With Tivoli Business Service Manager (TBSM) v4.2 planned for general availability within the next few months, I feel that it’s very important that I provide some insight into things that all of our current (any version) and prospective TBSM clients begin to consider in advance of their migration/upgrade to or initial deployment of TBSM v4.2 in the near future.
The next generation of Tivoli Business Service Manager (TBSM) is different and offers opportunities for reevaluating the past to succeed in the future. The architectural options, operating scenarios, product features and capabilities are likely significantly different than those you may be currently using today. To fully exploit the new release, I will be sharing some thoughts and ideas for you to consider as you plan for your upgrade/migration or initial deployment.
First off, I strongly encourage you to not treat your migration and upgrade as just another routine step in the TBSM maintenance lifecycle. I strongly recommend that you reevaluate how you’ve used TBSM in the past. You may not need to do everything you’ve done previously – and probably shouldn’t anyway. There may be many more efficient alternative approaches you should consider.
I’d start be brainstorming some fairly simple and straightforward questions.
- Are you getting the expected value from your previous TBSM deployment?
- Does it provide measurable benefit to the business?
- Is it a critical application, used daily or something that’s occasionally referenced?
- Does it make peoples jobs easier?
- Do you know exactly why something is in there, what causes it to turn red, yellow or green?
- Is it kept up to date and accurate?
- Do you enjoy using TBSM within your operating environments?
- Does it make peoples jobs easier?
- Do your operations and support teams “trust” what you’re showing them?
If it’s hard for you to answer these questions or your answers are less than positive, it’s really important that you think deeply about how you’ll adopt TBSM v4.2 within your environment. I strongly believe that with the right strategy, roadmap, design and plans, you can significantly improve your implementation of TBSM and its acceptance within your organization.
Furthermore, I’ve seen far too many operating environments over the past few years that have yet to adopt a true consolidated operations environment. Are you operating in a silo with your current TBSM deployment? Is TBSM only used for the network, distributed or mainframe group within your organization? Why? Why not consider leveraging the industry leading capabilities of the Netcool/OMNIbus dependency and deploy a consolidated TBSM architecture? Work the organizational problems; establish the vision for consolidated operations and true end-to-end service management within TBSM. You have the technology and product capability, why not use it? Your chances of realizing true value oriented Business Service Management are very poor if you can’t work towards this consolidated model.
The more effort and time you place in architecture, design and planning, the more successful you will be. Your tactical efforts will ultimately fail without a strategic direction and purpose. TBSM v4.2 and the Tivoli Integrated Portal (TIP) platform offers many new architectural options to consider. Become familiar with these and the plans for broader based TIP adoption across the Tivoli portfolio. If you have a goal of a consolidated TIP architecture servicing the needs of numerous core products, the typical enterprise tools groups will need to ramp up skill sets in this new area quickly. Capacity planning, performance, large scale high availability and failover are all areas worthy of significant investigation and testing.
If you own other soon to be TIP enabled products such as Netcool/WebTop or Tivoli Network Manager (ITNM), how will you design and implement a consolidated platform for multiple TIP enabled products? Will you take advantage of the Tivoli Common Reporting (TCR) capability? How will you plan for broad based TCR usage? Will you use a batch oriented reporting mode to avoid potential performance impacts on the core products? What will your access, authentication and authorization schema be? How will you leverage the new Single Sign On (SSO) capability?
I’ll try and cover as many areas as I can without getting into any confidential areas while products are not in a GA state. I think there are a lot of things that should be done now and even more as the products are GA and available for you to explore within your lab or development environments.
Next up – the importance of events.
Shameless plug
IBM Tivoli Services and our TBSM AAA Accredited Business Partners are always available to help advise and consult with you in these areas. Please do not hesitate to contact me at anytime and I can help arrange further discussions.
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