Recently in IT Operations Category

In many ways technologists are fighting for the same ideals – just on different levels. The single source of truth is one of those ideals and I find it fascinating to know that other members of the IT community are tacking a similar problem in parallel. Consider the following:

ERP: CEOs look to enterprise resource planning software to provide a single version of the truth with regard to a company’s finances. According to CIO.com, “Finance has its own set of revenue numbers, sales has another version, and the different business units may each have their own version of how much they contributed to revenues. ERP creates a single version of the truth that cannot be questioned because everyone is using the same system.”

MDM: A March 2008 report from Gartner describes how master data management “can help enterprises achieve a single view of the product.” For example, a consumer goods manufacturer that produces wigits in different countries tends to maintain different versions of the same product specification data for governmental or regulatory reporting requirements. Over time the quality of these different versions changes or erodes leaving the business with multiple versions of the truth.

CMDB: Many IT departments have embarked on configuration management system (CMS) projects to synchronize and reconcile multiple federated data sources from performance, asset and system management tools. To provide a single source of truth about the health, availability and quality of the service provided to the business.

As a BSM vendor, my experience with CMDB customers tells me that the most suitable approach for this type of project it to leverage data directly from the trusted sources through integration, rather than attempting to copy, duplicate or otherwise centralize the data with methods such as ETL. In other words, build a centralized view, not a centralize repository, which of course is a key reason why calling it a configuration management system is more appropriate than calling it a configuration management database.

Still the fact that other areas of IT are seeking to find solutions to the similar challenges is interesting – and we’ll be on the look out for best practices. It’s also reminiscent of the idea that those who don’t read history are bound to repeat it.

- Jim

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

Few that would argue that rolling out a business service management approach to an organization is highly valuable and beneficial. One of the biggest challenges, however, continues to be what this BSM solution should look like to its consumers. Is it a dashboard with a stoplight like layout? Is it speedometer tracking how quickly things are moving along on a production line? Is it information laid out on a world map highlighting contributions from various regions to a global marketplace?

Consider this analogy to highlight just how important this look and feel really is – I like eggs and toast for breakfast, as do a lot of other people. The raw contents of this breakfast are the same for everyone but preparation and layout will absolutely determine how successful breakfast is on any given day. It will determine how likely I am to recommend the meal to other people, how much satisfaction I gain from eating it, and how much value I associate with it as an everyday exercise. For the record, I like mine prepared as two eggs over hard with wheat toast cut in half on either side of the eggs, almost like a face. How many possible permutations are there? A lot.

Building dashboards at the presentation layer of a BSM solution is arguably the most important and most difficult task during any deployment, akin to making breakfast for a group of people all of whom agree that they want eggs for breakfast but can’t always articulate how they want them prepared or presented. This is exactly why in selecting a BSM vendor, it is absolutely crucial to evaluate flexibility in presenting information and also being able to change it very quickly to look like something completely different. In addition, the ability to quickly add/modify/delete the data feeds allows for new ingredients to be added to the mix so that the presentation layer can truly take on the shape that the BSM user community needs.

All this flexibility comes with its own challenges, the most significant of which is soliciting user feedback and building in mechanisms for comments, suggestions and approval from the user base. It’s one that is certainly reflected in the feature development cycle of a lot of companies, in particular ones with varying types of users. MySpace’s SVP of Product Strategy described their approach of soliciting feedback using blogs along Tom Anderson’s profile. A similar approach was described on CIO.com's blog.

These approaches can be creatively applied to building and maintaining a relevant presentation layer for a BSM solution by allowing communities of interest to provide feedback and suggestions on what they would like to see. It is then up to the administrators of the system to extract themes and concrete ideas from the feedback stream and construct new views. These should then be promoted in Beta form to further distill them, and then brought to the full user community. Sound like a BSM group inside of a larger enterprise social network? You bet.

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 saying goes, all politics are local. This adage seems to be true, even for Global 2000 companies with thousands of IT components cast around the globe.

In the second part of a blog series that examines future directions for IT, Arthur Cole commented, “…rather than simply deciding which box to plug in where, more and more CIOs are finding themselves at the crossroads of competing strategic influences.” I contend that strategic influences sometimes clash with local politics.

IT organizations invest big money in consultants to develop the perfect criterion by which to evaluate a short list of vendors. Features and functions, ROI and even compatibility or integration with the existing environment, usually top the list. However, unlike the binary or rules-driven logic of the technology so central to our livelihood – whether a consumer or supplier – as humans, there is always an element of subjectivity in any decision.

Political influence extends far beyond the classic case – where an enterprise architect by way of design mandates what tool IT operations will use for monitoring – to the affinity individuals develop for specific brands or products. Some have invested so much time and effort into a given tool or project, in many ways their careers are intertwined, even dependent on its success.

As a result, over the many years I’ve been selling software, I’ve sometimes won and sometimes lost as a result of this phenomenon. In some cases prospects with a bias towards a rival product have effectively killed deals – and on the other hand, I’ve observed some of my customers rise quickly through the ranks based on the results they were able to achieve with our product.

In either case, politics is most certainly and dynamically linked to IT.

-- Randy

Long time CMP writer and veteran technology watcher Penny Crosman recently blogged about a flood of new start-ups developing solutions aimed at reducing data latency for financial institutions. For example, one provider offers “software that sits on network switch mirror ports and monitors the traffic going by, combined with correlation algorithms that, the company says, can pinpoint latency to the box level.”

While such a tool may pinpoint latency to box level, component-based management only takes you so far. The next step absolutely must be to put this information in a business context - to understand the effect of any single box’s latency on IT’s ability to deliver business services. This is important because financial institutions often have tens of thousands of servers (among other components) in their enterprise, which means potentially tens of thousands of latency alerts. Without business context, the question becomes, ‘which latent box do you fix first?’

One way would be to incorporate Business Service Management (BSM) solutions to allow IT operations to make this determination quickly and easily. BSM manages IT from a holistic, service perspective, and dynamically links the underlying IT components according to the business service they provide – so, for example, IT operations can place the latency at a box level in the context of business impact. Since BSM platforms can integrate to a range of heterogeneous IT management tools from performance monitoring to service desks, it may prove more useful than trade data latency monitoring tools.

In many ways because of their reliance on technology, financial services institutions were among the early adopters of BSM technology in the late 1990s. Today, BSM has evolved to include a range of modular components to include discovery, service level management (SLM) and the configuration management database (CMDB) or as ITIL perhaps more aptly calls it a configuration management system.

-- 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

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