Category — ITSM

A couple posts with a bit of insight into activities. Sorry I haven’t had much time to ask for a follow up interview with the folks from the IBM team. Just difficult to find the time on everyone’s schedules!

Van Wiles over at BMC

William Vambenepe’s Blog

Neil Macehiter and Neil Ward-Dutton over at Software Infrastructure for Business Value have a great post that’s in complete alignment with the strategies and methodologies I’ve been talking about here for some time for working towards a real Business Service Management solution.

This is perfect - and really describes every vendor’s Business Service Management solution (including the one from the company I work at if not implemented properly).

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“The problem is that the vast majority of the technology and practice out there does nothing of the sort - at least not without the expenditure of a lot of blood, sweat and tears. To characterise the ITSM/app management/BSM “stack” probably crassly unfairly, all that happens as you move higher up the stack is that events and alerts are correlated at ever more abstract levels. Events from routers, servers and switches are aggregated to give higher-level views of health and performance of infrastructure; infrastructure events are correlated with stats from DBMS instances, application servers, web servers and more to give higher-level views of health and performance of “applications”; and information at the application level can sometimes be aggregated further.

But fundamentally all we’re doing is reporting on more chunky technology outcomes. The outcomes we’re reporting on are still technology outcomes. The insight is about performance, uptime, security, and so on. There is no business context.”

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They follow this up with the most difficult part - not focusing on the technology. As a former boss of mine said, “Doug, you’ve got to work the organizational problem”.

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“The real underlying point is that do really manage services that make sense in a business context, the whole mindset of the IT organisation has to be turned inside out. IT organisations have to stop focusing so much on internal perspectives of process improvement and efficiency (are we doing things right?), and start focusing a bit more on a more external perspective (are we doing the right things?)”

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It’s easy to ask the questions, but not so easy to change the status quo. As most of the Business Service Management or ITSM technologies and tools live far down inside the IT organization, these groups aren’t positioned nor generally encouraged to “rock the boat”. It takes a change agent who can offer some amount of “push” from the top to clear roadlocks and enable a different perspective such as is suggested in this posting. Unfortunately, this type of proactive support and change is not seen much and it’s usually a significant outage, pain point or “loud” LoB executive that forces this type of change and technology adoption to occur.

I hope the approach that we’re developing for Business Service Management, our methodologies and readiness assessments will help clients understand the importance of this line of thinking and that we can really help them “get there”!

Get ITUP v2.1.3 FREE (with registration) if you want to learn about IBM’s Process Reference Model for IT (PRM-IT), ITIL, eTOM, CMMI, COBIT 4, etc., how to incorporate these best practices into your own operating environment, align your tools and technologies to these processes, and these exciting new features and content.

This is the ONLY place to get the IBM PRM-IT material that I know of!! Any ITSM practitioner needs to add this to their reference library!

• ITUP now includes the same level of content as ITUP Composer 2.1
• Added task level workflows for 17 PRM-IT processes
• Added the full documentation set for Process Reference Model for IT (PRM-IT) V2 - over 1000 pages of previously proprietary material
• Added the ITUPC style “fully clickable” workflow diagrams
• Upgraded to support the newly available Process Reference Model for IT (PRM-IT) V2
• Improved Asset Management and Data Management processes with improved workflows and updated tool mentors
• Minor changes to other processes, including: Availability, Capacity, Change, Compliance, Event, Release, Service Execution and Service Level Mgmt
• Added an introduction to ITIL V3
• Added support for COBIT V4.1
• High-level swimlane diagrams moved to the process description tabs, which now complement the ITUP Composer style workflow diagrams
• Updated the generic Service Desk tool mentors to Tivoli Service Desk mentors
• Added new tool mentors for MRO Asset and Incident Management, CAM for WebSphere and CICS PA, updated several others for currency
• Improved tool in-context linkage to OPAL for ease of use and added support for new sub-catalogs: Netcool, CCMDB, PMPs and Autonomic Computing

In addition to our ongoing empahasis on IBM Service Management you’ll soon start to hear more and more messaging and positioning around IBM’s Governance and Risk Management focus areas.

IBM Governance and Risk Management
Techweb Portal on IT Governance and Risk Management

Dig in and get up to speed. I sense more cool commercials and ads in the future!

Just found the CMDB Federation white paper today. This is the much anticipated first deliverable from the joint working group made up of IBM, BMC, HP, Microsoft, Fujitsu and CA. You can download it here or here.

Update - Looks like they have the beginnings of a website now here.

Update - IT Skeptic’s Post here.

Hank Marquis has some good commentary here.

I will try and get some time on the calendar with some of the internal IBMers working on this effort and put another interview out there. I found out about this via a BMC Blog posting by Van Wiles here.

Interesting commentary will likely appear in the trade rags and skeptic blogs alike very soon.

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CMDB Federation Consortium completes white paper describing the CMDB Federation specification.

Well, we did it!

The CMDBF Consortium has completed its first objective, which is a white paper describing the proposed approach to federating multiple “Management Data Repositories” into a “Federated CMDB.”

A recent Tivoli Beat talks about how the Netcool brand is bringing traditional carrier and service provider Service Management concepts to the Tivoli IT Service Management (ITSM) story.

New marketing stories and webinars are planned for the beginning of October as well so keep an eye out for those. Read the Tivoli Beat story here.

Just released here.

All tied up into the BSM, CMDB and IT process messaging.

Question - Does BMC have a pure-play BSM solution or are they about the sum of all the parts?