Links that I have found interesting for October 19th:
- Remind me what we’re doing again? • The Register – While efficiency and effectiveness may be laudable goals for service management, they do require a handle on why the business needs certain services delivered in certain ways – and this information may not always be forthcoming particularly if the business has suffered poor service delivery in the past. There’s also that strange perception from customers, that IT can in some way second guess what the business needs – “Isn’t that IT’s job to know?” which can make it even harder to understand what the business is trying to achieve.
- BI’s next round: more conversational – Ted Cuzzillo’s BI. – But today, BI platforms make contributing difficult. "BI designers decide what reports are going to be out there, and that's the well you can drink from." Instead, people should be as free as in any conversation to make new syntheses, to comment, to recommend — "all the things you'd expect at a dinner party. BI doesn't feel like a dinner party, does it?"
"I suspect," he said, "that even though we don't see it within formal tools, it really is happening, such as through email, spreadmarts, the water cooler and such."
First comes culture. "If you don't have that culture that draws people into that practice [of collaboration]," said Scott, "you can have all the tools in the world and it isn't going to help."
Next come tools. "There are technological things we can do to make contributing more routine." He mentioned two mashup tools he likes: JackBe and NetVibes.
The entrenched players are going to change, he predicts. Either Cognos and BO and the others will become more like them
- Your Investment in BSM – Guidelines to CIOs – The BSM Review Blog – I offer the following rule-of-a-thumb guidelines to assessing whether the price quoted by a vendor for a BSM initiative is right:
1. Standard maintenance costs: Insist on a 1:1 ratio between license and standard maintenance over a 5 year period. If standard maintenance costs over this period exceed the corresponding license costs, chances are the vendor's software accrued a non-negligible amount of technical debt.
2. Premium customer support costs: Certain premium customer support services could be quite appropriate for your business parameters. However, various "premium services" could actually address deficits or defects in the BSM products you license.
3. Professional services costs: Something is wrong if the costs of professional services exceed licensing cost. Either the BSM product suite you are considering is not a good fit for your business circumstance or your BSM initiative is overly ambitious.
- BMC Software to Acquire Tideway – BMC Software (NYSE:BMC) today announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire privately-held Tideway Systems Limited (Tideway), a leading provider of IT discovery solutions. The acquisition will enhance BMC's Business Service Management (BSM) platform and help organizations minimize the risks associated with business-critical initiatives such as data center consolidation, virtualization and compliance.
- Business Service Management: Insights and Next Practices :: BSMReview.com – BSMReview.com is dedicated to next practices in business service management. Our goal is engage the professional community, the analysts and the practitioners, to examine emerging practices; analyze the value, scope and nature of business service management deployments; and create a vendor-independent forum for open discussion. We believe that only through an exchange of ideas that is unfettered from the revenue and branding objectives of vendors and from the research agenda of any one analyst firm can BSM become a dynamic contributor to the evolution of IT as a welcomed business partner within the enterprise community.