Posts from — May 2006

The folks over at Juice Analytics have some good points on how many of the consumer focused application user interfaces just make more sense than most of the very expensive business application interfaces. They tend to help the consumer “get” the message and meaning better.

Is this where we need some sort of Web2.0 revolution in the vendor community? Do we (vendors) do a good enough job beginning with the end in mind? I’m sure we have all kinds of usability, UI and reporting type groups involved in developing our products, but what about really sitting with our customers to make sure we’re not overcomplicating things or swamping them with unnecessary features and functionality that can to distract from productivity and product value.

Or is this an opportunity for an entirely new company/product to emerge - one that creates a wiz-bang Web2.0 type federated application that sits on top of all the expensive business and IT solutions and technology and presents easy to consume user interfaces, reports, portals, etc.?

Is this a Web2.0 CMDB? ERP for IT? BSM 2.0?

• Software Safari - Premium Blog on Application Software
  (tags: it software application blog)
• William Vambenepe’s blog
  SOA, IT management, automation and alignment of business and IT
  (tags: SOA IT_management Automation Business IT Alignment)
• HPLablog
  events, trends, perspectives, speculations and True Tales about HP Labs
  (tags: HP_Labs)
• App Manageability blog
  Content starts here Pankaj Kumar’s blog on rich, out-of box application manageability. About stuff that matters to developers, administrators and operators. About Java, JMX, WSDM, WS-Management and OpenView.
  (tags: HP Blogs)
• Frontpage | bITa Center
  bITa Center acts as the focal point and knowledge hub that highlights IT Alignment and Business IT Alignment as sets of relationships among strategies, frameworks and best practices.
  (tags: it_alignment IT bestpractices)
• The metrics of IT: Management by measurement | bITa Center
  The metrics of IT: Management by measurement
  (tags: it_metrics IT metrics)
• Q&A: Tivoli CTO talks about autonomics and software at IBM
  April 11, 2005 (Computerworld) — Alan Ganek, vice president of autonomic computing at IBM, was recently named chief technology officer of IBM’s Tivoli Software unit as well, and will serve in both roles going forward. He recently discussed the connection
  (tags: IBM Tivoli AlanGanek)
• CMDB - Configuration Management Database - Managed Objects
  BSCM resolves the challenges created by today’s process model adoption realities by providing a series of capabilities that actually help IT organizations accelerate their adoption of process maturity models like ITIL. BSCM not only automates the buildi
  (tags: ManagedObjects BSCM BSM CMDB BusinessService)

• skeptic’s blog | The ITIL Skeptic
  Hmm, it’ll be interesting to see what this is about
  (tags: ITIL best_practice)
• ITILPeople Discussion Forums - IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) / IT Service Management.
  (tags: ITIL ITSM bestpractices)
• IT Management Forum - powered by vBulletin
  (tags: ITSM bestpractice)
• Timeline of Trends and Events (1750 to 2100)
  (tags: Technology reference visualization timeline)

This is a good read from CIO magazine. The last few paragraphs sum it up nicely. Keep these same concepts in mind as you begin your business service management (BSM) journey.

–snip–

“IT executives aren’t good at describing IT work in business terms,” says Forrester’s Orlov. “They describe it in terms of technologies they are supporting. IT spending should be described in terms of growing revenue, lowering cost and improving the time it takes to do something. If all you talk about is uptime, you are a cost center, not a strategic partner.”

“In the end, the real metric is not IT, it is business performance,” says Dow’s Kepler. “What is the output per employee? How efficient are we as a business per employee?

“If you’re looking for a metric to justify IT spending, that’s not the right mind-set,” he adds. “The right mind-set is to understand how processes, systems and people tie together to get business results.”

While I was at our Raleigh Executive Briefing Center (EBC) this week, I saw my first glimpse into a recent acquisition of the company CIMS Lab. The technology is now rolled into a product called ITUAM and aims at really enabling the concept of charge backs to come to life. Here is the IBM page for ITUAM.

I think this picture sums the concept up quite nicely.

In my last job, management spent countless hours trying to manually do this. We built a time tracking tool (that just made everyone happy) to try and account for time spent doing various tasks, projects, maintenance, etc. which was then correlated with asset information from the IT perspective (in another home grown tool), which was correlated with Finance asset information from Great Plains, which was all mashed togther with their secret sauce in some BASS (big a#$ spreadsheet).

If this ITUAM product really simplifies an organizations goal to understand costs associated with a business process, activity, service, application, datacenter, type of hardware, software, network, people, etc. or move towards a charge back environment then it’s sure to be another winning product in the Tivoli portfolio. From what I saw from our dynamic speaker (”Mr. Serverguy”), the approach and technology makes sense to me assuming you can get access to all of the datasources you’d need to round out the costing model you choose to implement.

One key point that stuck with me from my various ITSM/ITIL training was that even if you aren’t moving real money there is real power in a zero dollar invoice delivered to your internal customer, line of business, etc. This can start to have a real mental impact on how they view the IT services they’re provided and help them associate a dollar value to what they may be taking for granted.

Understanding the costs to deliver a service, process, function can become an important metric in many other ITSM areas. I see this technology underpinning many other areas we talk about and providing a powerful tool during budget planning and contract renegotiation time with vendors, suppliers, etc.

Cote’s post on People over Process here , some of the calls to action on the new Open Management Consortium blog and my Q&A with peers in the industry over the past year said it’s time to see what other people think on this topic.

I suffered through a painful server agent forklift project that lasted almost two years (and appears to have finally failed and be in the midst of a vendor/legal contract fight) and I’ve always had “pent up” feelings (I apologize for venting…) on the whole server agent and server monitoring space. I had to deal with no less than four different competing tools - two from vendors and two open source. The mission from the top was one standard platform for server monitoring, the reality in the systems admin silos was they wanted their tools and didnt’ want to have anything to do with what was perceived as the “NOC’s monitoring tool”. List price for some of these base monitoring agents would end up costing more than some of the servers that we used in that environment. None of those vendors had a pricing model for addressing that issue or multi-core CPU’s either so the costs in the long run were certainly uknown for basic server hardware and operating system monitoring. My sense was that something had to give in the future in what customer’s were going to be willing to pay for.

I’ve been thinking (hoping) now for some time that in the near future base server HW/OS monitoring would be as easy as SNMP monitoring on the network side of the house. It’d become a commoditized component in the overall NMS/ESM architecture. I’ve heard from server manufacturers about embedding these functions in mainboards, add in cards or ASICs. Every release of an operating system builds on the management and monitoring capabilities of the previous version. Open source software solutions for monitoring foundational server and operating system components continue to mature. The KVM vendors are sure to invent monitoring capabilities for their product sets that can monitor this stuff via out-of-band connections to the server. Microsoft’s WMI continues to improve. WS* standards are developing to allow new ways to monitor servers. Heck, I bet Cisco or some of the network layer guys could event get into this somehow by watching the wire or something via a suped up switch connection in the future.

Recent vendor acquisition activities over the past year or so have these vendors making decisions on how to address product line overlap. Some vendors have already changed from agent based solutions in favor of agentless based approaches. I can think of at least two vendor situations where multiple server monitoring agent products exist post acquisition. I think there’s a great opportunity for vendors to think about basic server hardware and operating system monitoring now and what it’ll look like the next few years. Cote’s recommendation about teaming with this OMC group could be a perfect fit here for the future contribution of product and technology that may be passed over at some point in the future. Should this OMC group align with OASIS, DMTF or other standards body and work towards a free or very low cost standard base agent for the common platforms? Something that supports an extensible architecture where vendors could plug in their more value added agents for applications, etc.? This could help with the “multiple agents on a box” problem as well.

I don’t know all the economics on the product side by any means. I don’t know anything about revenue streams, pipeline, etc. There are certainly architectural and customer deployment challenges that would have to be addressed, etc. I do think that it’d be nice to see the monitoring of a server’s hardware and operating system get simpler and get standardized. I think the place the vendor of the future focuses on is in the monitoring of applications (ARM), services, transactions, SOA/bus publishers, consumers, batch/cron jobs, etc. on the server. They would be focusing on business services and applications, IT processes (ITSM/ITIL and other IT best practices) coming to life via these new rich agents.

Does anyone else share similar thoughts? Can base server HW/OS monitoring be as easy as monitoring the network? Will it be a commodity in the near future? What role will the incumbents, open source software, server hardware, operting system and KVM vendors play?

–

I’ve sat on actually posting this for some time. I’ve seen more and more of our roadmap plans this week around server and application monitoring. We’re doing the right thing for our clients. Our focus on our composite application management (CAM) products will be stellar and really enable both the management and the monitoring necessary for services of the future. We’ll make sure our customers get the best of both worlds in terms of server monitoring as their environments and needs demand. I hope to see IBM Tivoli take a leadership position in this area of open source base server hardware and operating system monitoring and management sometime in the future just as we do in so many other standards development areas.

I’m recovering from my whirlwind trip to Hong Kong today. I figure I’d better post something this morning before I enter a zombie state later on this afternoon. I presented on the Tivoli Netcool BSM story and enabling products this week in Hong Kong for our Asia Pacific group. The presentation was a success and my conversations with my peers in this region even better. There are numerous BSM opportunities in flight across the region now and over time I’m positive they’ll prosper with the expanded product family and capabilities.

As I give this talk on BSM, I’m always interested in learning more about how well we’re doing with our BSM story. I asked a lot of questions about what BSM means in this part of the world and if our clients are ready to start their BSM journey. One thought I’m interested in exploring is with such a focus on quality (TQM, Six Sigma, supply chain, manufacturing, etc.) in this part of the world if that enables them to be better prepared for BSM? They certainy have gone through the exercises to know how to measure and monitor their environments, but does this make it easier to align those business activities and services to the underlying IT environment?

I enjoyed meeting some of the folks who’ve discovered my blog while in Hong Kong. It was a pleasure to meet Sunil, Pabs, Mani and discussing the ins and outs of BSM, ITSM and opportunities in AP. Hopefully they’ll join in the conversations here and share things from their part of the world!

We’re looking for beta testers for our upcoming release of ITUP - the IBM Tivoli Unified Process tool. I’ve posted a few times on this and what value it can bring to those considering or implementing IT best practices and aligning their people, processes and information with them.

Stroll over to the ITSM blog here and sign up by May 19th. (or kindly ask afterwords if you’ve got a lot of interest)