Is your Tivoli Monitoring, Netcool/OMNIbus or TBSM Organization Structure a Barrier to BSM Success?

Many of the clients I work with have dedicated groups within the IT organization, operations or monitoring group based on common monitoring or product areas. For example, many larger Tivoli clients have a dedicated distributed systems monitoring group that is responsible for all ITM based monitoring, another group responsible for event collection and management with Tivoli TEC or Netcool/OMNIbus and yet another group tasked with deploying application discovery and mapping (TADDM) and business service management solutions (TBSM). Sometimes these groups fall under the same first line manager, but more often than not they do not.

I get the need for silo based organizational structures such as functional area and product specific groupings. This is the old school way of organizing the SMEs and getting work done. It’s the assembly line, work comes in and work goes out, add a monitor here, threshold there and move on to the next request or problem. It develops and reinforces the SME concept within these areas. Great, we have “lifers” who do one thing or another for a long time.

Business Service Management (BSM) is all about the instrumentation and visibility into the end-to-end service. BSM solutions depend on the ability for highly accurate information flowing from all of the core business service monitoring domains. BSM absolutely requires being able to work within an organizational structure that promotes collaboration and communication between the functional organizations within IT, operations or monitoring groups AND external to these comfort zones out into the business service SME groups (dev, support, etc.) AND most importantly with the LoB. BSM requires a common vocabulary, workflow and “style” that old school monitoring organizations are just not very “hip” to. I find many areas of the traditional IT organizational structure flawed and many are plagued by folks with “blinders” on (not my job, not invented here, etc.) and nobody with a sense of end-to-end ownership for business service management and monitoring. These cancerous attitudes and organizational structures are significant barriers to Business Service Management success.

In an effort to find the ideal collaborative and organizational approaches for creating powerful, value added BSM solutions, DevCampTivoli has been created. The theme for this event is “Collaborative Development of End-to-End BSM Solutions”. The desired outcome is to identify optimal approaches for how to best organize and collaborate within the typical IT, operations or monitoring organization so that the ITM, Netcool/OMNIbus and TBSM groups can work better, smarter and faster with an explicit focus on implementing BSM solutions within those products. We will experiment with various approaches and techniques and share our findings and success (of failure) stories. Whatever the DevCampTivoli produces will be freely available to anyone to take, modify and use to improve their BSM deployments.

Take a few minutes to visit DevCampTivoli. This event will be the May 17-18, 2008 which is the weekend before the annual IBM Tivoli User Conference Pulse 2008 in Orlando, FL. The thought and hope is that SME’s and practitioners in ITM, Netcool/OMNIbus and TBSM will already be coming to Pulse 2008 and will be able to come in a couple days earlier to participate.

More to follow…