Today, competitive Business Service Management solutions must provide quick time to value, be highly effective, easy to implement and manage and truly enable progress towards a business aligned organization and operations. In my efforts to assess and increase the Business Service Management readiness of our vast products within IBM Tivoli, I’ve just completed a quick first cut for our core monitoring product and associated monitoring modules. My results don’t shock me, and we have a long ways to go. I hope this can set a benchmark towards improvement in 2008, a year which brings significant change and potential for the BSM solution suite.
In my initial list of assessment areas below, I’ve tried to focus where I feel attention is needed “if I were king for a day”. Historically, we’ve focused on integrations at the back end and front end. We’re starting to focus more on some other useful areas via our navigation and reporting initiatives, but we’re still not focused on BSM solution oriented content (although we’re talking a lot about solutions for this and that).
Every release of the core products enabling the IBM Tivoli Business Service Management story (does everyone know what this is?) must include content into the core Business Service Management products including Netcool/OMNIbus and Tivoli Business Service Manager (TBSM). If we’re not doing this, we’re forcing our clients to take these tasks on themselves further increasing their workload, product management lifecycle, and drastically increasing their time to value from these investments. We absolutely must have value added content out of the box (or immediately available on OPAL) that coincides with every significant release of enabling technology (ITM, ITCAM, TWS, TPC, etc.) to be competitive within the BSM marketplace.
As I understand things within the ITM world, we include specific workspaces and reports with each release (core, IF, FP, etc.). Taking this work into consideration, exposing this with the appropriate Business Service Management context within our BSM products is a logical step. While every client environment will be unique and different, the trick here is to get to something that is 80% there that can be customized the rest of the way by our clients. Are there documents describing content associated with TEPS workspaces? Are TEPS workspaces just structured queries into TDW, TEMS and TEMAs? How would one find out about the queries used to drive a TEPS workspace? I’m sure someone could create a magic script to convert this stuff to relevant configuration components for a TBSM content pack.
The assessment lists things that I think are the relevant within the managed system, Netcool/OMNIbus and TBSM to further expand our end-to-end BSM solution and story using ITM based monitoring. I would like this to be a topic for discussion at DevCampTivoli. How can we do it? Should Tivoli do it? Should it be community driven? Would it provide value? Would it speed time to deployment? Would it enable more successful demonstrations, proof of concepts and sales? I certainly think so!
What are your thoughts?
Check out some of my other thoughts for improving the end-to-end BSM story here:
BSM Profile Concept for ITM 6.x
BSM Descriptor File Concept for ITM 6.x
Oranizational Structures for BSM Success
BSM Situation and BSM Event Concepts for ITM 6.x
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