taking the view that the CMDB is a dynamic living entity that never really attains a static ‘state of truth,’ but instead has major portions that are basically static, and ‘outliers’ that are being dynamically changed as network needs change, as virtual machines are created and destroyed, and as complex applications go into and out of existence. The truth in a complex IT system is a living, breathing, and most importantly, changing beast. This is why the traditional methods of creating a CMDB always seem to end up with something that is out of date with the real thing.

To make sure that the data is maintained in the CMDB correctly, a ‘governance’ policy needs to be instituted between the ‘gathering’ of the data, and the ‘structuring’ of the data within the CMDB itself. Obviously there will be many things that can be instituted as boiler-plate within this policy, but there will be many aspects of this policy that will be unique to the corporate entity that is instituting them. The policy is itself stored within the CMDB which introduces an aspect of feed-back that will help to tailor this policy to better capture and structure the dynamically collected data that ultimately forms the CMDB model.

The feedback loop is essentially a human interaction activity and could be compared to idea of domain experts who edit an encyclopedia (or a Wiki).

These experts examine the current structures of the collected knowledge within the CMDB to the real world, and modify the policy so that the collection and structuring of data more closely fits with, and changes with, the real world. The ultimate hope is to get to a policy that produces the closest possible CMDB model to the real world.

As the policy improves within the enterprise, the confidence factor rises and, of course, the usefulness of the CMDB within the enterprise also rises.

- David

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

If I had a crystal ball, I’d look to see the IT of the future. The flow of data, streamlined communications and an accurate map of the relationships between applications, technology, and the business -- the IT future would be clear, in fact, so crystal clear even the line of business would enjoy the view into IT.

Current CMDB projects look more like information warehouses for IT – developed and maintained by small teams of IT technologists. Yet, the vision for the CMDB is much larger and broader than many current implementations would have us believe. In the coming months and years, the CMDB will evolve into the valuable corporate asset it was envisioned to be – providing critical decision support capabilities for both IT and business users alike.

Interestingly, realizing this vision for the CMDB is not beyond the realm of existing technology. In fact, it’s not a technology problem at all.

As I’ve stated in a previous post, 70% of the data needed for a CMDB already exists in the enterprise. What’s needed is the mechanism by which to tie this data together, and present it in a manner that can be easily updated by the enterprise and consumed by the business.

This mechanism is integration – and it exists today. The interface for consumption might be borrowed from social networking concepts, where the GUI reflects the community. Views would be based on organization role – for the business manager, the IT director and the service manager respectively – and derived from the same corporate asset: the CMDB.

-- Siki

The power and pitfalls of knowing every side of the story

As a manager, your company’s ability to execute effectively cannot and does not depend on your ability to scale your own execution across superhuman multiples.

Instead, it depends on two things – first, it requires a refined ability to assimilate data from a number of different sources to formulate an accurate and complete picture of the business as it stands today – and then, leveraging that picture to formulate a clear and concise blueprint and course of action for where the business needs to be in the future.

Secondly, it depends upon your ability to gain buy-in and participation across a number of different constituents – both within your team and across the company.

The challenge of building a blueprint, gaining buy-in, and then orchestrating work across a broad spectrum of resources, is what business management excellence is all about.

Interestingly, there are a number of similarities between effective business management and effective IT management – particularly, as it relates to the CMDB. From data assimilation, to blueprint, to plan of action – the CMDB provides a central focal point -- an accurate and complete view of the IT infrastructure.

And yet, CMDB data inaccuracy is the number one cause for CMDB project failures -- followed closely by a lack of broad adoption of the CMDB across a broad set of constituents within both IT and the business.

Going forward, the CMDB must be an absolutely accurate, trusted source of IT infrastructure information. In addition, the CMDB must be widely accepted and adopted across a broad set of IT and business users within the enterprise. IT organizations will each need to address both of these challenges for CMDB projects to be successful over the long-haul.

Don’t think Managed Objects hasn’t noticed.

-- Siki

Does process matter? In the case of BSM, both technology and process are inextricably linked. On one hand, BSM technology brings together integration, modeling, automation and analytics – so IT operations have the necessary tools to quickly associate IT component failures with relative business services. Without technology, root cause and impact analysis must be manually discerned, which for at least one of our customers, takes as many as 35 people on a conference call.

On the other hand, without IT process regimen to ensure IT infrastructure change repeatability and continuous improvement, BSM technology will help to find problems faster – but it won’t help to reduce the risks introduced when changes are made to the IT infrastructure.

In both regards, BSM vendors have come a long way over the last five years. For example we’ve learned how to couple the capabilities of Service Catalog and Discovery with a detailed top down implementation process that results in successful BSM projects in as few as 90 days.

The aspects that vary from project to project are customer-specific – organizational processes or infrastructure – that makes each BSM implementation slightly different. This is where a vendor’s implementation experience matters most. To that end, we like to believe we’ve learned a lot in conducting more than 300 BSM implementations over the last decade.

Managed Objects fully agrees with the assertion that process matters…but we also believe that there are a number of generally accepted and well-defined processes and best practices associated with successful BSM projects.

- Dustin

Analysts in both the US and UK have been anticipating Microsoft’s move to extend its IT management capability into the Linux and UNIX platforms. For example last fall at Gartner’s ITxpo, one analyst theorized that if application vendors moved into the IT management space, it would be game-changing.

There is little doubt Microsoft’s move will make ripples in the market. The company has incredible influence in so many aspects of IT, that if this proves a serious commitment to IT management, there is a high probability for success. That success will likely come at the expense of incumbent vendors – mainly by way of taking market share from the Big 4.

By expanding beyond the realm of Windows it is conceivable that customers might find it attractive to extend their existing MOM implementations to other platforms. However, this does not guarantee gentle westerly winds nor smooth sailing since there are several market dynamics and competitive factors that will influence how – and how quickly – Microsoft’s initiative evolves.

First, cost reduction and cost containment are perhaps the most substantive pressures on IT decisions today. As such, it’s reasonable to expect the Big 4 will respond to this event with more aggressive pricing. In this approach, Microsoft will essentially be trading space for time, and slowly chipping away at Big 4 revenue streams. This will weaken the Big 4 over time.

Secondly, there will remain some doubts in the market as to Microsoft’s credibility. For example it will have to prove it can manage mission critical environments as well as the incumbent vendors. This means IT decision makers will see tremendous risk in migrating to a Microsoft management platform – which can prove to be a difficult and time consuming sales objection to overcome.

At the same time, the Big 4 are investing in two key product functionalities that will extend the vast distance among product innovation that Microsoft, despite its prowess, will find it challenging to cover. Mainly these investments are in behavioural logic – the detection of unusual activity that provides predictive capabilities – and data centre automation.

Perhaps then, Microsoft has long range plans to move into the BSM space given it’s newly found operating system independence. BSM is still very much a level playing field with the Big 4 attempting to buy (rather than innovate) their way into a space with more agile pioneers, like Managed Objects, where our vendor neutral approach and pervasive integration is proving a difficult capability for them to match.

- Jim

As the Internet titans struggle to find more cost effective methods of keeping their datacenters cool, while simultaneously lowering their impact on the environment, I can’t help but smile. No I’m not insensitive the impending crisis that is global warming – to the contrary, I am a big believer in thinking globally and acting locally. It’s just that those of us in the field of BSM have already been executing on this global-local philosophy for years:sweeping, expensive measures aren’t always the best remedy – sometimes you just need to improve how you use what you already have.

Several years ago I was asked to provide some consulting services to a customer, an unnamed manufacturer, with a plant in Canada that desperately needed a solution to a simple but a very expensive problem. The servers in the datacenter that hosted the technology controlling the operation of the assembly line had to maintain a temperature that did not vary above or below a (+/-) 5 degree Celsius. If it did the servers would automatically shut themselves down to prevent overheating. With a vehicle rolling off the production line every 27 seconds, any stoppages on the manufacturing line had a clear and measurable impact on revenue.

Some proposals called for grand schemes to overhaul the datacenter with sweeping and sophisticated new solutions…until I arrived and offered a simple answer: integrate the tools you already have to develop an early warning system to monitor the temperature in the datacenter.

The HVAC systems already installed in the datacenter had onboard SNMP servers, which allowed a periodic polling of the datacenter temperature at three different points. The outcome of this poll was correlated to the required mean temperature in the datacenter – and a severity level for the production floor then conveyed to the Center. For example, if the temperature varied more than 2 degrees Celsius either way, IT operations staff was automatically paged and the manager on duty received an email on his blackberry. In just a week after installing this very simple early warning system, the number of production line stops was reduced by over 90 percent.

This situation was perfect for a BSM solution which is designed to integrate and correlate IT and business data and visualize it in a way that is meaningful to the business. More importantly, it exemplifies what is often symptomatic of a larger problem: providing a way for IT to understand that given current course and speed, a crash will occur in X-number of minutes. Whether it’s global warming or cooling the datacenter, sometimes we already have the ends of a solution in our hands – we just need to tie them together.

-- Jonathan