Category — Business

Just thinking out loud here…

• What’s it really take for a community to start and evolve?
• Who must participate?
• Who shouldn’t participate?
• Who should facilitate?
• How does the “What’s in it for me” get addressed?
• Is this really what a community serves? Free support, free tools, utilities, open access to information?
• If this is true, can “real” relationships ever be realized?
• How transparent should the community be?
• Does transparency/openness help/hinder participation?
• Should everyone be able to see who’s participating, where they work, their background and motives?
• Should companies incent/encourage/mandate participation by their SMEs and practitioners?
• How should they?
• Who has the best community and what makes it so good?
• What’s an example of a bad community?

Thoughts?

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?

“B” is our middle name. We have “B” scattered throughout everything that we do. At times we fight over who owns the “B” word. I’m in search of a unified “B” story and solution. IMO, if we had this, it’d be tough to compete with us in any of the “B” acronyms.

The “B” Business TLA’s: Business Service Management (BSM), Business Process Management (BPM), Business Performance Management (BPM), Business Activity Monitoring (BAM), Business Transaction Management (BTM), Business Intelligence (BI) and I’m sure there are others.

What’s it going to take to have a unified “B” story and solution? Sure, we’ve probably got mentions in individual roadmaps and presentations of how we’ll integrate with this, share data what that, use Cognos here or there, send events from one tool to the other, etc. but what about a real “B” solution? IMO, these approaches just prolong client value and significantly delay any real innovation in core products.

What’s the cost of “forking” and creating a new solution entirely? One that focuses on becoming best of class in all of the “B” areas (ok, at least do all of them pretty darn good)? One that can be implemented and managed by one team free from (well, probably not) the organizational politics that’d exist if it was a “solution by integration” solution. One that has the best possible chance of truly aligning business and IT. Ok, this is probably cost prohibitive, but its GOT TO BE THE END GOAL!

This is where the politics come in unfortunately…where would you start? Which “B” is the most important “B”? Is it Business Service Management - my preference is here of course. Our friends in other organizations would see it other ways for sure. We must find the right way to develop the “B” story and solutions in ways that are most beneficial to the client. We must include content in each others products that “treads” on each others turf. We must have joint releases that build towards the unified “B” story and solution. When we release a new business process management suite (BPMS) we must include dashboards, models and integrations that provide value OUT OF THE BOX inside our BSM product. This must be backed up with the business and services consultants who have consultative based skills to guide our clients through the process because this isn’t about the product as much as it is about working through the organizational problems and politics.

A unified “B” story and solution may sound like a pipe dream, but it’s what clients really want to strive towards and our competitors are making giant strides in this direction. What would your ideal “B” solution look like? If you were king for a day …

Let’s face it, here in North America most IT organizations are structured around functional silos of expertise. It’s not uncommon to see the Network Group, Windows Server Group, Unix Server Group, Mainframe Group, Application Group, Operations Group (NOC/OCC/ECC, etc), Tech Support/Help Desk, etc. These functional silos support everything and anything the IT organization delivers for the business. Organizing this way seems to be the norm here in the United States as it allows for certain economies of scale to be achieved in the functional silo areas. I’ve seen weekly/monthly reports highlighting measures such as “server admins per 100 servers” or “network engineers per 100 interfaces” as the key contribution from within the functional silo. The “we can do more with less” battle cry was born of the days of controlling costs and headcount. This process of organizing to achieve economies of scale is generally fairly broad at the lower levels of the IT infrastructure and tapers as you progress up the stack. There are fewer experts in the application areas, fewer database, web and application server administrators, etc. About the only time you see someone who claims ownership for a key business or IT service may be found in a “Product Manager” type role serving as a bridge (roadblock) between IT and the business.

Let’s look at this from the operations perspective. The typical Network Operations Center (NOC), Operations Center, Enterprise Command Center (ECC) or Help Desk are the “ones” who get “stuck” with some level of responsibility for how the business, clients, customers, etc. use the sum of all the parts developed and delivered by those functional IT silos. They get the calls that the service is unavailable, that transactions are failing, that the business is being impacted by poorly performing IT services, applications, etc. They resemble the responsible party, but generally aren’t given the responsibility, access, authority or tools to be anything more than ticket and triage experts who know how to follow the run book to escalate the tickets before the timer for the SLA is violated. Fair enough, this capability is needed.

But who really owns the service? Who owns the business experience? Who owns and is responsible for poorly performing services that impact business goals and objectives? Who doesn’t get their bonus paid out in full? Who gets a poor performance review? Who will stand up and take responsibility for the end-to-end service instead of pointing a finger towards another functional silo? Who will work with the business directly, in partnership, to manage the service as a whole, top to bottom, across all technologies, integration points, applications, and functional IT silos?

You’re all very well aware of how these organizations work. There is constant focus and incentives on silo specific tasks, projects and activities over end-to-end service delivery goals and objectives. Finger pointing, territorial mud slinging, gnashing of teeth, etc. are the water cooler conversations after the traditional “all hands on deck troubleshooting crisis conference bridge” session is complete. Do the goals and objectives of Business Service Management (BSM) have a chance becoming reality in these environments? I don’t think so. If these groups can’t check their emotions and egos at the door and realize that they exist for the business to meet business goals and objectives, Business Service Management will never mature to a high level in the Business Service Management maturity model. Yes, Business Service Management projects often start within these organizations. Yes, Business Service Management projects may be viewed as successful in these environments. But moving up the maturity model to a point where quantifiable value and direct business improvement can be measured will be a significant challenge in these organizations.

I don’t think this end-to-end service owner is the VP or Director of IT, MIS, or other common IT management roles or functions. They certainly play a role, but I have a feeling they’re just too distracted with the other pressures of running IT organizations today. I don’t think this is the Operations Center or Help Desk. These folks are often in the trenches, fighting fires, and dreaming of getting in front of problems rather than reacting to them. They do a great job managing the lifecycle of outages and incidents in the IT environment, escalating, communicating and manning the phones and this is a needed function as well. I’m not sure if this needs to be a new organization that breaks down those functional silos into functional service silos. It may make sense in smaller organizations to consider this, but you do need to have some economies of scale to manage larger environments. I see the early stages of Service Managers here in the USA but these tend to be too closely aligned with ITIL and IT process improvement efforts. They don’t appear to have enough responsibility to do anything other than define SLA/OLA/UPC’s related to service delivery and support.

Does a service management/ownership matrix overlay organization make sense? A matrix overlay that has named senior level ownership responsibility for each service where this senior level owner may be from the IT side or the business side of the organization. One that joins together named functional SME’s across the service delivery, service support silos AND from the business side to form a cross-functional, cross-organizational team that can step up to the plate in terms of service delivery and support ownership. One that has complete ownership of the service, associated transactions, processes, activities and flows that deliver IT and business services. Their goals and objectives would be aligned to service delivery and support that is in complete alignment with business goals and objectives.

Expanding the tenants of Business Service Management and IT - Business Alignment across an organizational structure similar to this would be a huge step forward in realizing the true and measurable value of Business Service Management. Aligning technology components with the business services and applications they deliver and support is an initial step, but aligning people, process, goals and objectives with the same is HUGE. I’d be very interested to hear your thoughts and comments on these ideas. What works, what doesn’t work, are organizations thinking like this? Am I way off base thinking like this???

Additional food for thought:

• New roles of the service aligned organization: Business Service Management (BSM) Analyst, Business Service Management (BSM) Architect, Business Service Architect, Service Modeling Architect, Transaction Management Engineer, Process Management Engineer
• Traditional IT organization management evolves into the emerging Enterprise Architecture function
• Shared IT Services, Virtualization, Grid and Utility Computing could be a key component to underpin this service aligned organization
• How to sell / deploy BSM into the “traditional” IT organization
• How to sell / deploy BSM into an emerging and evolving IT organization

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.