thoughts on business, service and technology operations and management

• Q&A with Doug McClure: Is BSM Lite the Answer? | ScienceLogic
  If we can get people to think, operate and respond differently than they do today with a focus on the business, customers or whatever else is most important to their business goals and objectives, than that is BSM and could be “BSM Lite” if you will.
  (tags: bsm business-service-management bsm_value bsmlite bsm4bu bsm4lob sciencelogic interview q&a netforcast)

• Software vendors and the bait-and-switch trick | The IT Skeptic
  Abbas Haider Ali, VP of Product Strategy, getting some advertising space over on Doug McClure’s normally more useful blog…

  ** Hmm, advertising has never been my goal or objective. **

  (tags: managedobjects mycmdb cmdb web2.0 itskeptic opinion)

I’m looking for a wiki platform that I can use to complement my blog. It could be something that I deploy myself (pureplay wiki, CMS based wiki, etc.) or something that’s hosted and allows complete customization and branding (domain, look/feel), etc.

Anyone have any recommendations? Examples?

Tks,

Doug

• Stop buying more technology, start maximizing current investments: Gartner - Network World
  “We still have IT organizations obsessed with acquiring new stuff. We need to get obsessed putting well-defined business processes in place to make us better at managing what we’ve already got,” Kyte said.
  (tags: bsm gartner analysts)

• IBM Service Management - ITUP v7.1.3
  * Now fully aligned with ITIL V3 framework best practices – includes significant updates and improvements
  * Includes updated IBM Process Reference Model for IT (PRM-IT) V3, which is also fully aligned with ITIL V3
  (tags: IBM Tivoli ITUP TivoliUnifiedProcess ITIL PRM-IT itilv3 bestpractices)
• 10 Steps to Simplifying Systems Management
  Here is some no-nonsense advice for implementing holistic systems management practices and tools in an organization.
  ** Unfortunately, easier said than done**
  (tags: systemsmanagement itsm)
• IT Gumbo: Aternity continues to make the proactive enterprise a reality (Interview with Trevor Matz)
  What gives Aternity its edge over its competition?
  Our integrated analytics correlation engine and virtualization support makes our solutions unique. These programs truly deliver immediate time to value
  (tags: Aternity, user-experience appmgmt applicationperformancemanagement performancemgt)
• IBM Tivoli lays off 150 workers, 30 in RTP
  “These resource actions are done to match customer requirements,” he said. “We’re continually evaluating the skills we need.”
  (tags: IBM Tivoli Layoffs ResourceActions)
• Removed link to old data from a IBM/Tivoli layoff in 2001
• ASG and Tideway Partner
  partnership with Tideway to provide customers with a single solution for complete discovery of both packaged and custom applications in mainframe and distributed environments.

  **Hmm, me smells M&A**

  (tags: ASG tideway bsm business-service-management appdisco discovery dependencymapping adm cmdb)
• On-demand Webinar Available - “Improving Event Resolution”
  Find out how you can reach your Business Service Management (BSM) goals by integrating and automating event resolution.
  (tags: entuity bsm events eventmanagement)
• Business Service Management Market Update by Peter O’Neill - Forrester Research
  BSM is treated differently across different regions: Asian IT organizations demonstrate more business acumen than their colleagues in NA and EMEA, while European projects tend to be more strategic with CMDB

  **Anyone Have This?**

  (tags: forrester bsm market bsm-maturity)

Abbas Haider Ali has recently joined the Managed Objects team as their new VP of Product Strategy. We’ve been communicating over the past few months and while he doesn’t bring “direct BSM” experience, his vision for shaping and guiding Managed Objects is likely to bring a fresh perspective to a well established company and to the overall BSM marketplace.

I’ve been after some technical practitioners at Managed Objects to participate as guest SME authors on my blog for some time now. They’ve recently launched their own blog, but I hope to still have someone from their team participate here. While Abbas’ initial post here is a bit more “sales/marketing” feeling than I prefer, he’s providing some good information here to “clear the air” on why the launch of the myCMDB application is unique.

Feel free to join in the conversation and ask Abbas and the Managed Objects team anything! I know they’ll respond!

* For a more interesting debate on the myCMDB topic, feel free to visit the ITSkeptic’s lively debate here or Charles Araujo’s post here.
———-

In late June, Managed Objects announced myCMDB and the reception to date has been far-reaching and overwhelmingly positive. We’ve also received a few follow up questions which we’ll do our best to answer here. Thanks for the opportunity, Doug!

What is exactly is myCMDB?

myCMDB is an application which incorporates structured social-networking and community principles to fulfill the promises of the CMDB to IT organizations:

• Improves CMDB data accuracy and accessibility – ensuring the CMDB provides a complete picture about the IT infrastructure
• Introduces next-generation in CMDB interaction – incorporating Web 2.0 principles for greater CMDB usability and personalization
• Delivers new analytics that provide better IT decision support
• Incorporates fast and intuitive search to make CMDB data retrieval easier
• Expands usage of the CMDB to a broad set of IT and business users
• Supports a complete range of control over how the CMDB is updated – from Wikipedia-style complete freedom – to approval based change control

Allow me to underscore the word application. myCMDB is designed to sit on top of an existing CMDB, be that our own product, CMDB360, a home grown CMDB or another product such as BMC’s Atrium.

Why did you build myCMDB?

Quite simply our customers – and those of our competitors – asked us to develop myCMDB. Okay, perhaps not in those exact words of course, but over the course of two years our research and experience has taught us that the biggest barriers to a successful CMDB implementation is the accuracy, currency, and usability of the data – especially across federated sources.

Federation allows IT organizations jumpstart their CMDB projects by taking advantage of the data that they have in areas such as asset management, discovery tools, dependency mapping solutions, element managers, etc. Managed Objects CMDB360 has been highly successful in the market because it delivers on these capabilities. Customers have been telling us that federating data isn’t enough and that it gives them a 70-80% solution – the rest is in people’s heads.

They key elements that are missing include an easy way to populate the missing information (which isn’t stored in any uniform fashion) such as relationships between IT elements, applications, and business services. In addition, the goal of a CMDB project is rarely to build a repository of information just for the sake of having it; rather it should deliver real value to all the parties who would contribute to it. Extracting and finding information in a CMDB typically requires deep understanding about its underlying structure and schema which is a real challenge in increasing adoption. We built myCMDB to address these challenges in the CMDB market.

Isn’t social-networking more about fun than work?

It seems like just yesterday enterprises were tackling the same question about instant messaging: businesses viewed IM as more pleasure than business. Today, I can hardly scope out IBM/Tivoli’s Web site without having a friendly customer service representative offering me assistance via chat. In the end, IM has earned a well-deserved reputation as a tool for connecting with customers and collaborating.

Managed Objects believes that the same is true for social-networking – but allow me the luxury of emphasizing the word “structure.” Structure can be likened to governance in that we clearly anticipate the need to set policies governing who has permission to view what data, or more importantly, to make changes to data.

We foresee the myCMDB world being divided into two broad camps: producers and consumers. At a high level, producers are the domain experts – the people that maintain the trusted federated sources, such as the network managers or application owners. Consumers might range from an executive audience viewing their service – to the change manager conducting an impact analysis – to the administrative assistant trying to get a definitive list of serial numbers for every laptop in his or her division without sending out another unit-wide e-mail with a spread sheet requesting an update.

How specifically will social-networking techniques be applied?

We’ve taken pages from the playbooks of several social-networking techniques and while I’ve described these below individually, in reality many of these are interwoven in myCMDB functionality along with the appropriate security and controls. Here are just a few examples:

• Facebook: The community experience afforded by Facebook permits participants to create groups relevant to their area of responsibility. Communities in myCMDB can be based on function, such as database or networks or on geography such as the datacenter in Dallas.

• LinkedIn: When a member of your LinkedIn network makes a change to their profile, you are automatically notified of that change. myCMDB has adopted this feature for notification and can be adapted for workflow or approval processes.

• Wikipedia: Allowing experts to fill in, tag, correct, update, or delete information that they possess results in an overall complete article or in the case of the CMDB a configuration item (CI). Owners and authorized parties can update information while others can view or link to it.

• Del-i-cio-us: Social bookmarking techniques enable a community of myCMDB users to share relevant information more quickly.

• Google Finance: One powerful feature of Google Finance is the ability to correlate events – earning calls or scandal – over time to the price of a stock. We’ve applied this feature to CIs for a historical view that correlates changes to impact.

Why is Managed Objects uniquely positioned to deliver this solution?

To understand the significance of the myCMDB application, it’s important to understand how differently Managed Objects approaches CMDB projects with our CMDB360 product.

As noted in this Data Center Journal article, Managed Objects views CMDBs as a component of BSM and to that end, our customers and experience tells us a CMDB should not be a big hunky centralized database – but it should have a centralized service view. “Some CMDB products require IT to extract, transform and load (ETL) data from their existing tools into a centralized database but the challenge here is multi-faceted: 1) it’s expensive, 2) the minute you extract the data its accuracy becomes dated, and 3) the amount of data being jammed into a centralized repository quickly becomes unmanageable. A better solution is federated approach we advocated with application-interface (API) level integration that “points” to the original source in real time or near-real time.”

Managed Objects has built a reputation for being masters of integration over the last decade. Not just SNMP integration but rather bi-directional, API level integration with a powerful engine to reconcile, synchronize and automatically model nearly any federated source or existing IT management tool. This is a marked difference from our competitors and this agnostic approach, based on open and modern technology, provided us with an opportunity to embrace social networking techniques for the purposes of solving a real business problem. Managed Objects just might be the first company to do as much.

Abbas Haider Ali is the vice president of Product Strategy at Managed Objects.

** An interesting note here that Managed Objects is using the killer MIT Simile Timeline code. I told the IBM Tivoli BSM PM’s that this was something they needed to include in our BSM products over a year ago - no response!

I need to speak to someone who knows a lot about CA/Wily products. If you can direct someone my way I’d appreciate it!

Tks,

Doug

I’ve been on the road for the better part of June attending our annual Tivoli Technical Education Exchange (TTEE) in Austin and starting a new global project with a Fortune 10 client for what’s likely to be one of Tivoli’s largest BSM/BPM/BAM deployments based on TBSM v4.1.1 ever.

I did managed to squeak a few posts out this past month. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking around the emerging area of predictive/proactive analytics tools such as those from Integrien, Netuitive and the former ProactiveNet (now BMC).

While I still think each must be more transparent with their secret sauce of what’s really happening so practitioners (not PHDs) understand it, I’m really more interested in the business case and buy decisions a potential client has for this investment (and how this is related to what clients aren’t doing in their monitoring environment or how us vendors are letting clients down). I’m also extremely interested in how clients expect to operationalize the solutions and implement the organizational changes required to move from a reactive to a proactive/predictive organization.

Hot Posts for June

In Top 5 Reasons for a Predictive/Proactive Solution I take a whack at what the drivers are for making an investment in these solutions. Please share your thoughts!

In Does a Proactive/Predictive Tool make for a “Proactive/Predictive” Organization? I ask some pointed questions to better understand and shape the discussion to areas I see more need. There is significant organizational transformation needed to reap the benefits of this technology (which was validated by at least one Netuitive customer in the comments). Please share your thoughts!

In What Business Service Management means to IBM Tivoli, what may be an unprecedented first for IBM Tivoli (at least that I know of), this detailed discussion on what Business Service Management means to Tivoli and the strategic and tactical directions the BSM solution will take over time is detailed. I’d love to see any of the other vendors (or IBM Tivoli PMs) open up with this kind of transparency. I hope that this raises the bar in the Business Service Management market and helps others CLEARLY evaluate vendors in an apples to apples way. (I hope to facilitate that more soon.)

In the “What’s BSM All About” Category

I’ve had the opportunity to speak with an emerging vendor named StackSafe of which I think every monitoring tools group should be looking at to help support their development, testing and release process. Denny Powell and I chatted about some of the leading Business and IT Service Management topics earlier this month in Doug McClure Tells a BSM Story”. Our conversation continues in Doug McClure Thoughts on BSM, ITSM and Change/Release Management. I encourage you to check out what StackSafe is up to.

Tivoli Business Service Manger (TBSM) Posts

We launched another interim fix for TBSM v4.1.1 here but it was quickly identified as having bugs when applied to a TBSM v4.1.1 deployment with failover. The symptoms I saw was the secondary TBSM server never started up. A new release has not been made available yet.

On the To-Do List for July

What else - WYNTK on TBSM Design Patterns…hopefully.
Collect more “BSM Defined Project” input. If you’re willing, share what BSM means to you & your company!