Posts from — July 2008
TNSQMC - Tivoli Netcool Service Quality Management Center
Tivoli Netcool Service Quality Manager (TNSQM), Tivoli Business Service Manager (TBSM) and Tivoli Netcool Customer Experience Manager (TNCEM) have been packaged as the new Tivoli Netcool Service Quality Management Center (TNSQMC).
I’ll be talking at length about what Service Quality Management (SQM) really is later, but IMO the easiest way to think of it as Business Service Management (BSM) for the Engineering/Network focused groups of Communication Service Providers (CSPs) such as wireline/wireless telcos.
Traditional BSM still is very applicable to the enterprise side of CSPs and is a must have in supporting the business of being a telco by understanding the IT impacts on the many OSS/BSS systems that exist within these environments (billing, provisioning, fraud/revenue assurance, accounting, legal, HR, CRM/ERP, etc.).
Now what I’m trying to find out is what content is provided for creation of value oriented solutions within TBSM. I’d expect there to be templates, instances, rules, service models, scorecards, custom dashboards, layouts, launch in context actions, etc. available for various audiences (NOC, Eng, Mgmt, CustSvc, etc.).
Some backgrounders:
SQM Solution for Telcos
Tivoli Netcool SQM Service Solutions
Tivoli SQM Story
Tivoli Netcool Customer Experience Management
Service Assurance Demo Scenarios
IBM® Tivoli® Netcool® Service Quality Management Center V4.2 delivers:
- An integrated dashboard-based solution for service availability, service quality, service level agreement, and customer experience management.
- End-to-end Service Quality Management delivered via common visualization and reporting measures, and reports against key metrics to more effectively manage critical services.
- A rich set of extensible, off-the-shelf service-specific solutions for voice, video, and data services, which dramatically reduces total cost of ownership and accelerates time to benefit.
IBM Tivoli Netcool Service Quality Management Center is used to:
- View combined business and technology service indicators to quickly determine the impact of events on availability and performance.
- Discover root causes of quality issues throughout the service path, while helping your efforts to maintain aggregate service levels and SLAs.
- Get a detailed understanding of the individual subscriber experience combined with broader service quality trends.
- Share service quality and client information across multiple business units.
- Invest in modular architecture to help you address initial needs more cost effectively, and then expand as your requirements evolve.
July 31, 2008 No Comments
links for 2008-07-31
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Best-in-Class organizations are taking an additional critical step and are measuring application performance not only from the perspective of their data center components, but also from the end user perspective.
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For BMC, the BladeLogic buy gave its Business Service Management (BSM) business a significant shot in the arm, industry watchers say.
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In a way, Spiceworks is providing a framework for users to “open source” select aspects of the product and the community in a controlled fashion. Spiceworks is providing good moderation of the user-generated content.
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“With proper process and organizational planning, CMDBs can reduce mean time to repair or overall downtime by as much as 70 percent,” says ASG’s Chief Technology Officer, John Connor.
**Nice qualifer**
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State of Kansas was mandated to find ways to consolidate operations and boost staff productivity… Ultimately, we experienced improved network availability and performance, increased staff efficiencies and lowered operational expenses.
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# Should traditional management frameworks be given a second look?
# Do system mgmt framework tools remain a good choice only for the largest of shops?
# Does open source provide a viable alternative?
# Are there alternatives to commercial frameworks? -
Event-driven architecture (EDA) and complex-event processing (CEP) provide early problem detection and predict future threats and opportunities before they materialize. They enable the situation awareness and sense-and-respond behavior enterprises need.
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Key to this is event driven data integration, in-memory data, predictive analytics and rules engines.
** CONVERGE INTO BSM 2.0 - BREAK THE IT AND BIZ BOUNDARY**
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Lombardi dismissed the move, saying it makes IBM little more than a “bottom feeder”: “Clearly this was a bottom-feeder acquisition for IBM,” said a Lombardi, after CBR asked for comment on the deal. “This is a non-event, especially in the BPM ma
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But to succeed against its main competitors in the BSM market, ASG has to transition from best-kept secret to most-visible IT management software challenger.
** Anyone have a contact here ? **
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written by renowned IT expert Malcolm Fry and other industry experts, provides a common sense, step-by-step project approach to building a CMDB
** Free Book **
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Analysts will share highlights from new research studies on IT service catalog, CMDB and enterprise application management
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Even if consensus is restored, different choices are being made across corporate boundaries and then mergers and acquisitions take place throwing the whole organization into disarray again.
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Anytime there is a difference in reward or perspective (e.g., operations focused on reliability, Enterprise architecture focused on flexibility) there will be opportunities to resolve conflict.
July 30, 2008 No Comments
ASG Business Service Platform (BSP) for BSM
I would like to talk to someone who is experienced with, currently uses (or has used) the Allen Systems Group (ASG) Business Service Platform (BSP) for BSM.
Please contact me via this blog post or direct.
Tks,
Doug
July 30, 2008 No Comments
Barriers to BPM, SOA, BSM, BAM Success
In an repost of an article from a couple years back, Robin Bloor provides some updated color on the state of BPM and SoA. It’s apparent that some of the other “B” buzz words have the same challenges that exist on the BSM front.
Things to ponder…
- How can these projects with such touted value to the business or IT be successfully implemented?
- Where are vendors falling short in helping “solve the organizational problems” that often cause these “B” projects to fail?
- Is throwing technology/product at the problem the best place to start?
- What should a next generation organizational structure look like? Can IT and Business organize around end-to-end business service/process delivery and support?
- How can organizations be incented, encouraged, mandated to have an end-to-end business service/process focus?
- Where success stories for BPM, SOA, BSM, BAM, etc. exist, how have these technologies been operationalized, organizations changed, workflow/process/procedure modified to reap the benefits?
- Is it foolish to think that any of these organizational challenges can ever be solved or at least minimized?
- Do we have generational issues here that will change as Baby Boomers retire and Gen X/Y/Z move up the ranks in IT and Business?
Give the post a read, I found these two very applicable to all of the things I’m seeing with BPM, BSM, BAM, etc.
Question 5: What are the most difficult steps within a BPM project – and what makes a SOA project tedious?
Answer: The most difficult steps within a BPM project are the early ones. The problem is cultural. As a fact of business history and IT history, all organizations are siloed. Hell, I know it’s a cliché and a platitude, but its also true. The siloed nature of organizations is ingrained. You have to get people to think end-to-end rather than silo. This means everyone, the business folk and the IT folk and any other folk who happen to be around. The IT folk are siloed too, you know. You need to “get their minds right” because with BPM you need cross-discipline teams who don’t indulge in turf wars.
As for SOA projects, I don’t believe one should even think in terms of implementing SOA as a project. SOA is a road and it’s a road that everyone will ultimately have to take, because it’s the road that the IT industry has already taken.
Is there anything tedious on this road? Yes there is; turf wars and inadequate technology.
Comment: It’s still true. It’s still the case that the cultural problems are the biggest block to SOA.
Question 6: What best practices do you recommend to organisations looking to initiate a BPM / SOA project?
I could write a book about this, in fact we did write a book; SOA for Dummies. So let’s just pick two things that I believe to be critically important:
Answer: Get sponsorship right from the top. There are many reasons why this is necessary, because SOA and BPM usually cause significant changes to an organization.
Also pick an easy first target. Make sure to go for low hanging fruit on the first project. You know what I mean, low risk, high benefit. You really don’t want the first project to stall in any way.
Comment: Now I would add, that you should look to implement comprehensive Identity Management as soon as possible and also go after coherent Asset management. The big note on the wall should read: “It’s the plumbing, stupid.”
July 30, 2008 No Comments
links for 2008-07-30
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NimBUS Real User Monitoring (RUM) is a cost-effective appliance that collects and analyzes actual application traffic, providing quantitative and service management reports with minimum effort.
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At Wright Patterson Air Force Base, for example, the staff uses the open source Nagios network monitoring program for its air handlers, chillers and PDUs, as well as environmental sensors placed throughout the floor.
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introduced Business Pulse XF, an executive “dashboard” that provides business and IT leaders with actionable insight about the impact of web performance on their business health.
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what I want to do is just change the main text which is sent from ITM to TBSM. Sounds simple?
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This keynote presentation will start by considering what events are, including identifying examples of typical IT events and non-IT events. It will continue by exploring the Forrester taxonomy for event processing…
July 29, 2008 No Comments
links for 2008-07-29
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** TBSM uses ILOG extensively for its GUI. I hope this makes the much needed GUI improvements a reality and I hope we include the capability for end users to build their own data driven GUI widgets now. **
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Ilog’s business rules management systems (BRMS) could be used to improve and add capabilities to a whole range of IBM product lines, including Tivoli and Lotus, the companies said.
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– Monitors application performance as experienced by the real users of HTML, AJAX, Flash and Silverlight applications
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TuringSMI Telecoms Division launched the SID Data Model for Atrium CMDB, enabling Communications Service Providers (CSPs) to manage their IT and telecoms network infrastructure more coherently, improving efficiency and reducing service interruption.
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“The Total Economic Impact of the BMC Atrium CMDB Solution”
-Provide a service-oriented view of the IT infrastructure. The BMC Atrium CMDB lets the customer manage IT infrastructure based on what has the most impact on the business.
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Applications of Vantify Experience Centre include business KPI dashboards for executives, service assurance, service and IT performance baselining and monitoring, and root-cause analysis for issues impacting Customer or Service experience.
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Prelert offers predictive service impact management software designed for Real Time Infrastructure
RiverMuse will offer similar features to Netcool Omnibus allowing Enterprise customers to reap the same commercial benefits that Service Providers have
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the thing that nobody seems to mention in the OSS/Enterprise Event Console market, is that cost of ownership is the key to an effective platform, not events per second. Events per second is easy, cost of ownership is a Tax.
* All eyes on this one folks!*
July 28, 2008 No Comments
Christmas in July? IBM acquires ILOG!
While I’m sure that TBSM’s use of ILOG wasn’t in the business case for IBM’s announced purchase of ILOG today, I am getting my hopes up that this is the Christmas present that anyone using TBSM is looking for.
TBSM makes extensive use of ILOG under the covers for the core of the canvas and visualization. We barely scratch the surface in capabilities (see demos below) in how its used, but it is the foundation for all of the data driven widgets used in the canvas, custom dashboards, etc.
Let’s face it, we have a long way to improve in our dashboarding and visualization capabilities. The acquisition and product convergence focus has been a significant impact on new innovation in this area within TBSM. With the upcoming release of TBSM v4.2 soon to be behind us, I hope that we can finally make investments where they are desperately needed within the data visualization, user experience, widgets, real time charting/graphing and general sex appeal areas for creating the dashboards expected of products in this price point.
TBSM 4.2 will give us a new platform to build upon, but it WILL NOT MAKE SENSE to develop other components (widgets, charts/graphs, analytics, rules, visaulziation, workflow, etc.) in the buzz word of the day (AJAX, Dojo, Python, RoR, PHP, TCR/BIRT) when we may have this ILOG portfolio at our disposal. (my opinion only, I ack the biz side of these decisions)
I strongly encourage you to voice your thoughts and requirements for improvement of TBSM’s capabilities in these areas via appropriate channels.
ILOG has a log of powerful capabilities to offer should we choose to take advantage of them. Better yet, equipping you to take advantage of them with self service designers, SDKs, APIs, etc.
For example:
ILOG Visualization Portfolio
ILOG Diagrammer (TBSM uses this)
ILOG JViews Demos
ILOG Elixer
ILOG Elixer Demos AWESOME! Look at Gauges & Dials Demo!
I hope this is the Christmas present we’ve all been waiting on for TBSM this time next year!
July 28, 2008 1 Comment
links for 2008-07-24
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a couple of years ago we decided to implement some of the functionality of Netcool into OpenNMS
** Links to more info on OpenNMS as Netcool alternative **
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Business Service Management, or BSM, traditionally has been defined as managing infrastructure and IT service management. With Enterprise IT Management (EITM), CA takes this concept a step further and incorporates governance, IT security and compliance.
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At the heart of the matter is the IT-centric nature of the service level metrics, most of which have little or no relevance to business end users.
** Anyone have this report? **
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The new predictive capabilities extend Spotlight’s value and allow users to predict the future performance of SQL statements.
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Properly planned and skillfully implemented, business service management or BSM has a unique value proposition that can help your organization deal more effectively with regulatory and compliance issues - among many other things.
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The fund diff btwn us and our comp is we believe the category in which we participate of BSM should be about proactive mon of IT perf rather than about capturing and resolving IT issues after the probs have occurred and the damage has been inflicted.
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An interdependency model is supposed to answer the question “how does one entity in a IT environment depend upon or influence other objects”
** A nice approach to add to my WYNTK on TBSM Design Patterns - very KISS! **
July 23, 2008 No Comments
