Category — Business Assurance

Think you’ve got what it takes to turn complex data into something easily understood by an executive? Got a special knack for creating dashboards, reports, charts or graphs? Do this in your day job or as a (weird) hobby? The Business Intelligence Network announced its 2006 Data Visualization Competition. Download the spreadsheet and take a look at this contest based on five different business scenarios.

I like scenario #4 and may give it a go:

“You are a consultant who has been hired by a U.S. commercial airlines to design a dashboard for its executives. The information that the executive team wants to monitor has been identified and now its your job to create the dashboard’s visual design. You must try to display all of this information in some manner on a single screen such that the executives will be able to quickly identify anything that needs their attention and then have the means to discern enough about the situation to decide if they can ignore it for now or must perhaps take some action. It is up to you to determine the appropriate manner, level of detail, and means to display each piece of information.”

Fore more information, visit here.

I heard something I really liked today at the Atlanta IBM Tivoli ITSM roadshow from one of our sales folks. When you introduce yourself or tell someone what you do for your company - simply add the phrase “supporting the business” afterwards.

Such a simple and powerful way for anyone in IT to really understand their purpose in life.

Ismael talks about how clients are asking for more content out of the box from their BPM vendors.

It’s certainly a similar problem in other vendor product and technology areas as well - and a big reason I came onboard Micromuse / IBM Tivoli was to contribute in this area. Will we be everything for everyone, of course not. Are we on the right track, I think so. I’ve been in more converstations recently that all sounded very similar - more out of the box, less “do it ourselves”, more vendor support and quicker.

Resources will always be challenged and budgets tight. We’ve got to rally the troops (clients, practitioners, partners, vendors) and work togther on some of this stuff - in accordance with open standards and practices. A set of ITIL templates straight from the books would go a long way towards giving people that 80% they need to start. Then allow them to EASILY customize, integrate and operationalize into their own environment. The Open Management Consortium may be the right place to start. Ismael, have you considered joining in this effort? Your technology would be a good fit!

I’ve got a huge list of things I’d like to do to enable our clients and partners via OPAL, ITUP and other similar IBM Tivoli outlets. The ITSM story and CCMDB come to life in June and I think we’ll be positioned very well with capabilities much like Ismael talks about. It’s neat to see the sum of all the parts come together to enable our clients with the potential to really make changes in their IT environments. Stay tuned for sure!

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?

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.

I received a lot of positive feedback from my presentation yesterday (and my other AAG peer’s prezos) on the Netcool BSM story and enabling products. The audience was made up of Tivoli Services, Support and Education (all part of ISST group) engineers and architects and a few GTS (the former IGS) architects.

I think the overview of what exactly BSM is and isn’t and how it relates to our ITSM story was helpful as well as the engagement tips in advance of my best practices document were also well received. I wish I had more comparable content on how Netcool/RAD relates to Tivoli Business Systems Manager (TBSM). Netcool/Impact stood on its own and they all seemed interested in the real world scenarios I covered from my past, especially the instrumenting, managing and visualizing of ITIL Change Management process (and maintenance windows) using Netcool/Impact, Netcool/Webtop and Netcool/RAD.

I did get to spend a lot of time talking to my peers working with TADDM (application discovery and dependency mapping) which will become the core discovery foundation for our CMDB. I hope to write some about this and our CCMDB (including Process Managers) soon in the blog.

I’m off to Hong Kong on Saturday afternoon to give a similar presentation at the Asia Pacific Tivoli/Netcool sales kick off. I’m excited about sharing the BSM story and talking about our solutions - but I’m worried about going crazy on a plane for 21 hours from ATL to ICN (Korea). I hope the combination of my laptop, iPod and books/magazines keep me sane. Any tips on long distance travel appreciated!

The folks over at RSSBus have taken a few more covers off of thier RSSBus product. I’ve played around with the RSSBus Desktop Server some now and continue to believe in the potential it has in many of the areas I write about in this blog, especially enabling the “average person” to publish events for consumption by business rules, event and visualization solutions. I’m very excited about the ability to suck metrics, kpi/kpm, etc. out of all those BASS out there!

Check out RSSBus here and download their public beta here. Read the whitepaper, it’s really good.

They’re keeping a blog here where you can follow the product’s progress. I’ve had private email exhanges with their CEO Gent Hito about their plans for the product. They plan to keep parts of it free and are considering open source for parts. Reach out and encourage them to consider this!