Posts from — September 2007

• The Connection between Business Service Management and Pink Cadillacs
  To overcome the challenges to adopting BSM, Mary Kay followed four key steps:
  -Link the effort to the existing company direction (standardize)
  -Gain in-depth understanding and consolidation of like processes (change process)
  -Consolidate systems
  -Educate
  (tags: bsm business-service-management bsm_value)
• ZipTie Open Network Alliance
  The ZipTie Open Network Alliance (ZONA) is a group of like-minded companies and organizations
  interested in advancing and promoting interoperability, open management standards, best practices
  and value-added tools for the networking community.
  (tags: Alterpoint ziptie NCCM OSS Zona alliances)

Continuing in my series (finally) on what the key elements of Business Service Management are (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, please enjoy and comment on Part 4 below.

In order for Business Service Management to stick for the long haul within a company it needs to be thought of as equally important within the company as other key business or IT initiatives do. Just as Sarbanes-Oxley and other compliance mandates changed the way most companies manage IT and their business processes or how the expected benefits of a SOA will change the way IT things about how to standardize complex enterprise architectures, Business Service Management must be elevated to these same levels within the company.

Strategy – strategic – what’s this mean?

Wikipedia [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategy] defines strategy as a long term plan of action designed to achieve a particular goal, most often “winning”. Strategy is differentiated from tactics or immediate actions with resources at hand by its nature of being extensively premeditated, and often practically rehearsed. The key words here we want to focus in on for our Business Service Management strategy are “long term plan of action”, “extensively premeditated” and “practically rehearsed”.

What’s a Business Service Management strategy and why should I have one?

First, it clearly defines what Business Service Management is for your company in your own words – it’s not IBM’s or an analyst’s definition of what Business Service Management is.

Second, your Business Service Management strategy is your vision and value statement, your governing principles – how your company will use Business Service Management to achieve value and competitive differentiation. It should include your own defined goals and objectives such as better cost controls, higher margins, improved service, improved user experience. At a high level your Business Service Management strategy should introduce how your company will operationalize the value statement and governing principles within specific lines of business, in IT, in Operations, in Application Support, etc.

Third, your Business Service Management strategy links Business Service Management’s expected value, returns, methodologies, integration and alignment with all of the other key business and IT strategies, architectures and initiatives. All key company initiatives such as Enterprise Architecture, Service Oriented Architecture, Business Transformation, Outsourcing/Insourcing should all have direct Business Service Management alignment and value statements.

Fourth, the Business Service Management strategy creates consensus and buy in within key audiences and sponsors. It neutralizes opinions and speaks in “good for business” terms. With the right level of agreement and support, the Business Service Management strategy establishes the value the initiative has for the company and that it’s not just another pet IT or Business project vying for scarce budget dollars or resources.

When starting work on your own Business Service Management strategy, it should focus at a higher level, not a low level. You should not talk about specific vendors, products or technologies within the strategy document. Technical standards, concepts, methods and practices can be mentioned if they are ones you wish to adopt as key guiding principles for enabling your Business Service Management strategy within your company

The Business Service Management strategy should be flexible and change based on the dynamics of the business yet fixed enough to allow planning and progress to be achieved. Your Business Service Management strategy helps you begin with the end in mind and will guide development of the Business Service Management roadmap. [see Post 3]

These tenets and guiding strategic principles are the underpinnings of successful Business Service Management initiatives. While most companies go for the “quick win” and strive to recognize “quick value” from their technology investments, these tactical efforts are mostly short lived and unsustainable. By focusing on Business Service Management as a strategic component and differentiator within the company, a foundation for long term success and value is established.

Follow on post will be discussions on the fringe benefits of establishing a Business Service Management strategy for the monitoring tools group, examples of Business Service Management strategies and linking the Business Service Management strategy to the Business Service Management roadmap (with examples).

• Business Service management and your bottom line
  Proving and communicating the business value of IT services and investments is a constant challenge for CIOs, understanding and adopting Business Service Management systems can help.
  (tags: bsm business-service-management bsm_value compuware alignment)
• Look beyond the ITIL starting point
  In other words, rather than simply producing software that meets the ITIL requirements, why not go beyond these and offer additional features and functionality that are of real use to the helpdesk and network management communities?
  (tags: ITILv3 bsm business-service-management networkmanagement)

• YSlow for Firebug
  YSlow analyzes web pages and tells you why they’re slow based on the rules for high performance web sites. YSlow is a Firefox add-on integrated with the popular Firebug web development tool.
  (tags: YSlow Firebug analytics bandwidth performance webdev development user-experience)
• Exceptional Performance
  Yahoo!’s Exceptional Performance team evangelizes best practices for improving web performance. Conduct research, build tools, write articles and blogs, and speak at conferences. Their best practices center around the rules for high performance web sites.
  (tags: design development performance webdesign webdev user-experience)
• Psytechnics: Tracking the Voice Experience
  “They’re not measuring the voice application piece: whether there was echo, whether the speech levels were too cold or too hot and so on. It’s not that they’re doing a bad job of it—they’re not doing it at all.”
  (tags: Psytechnics VOIP IPQOS user-experience monitoring)
• NetScout Gets Network General For $205M
  NetScout said it will acquire Network General from Silver Lake Partners and Texas Pacific Group in a cash, stock, and debt deal valued at $205 million.
  (tags: NetScout NetworkGeneral M&A networkmanagement monitoring)

• PacketTrap, Network Management Software, Network Monitoring, Network Discovery
  PacketTrap Networks is a leading provider of IT network management & reporting solutions, including free IT network management tools, and affordable enterprise-class network analytics, diagnostics, discovery, monitoring, and endpoint management platforms.
  (tags: PacketTrap appliance networkmanagement monitoring discovery)

• The Definitive Guide to Business Service Management - Realtime Nexus Digital Library
  The intent of The Definitive Guide to Business Service Management is to provide a framework for true management of IT service from a business perspective.
  (tags: bsm business-service-management Compuware)

A new TBSM 4.1 Interim Fix (007) is available on the support download site here. Ensure your TADDM installation is patched to the correct FP or IF level as well.

This version provides fixes to IBM Tivoli Business Service Manager 4.1 Discovery Library toolkit.

* Fixes that are included in this Interim Fix:

164321 - TBSM does not reflect deleted resources in TADDM business applications
IY98472- Problems handling deleted base classes in TADDM metadata.
IY99645- Performance improvements for TADDM imports
163212 - Namespace missing from WSPort
164995 - DL_TmpFile_CleanupInterval min value set to 4320
165159 - DB2 resources from latest zOS DLA are not displayed

TBSM DOES NOT REFLECT DELETED RESOURCES IN TADDM BUSINESS APPS (164321)

Resources that are removed from business applications in TADDM are not removed from the service views in TBSM following a bulk import.

PROBLEMS HANDLING DELETED CLASSES IN TADDM METADATA (IY98472)

TBSM maintains a list of classes that it collects from TADDM. Recent fixpacks to TADDM have implemented changes in the common data model, these changes included the deletion of classes that previously existed. TBSM continued to query for information on the deleted classes, resulting in exceptions that stopped processing.

PERFORMANCE IMPROVEMENTS FOR TADDM IMPORTS (IY99645)

This fix implements a number of changes to the methods used to import data from TADDM. These changes require that TADDM be at FP3 or higher.

NAMESPACE MISSING FROM WSPort (163212)

WSPort objects missing namespace attribute because of method of checking object types using base class attribute list.

DL_TmpFile_ClenaupInterval MIN VALUE SET TO 4320 (164995)

The minimum allowed value for DL_TmpFile_ClenaupInterval has been changed to 4320 seconds (3 days). This was changed to ensure that data would be maintained for problem determination.

DB2 RESOURCES FROM LATEST ZOS DLA ARE NOT DISPLAYED (165159)

Changes in the latest zOS DLA resulted in DB2 resources not being processed correctly.

• EMC Expands Solution Set for Managing IT Service Delivery
  EMC’s new management software solutions around IT compliance analysis, IPv6 network problem management, and storage service delivery
  (tags: EMC Smarts ITSM compliance IPv6 networkmanagement monitoring)