Posts from — February 2006

• “Documented common sense” (best practices)
• Recommendations - ’should’ do this or that
• IT decision
• People are certified, not business, company or technology

ISO 20000 (formerly BT 15000)

• Demonstratable and auditable best practices
• Requirements - ’shall’, ‘must’ do this or that
• BUSINESS decision
• Organizations are certified or accredited as in compliance

Remember, nothing gets ITIL certified but people who take training and pass the tests from an accredited organization (IESB, EXIN).  I heard numerous references today to “our product/company/methodology is ITIL certified”.  It’s simply not true.  For more information, see the OGC ITIL FAQ.

References:

• ITIL and ISO 20000 Support Portal
• ISO 20000 Central
• Order Standards in USA

• Business aligned reporting demonstrating value for money & success
• Conformance of agreed business service levels & targets
• Customer perception/satisfaction
• Organizational & process bottle-necks
• Workload patterning & trends
• Staff resource usage & workloads
• Business areas for improvement

Identify what generates management emotion:

• Brand credibility
• Customer loyalty reinforcement
• Revenue loss reduction
• Business improvement/savings
• Personal/organizational credibility
• How you can make management & yourself look good

Then Align to the Business:

• Use business language & terms
• Classify using business SERVICES
• Report and present information which the ‘Board’ will relate to

Quality Metrics Generate Positive Reaction:

• Demonstrates value for money
• Contributes to staff & customer development
• Promotes continued investment in IT
• Reduces outsourcing possibility
• Drives Professionalism
• Promotes team building & communication
• Maintains business

Report evaluation criteria? The 8 steps to making your life easier:

• What does the report tell me?
• Do I ‘understand’ what the statistics are saying?
• Are the results a surprise?
• Do they highlight areas for improvement
• Do they highlight our areas of success
• What do they tell the person who needs them
• What action/decision will they invoke?
• What other complementary metrics may I need

• “emotional metrics enforce customer perception”
• “customer perception is reality”
• Avoid reporting on component level metrics and rather on end-to-end service metrics

The blogger formerly known as “Dr. ITIL” has emerged in a new blog called the IT Service Blog and also has created a search engine for all things IT Service related here.

Robin posts about the upcoming changes in the works for ITIL in their refresh or version 3 release. He intends to keep everyone up to date with these very important changes in the ITIL framework so keep an eye on his blog of other official sources like the OGC or ITSMF.

See Robin’s post, link to the webcast from Sharon Taylor (ITIL v3 Lead Architect) and his slides summarizing the webcast here.

Thanks to Doug, I will now be diving headfirst into a public forum through which to share my experiences and thoughts around Business Service Managment (BSM). I have been managing Netcool/RAD and Netcool/Application Discovery (which interestly enough, was also acquired by IBM) for the past year or more. This space is very fluid as its measured in hype, reality, and practicallity. Many are starting to understand these terms as if they were things they have always been doing, but somehow slightly new and with renewed clarity. Funny that Doug points out how a few folks had just recently gone through ITIL certification in NYC. I was one of those folks, and can honestly say, having been in the space for a decade or more, it truly helped attending this class. It not only helped me reflect on all my customer experiences (I tried to compare where each was while using non-ITIL processes) but it truly helped me get my vocabulary on the same page as leaders in the BSM space. Can’t say it wasn’t more than 80% terminology and 20% process/role defintiions - but it did help me separate a few “cloudy” areas that somehow seemed easy enough to gloss over when discussing BSM processes with non-ITIL folks.

I am very excited about the upcoming release of RAD. Our team has been working hard on it for a very long time and it shows in the elevated quality over any previous release. Being the flag-ship product for our BSM offerings, it has taken on more and more dependents in moving the IBM/Netcool ITSM solutions forward. I very much look forward to solidifying its new home within IBM and expanding it further into BAM and BPM areas.

Ok, so that’s a little on me and where my head is. Thanks for inviting me onboard Doug. Should be a lot of fun.

Cheers,

Dan

We had our “First Day” kick off activities today or our initial “blue-washing” as they call it. We had a great kick off video conference with IBM Tivoli’s GM Al Zollar and the GM of the new Netcool division Lloyd Carney (former Micromuse Chairman/CEO) as well as sessions from HR and IT management for the SWG.

They showed a really good intro to IBM video over lunch covering a bit of IBM’s history and how IBM is all about the “Think” … as in innovation, inventions, and its people creatively solving our clients problems. Really good stuff!

Everyone I’ve talked with is very excited about the upcoming year, our new home and roles as IBMers!

In flight, LGA to ATL 9:30PM on my Blackberry 8700C…

I just wrapped up two days of deep dive technical training on our new release of Netcool/Real-Time Active Dashboards (RAD) version 3.0 in NYC (post Blizzard of 2006).

It was great to spend the time with our leading developers, product managers and systems engineers from around the world and hear the excitement from the field around the product and what it is enabling our clients to do in their environments.

Another thing that pleased me was seeing the excitement of our key BSM product family developers, product managers and executive management as they got their first immersion into ITIL during their ITIL foundation training.

Hearing folks generally pretty far away from IT Operations excited about change management, service level management, and the various ITIL training fun (the proper English, wacky IT scenarios, and practice tests) took me back to my training, certification and implementation experinces at EarthLink.

I am sure this training will help them greatly as they dialogue with new and existing clients worldwide. I encouraged most of them to keep it up and try for the practitioers certifications as I have.

Back to our new product release. The name Real-Time Active Dashboards only partially captures the capability and potential clients have at their fingertips with RAD. What that name doesn’t convey are the powerful service and dependency modeling, data source integration, and overall BSM, BAM and BPM capability. I encourage you to take a look at the PR on it from this week as it launched at the Pink Elephant ITSM show in Las Vegas.

I hope to write about some of our many solution, application and architecture ideas on how clients can leverage our BSM product family (including our new Tivoli parent’s product portfolio) in their environment. No, not theoretical ramblings, but keeping it real and aligned with my goal of bringing BSM (really B*M) to life in the real IT Operations environments you work in.

I’ve also opened the door for some of the product and development folks to jump in and blog with me here. I hope they do!

Yesterday, Micromuse’s era in the network and systems management space ended as we formally knew them. Micromuse was founded 15 years ago and my exposure to them as a customer goes back 10 years. I can vividly remember my first Netcool experience at an ISP in Norfolk, VA called InfiNet. Netcool was the saving grace for an ISP in the mid-1990s. Having cut my teeth on HP’s NNM and Cabletron’s Spectrum plus a handful of unique element management systems for the network and server devices, having Netcool to consolidate all of these systems into a “single pane of glass” worked wonders in the NOC.

Yesterday was my first day as an employee of IBM Tivoli. The future of the combined Micromuse Netcool and IBM Tivoli product families is extremely bright. I’m looking forward to learning and growing within IBM Tivoli and continuing to seek ways to bring the goals and objectives of business and IT best practices (BSM, BAM, BPM, ITSM, ITIL, etc.) to life by focusing on the not just the technology but the people and processes required for a successful implementation.

MarkG. posted in the Darth.Net blog a follow up to the excellent article on the Event-Driven Architecture by Brenda Michelson. He provides additional insight and observations into the implementation challenges of EDA.