Posts from — April 2007

In addition to our ongoing empahasis on IBM Service Management you’ll soon start to hear more and more messaging and positioning around IBM’s Governance and Risk Management focus areas.

IBM Governance and Risk Management
Techweb Portal on IT Governance and Risk Management

Dig in and get up to speed. I sense more cool commercials and ads in the future!

Tivoli Business Service Manager (TBSM) version 4.1 is now generally available (GA). This is the first step in converged Business Service Management (BSM) solution for IBM and marks the future end of life for the Netcool/Realtime Active Dashboard (RAD) and Tivoli Business Systems Manager (TBSM) products. Over the next several releases, the new product will continue to collapse features and functionality from legacy products into the new go ahead product. Note the subtle change in the TBSM acronym to reflect Business Service Manager versus Business Systems Manager.

This release presents an ideal opportunity to step back and revisit why you may have made an investment in IBM Tivoli or the former Micromuse’s Business Service Management story. I have heard, seen and experienced the success stories, the nightmares, the tales of shelfware, feature/functionality “vaporware”, the fancy sales and marketing slicks, etc. all related to our past efforts in the Business Service Management space. I can’t say we’ll be perfect, but we are improving and heading in a great, market leading and innovative direction.

I’d like to encourage you to evaluate where you are in your Business Service Management journey. Have the things that you used to justify your purpose been achieved? Are they providing value to those who use them? Are you really doing Business Service Management or just using this as another IT tool with pretty pictures, maps and dashboards? Is it difficult to justify your maintenance renewal each year? Is your Business Service Management solution an integral part of your day to day operations? Is it frequently reviewed and kept up to date, accurate and managed, patched, etc? Is it difficult to assign resources to your Business Service Management solution compared to all of the other resource demands you face each day?

If you’re not comfortable with your answers to these questions, I recommend that you discuss with your team, peers and management about revisiting your Business Service Management strategy. If you don’t have one, now may be the perfect time to establish one. (more on that later) I offer a few tips in a posting related to developing a Business Service Management roadmap that may help get you started. I’ll be posting some more over the next few weeks on practical applications of TBSM 4.1 features and functionality, deployment scenarios, strategies and keys to success.

I’d be very interested in discussing how we can help with TBSM 4.1 architecture, design, deployment planning and migration from legacy Netcool/RAD 2.x/3.x and Tivoli TBSM 3.x to the new TBSM 4.1. Let us help you find a path towards Business Service Management success and value within your organization. I strongly believe that it can be done, but it doesn’t happen overnight and it doesn’t come “out of the box”.

• IBM - IBM Tivoli Business Service Manager V4.1.0 Interim Fix 1(4.1.0.0-TIV-BSM-IF0001)
  A potential security vulnerability has been identified on IBM
  Tivoli Business Service Manager (TBSM) 4.1 installations. After
  installing TBSM 4.1 and its prerequisite software (the IBM Tivoli
  Netcool Security Manager), passwords will appear in unencrypted
  (tags: IBM Tivoli TBSM4.1 TBSM bsm business-service-management netcool)
• Compuware Strengthens End-To-End Service Management Solution: Financial News - Yahoo! Finance
  “This release provides the foundation for Compuware’s integrated solution with the recently acquired Proxima Technology Centauri, which will be released in the next quarter.”
  (tags: compuware Vantage Proxima Centauri systemsmanagement networkmanagement appmgmt user-experience service_management)
• Digital Fuel Acknowledged for Business Service Management Leadership by Independent Research Firm
  “Digital Fuel approaches BSM in a unique way,” wrote Forrester analysts and co-authors Peter O’Neill and Evelyn Hubbert, “providing insight into service levels, contracts, and costs associated with these service levels and managing the services provided b
  (tags: digitalfuel bsm business-service-management sla Forrester analyst opinion)
• Serge Thorn’s IT Blog: Service Level Management and SOA. more confusion?
  For some consistency we should differentiates SLAs in an ITSM framework from SLAs in a SOA. For these reasons a good thing would be to create a new acronym: WSLA for Web Service Level Agreement!!
  (tags: SOA ITSM SLA BSM WSLA webservicelevel)
• Four Steps to Developing a Service Management Strategy for Midsized Business - Computerworld
  Four Steps to Developing a Service Management Strategy for Midsized Business
  (tags: BMC whitepaper service_management ITSM bsm)