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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.

It's not surprising to us that analyst firm Forrester has predicted that companies will spend nearly $5 billion on Web 2.0 technologies – blogs, wikis, podcasts, etc – over the next five years. Social networking has become the next generation of knowledge management, but it is one where user adoption is driven by the end user: think Wikipedia.

Social networking has dramatically changed the media landscape in North America. Blogs enable individual consumers to change corporate behavior and have taken the limelight for breaking political news by framing election issues on cable networks. In fact, during live coverage of the presidential primaries, CNN often runs segments reviewing the latest buzz in the blogosphere.

The Economist magazine says that blogs have affected Britain differently, as most of the major news networks rather than Web savvy upstart pundits have been the dominant force However, the government in London may have been faster than its Western siblings to grasp how Web 2.0 can involve the populace in more effective policy making.

With the ability to capture knowledge, interact more closely with constituents, shape viewpoints, and ultimately influence behavior, its no wonder Forrester foresees sizable corporate investment in Web 2.0. Enterprise social networking is, in essence, $5 billion worth of industrial strength fun.

Managed Objects has been no exception. Internally, the company uses Twiki to easily and rapidly communicate about support issues, software development and generally share tribal knowledge. Externally, we’ve launched our own blog with the intent of contributing to public discourse on BSM with other blogs engaging in discussions on future directions of IT, and inviting interaction from the ITIM community, including our customers. We’ve also been quick to innovate our product line – as a long time provider of role-based dashboards, we launched myMO (my Managed Objects) last fall as a Web 2.0 front end for BSM.

And there’s more to come, we can promise that!

- Dustin

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