dougmcclure.net — thoughts on business, service and technology operations and management in the digital transformation era

Interesting Links for August 13th

by delicious on August 14, 2008

in General

Links that I have found interesting for August 13th:

eTelemetry | Turning Network Traffic Into Business Intelligence – eTelemetry develops solutions that help enterprises in any industry derive real–time business intelligence from people’s activity on the network. Our network solutions have been deployed in enterprises ranging from world-class hotels to architecture and engineering firms, government agencies, and universities.
Competing Visions of Enterprise Data Center Management at Mainframe Executive – This is where IBM also sees data center management going. It’s less about managing individual devices, systems, applications, or data. Just keeping systems up and running is no longer enough. Now data center management is about BSM, meeting service commitments, and aligning with strategic goals.
…

IBM’s new management vision and the new Tivoli toolset, however, may be more complex than some customers need. “For us, a lot of the Tivoli suite is overkill. The footprint is more than we want now. We’re more incremental in our management approach,” says A. Harry Williams, director of technology and systems at Marist College in Poughkeepsie, NY.

…

Underlying the jockeying among Tivoli, CA, BMC, and others for leadership of this new generation of data center management is “the issue of full lifecycle cost, which can give one vendor a tremendous advantage,” says Day. This dramatically changes the tool selection equation.
ASG updates its MetaCMDB software – Network World – MetaCMDB 3.2.0 is available now and pricing begins at $600,000.
** Does it do the laundry and cook dinner too? **
ITIL v3 and Business Service Management – So what does ITIL V3 have to do with BSM?
BSM is now an ITIL best practice. ITIL V3 defines it as “the ongoing practice of governing, monitoring, and reporting on IT and the business service it impacts.” It’s an approach that leverages processes and technology to make the goals of IT and the goals of the business one and the same.
The Business Of IT: Are You A Stuck-In-The-Mud IT Manager? Here's How To Save Your Career – It's All About The Business: The key to making the CIO, the tech managers, and the whole IT department a strategic part of the business is to understand that IT is a part of the business that deals with a specific business area (technology) just like the rest of the business. This means that it needs not only the code jockeys but also the business heads to make the whole thing work.
The Business Of IT: Here's What's Really Wrong With IT And How To Fix It – What would this do for a CIO? First it would instantly boost his / her respectability. All of a sudden everyone would realize that the CIO and the IT department were really part of the company and that they were working to make a profit also. This would allow the CIO to start to take on different information management tasks that showed real value to the company. Finally! Alignment would be possible.
The Business Of IT – So what do CIOs spend their time doing? The gut answer would be playing solitaire and shopping on eBay; however, I'm hoping that is incorrect. The survey says that CIO spend less than 10% of their time managing IT operations. Since CIOs aren't spending their time dealing with strategic issues, they end up spending it on tactical issues and then justifying their tactics. What a waste!
One of the reasons that the CIO is in such a bad situation is because the survey reports that in only about 66% of the companys did the CEO advocate IT as a strategic asset. Without this support, the IT department has no support at the strategic level of planning.
The Business Of IT: I.T.I.S. (It's The Information, Stupid!) – Who's to blame for the current situation? Well, we IT departments have more than our fair share to bear. All too often we interact with business customers using technology terms. When we do this we are seen as the "geeks" that we really are instead of business partners. What we should be doing is talking business with the business folks and reserving our technology discussions for when we are back within the IT department and talking with our teammates.
Final thought: hide the technology and the data from the business customers. Instead, talk with them about information systems and the types of information that they need in order to help the company be successful.
Jaspersoft Delivers Business Intelligence Development Platform for NetBeans and MySQL – iReport is the graphical report and dashboard design tool for JasperReports, the world's most popular open source reporting product and the Duke's Choice Award winner at last year's JavaOne conference. iReport has been available in Beta since December as a native NetBeans plug-in, during which time it rapidly became the most downloaded plug-in by this community of 600,000 developers from more than 130 countries. iReport developers deploy their reports with JasperServer, which includes a secure repository, dashboards, scheduling and ad hoc reporting. iReport and JasperServer are included in Jasper for MySQL.
StrikeIron SOA Express for Excel – Bring your SOA to life in minutes! Build rich composite applications quickly and easily within Microsoft Excel without any programming. Traditionally this has only been possible by hard-wiring Web services into Excel with complex Visual Basic programming. This is the first drag-and-drop composite application builder available for Microsoft Excel. SOA Express can leverage an entire library of services available within any SOA, enabling rich "live" powerful applications to be built in minutes.
Now, I.T. can put the power of live data directly to the desktop without any risk to internal data controls. And Business Users can build "live" Excel workbooks with real-time data available all over the organization and combine them with data that is available over the Web.
Next-generation BI at Hand, Forrester Reports – Despite the last 18 tumultuous months in the BI marketplace, a recent Forrester research report (The Forrester Wave: Enterprise Business Intelligence Platforms, Q3 2008) concludes that the BI leaders of today are much like those of two years ago: a handful of vendors — namely, IBM Cognos and SAP Business Objects, followed by Oracle Corp. and SAS Institute Inc. — still sit atop the BI platform market.
"IBM Cognos also tries to make it as easy as possible for its customers to migrate applications from one environment to another [e.g., development to test to production, for example] with a rich set of impact analysis utilities." Other Cognos advantages include not one but two OLAP engines (both PowerCube and the TM1, which Cognos picked up from the former Applix Inc.), as well as a business activity monitoring (BAM) appliance — Cognos Now! — which the company picked up via its acquisition of the former Celequest Inc. last year.
IBM WebSphere Business Events enables users to manage business events, flowing across systems and p – Business Event Processing (BEP) allows business users to define business events, those signals that something of interest has happened in the business and that triggers actions based on identified business event patterns. BEP allows business users to proactively define, analyze, and take action on changes occurring in the business to seize critical business opportunities or to mitigate risks.
WebSphere® Business Events is a software system designed specifically for managing the business events flowing across systems and people with the goal of providing timely insight and response. Business events are discovered and described in business terms to meet business objectives based on high-level management goals. WebSphere Business Events allows business users to detect, evaluate, and react effectively to the impact of business events.

WebSphere Business Events delivers this capability through intuitive business user tools that define, implement, and manage business events.

0 comments

Interesting Links for August 12th

by delicious on August 13, 2008

in General

Links that I have found interesting for August 12th:

Birt: A Field Guide to Reporting, Second Edition – This second edition, revised and expanded, adds updated examples and covers all the new and improved product features, including
* Cross tabs and OLAP cubes
* New chart types, including Gantt, bubble, tube, and cone charts
* Web services as a new data source
* New report output formats, including doc, ppt, xls, and PostScript
* The capability for reports to reference CSS
* Localization of report parameter and data values
End-user monitoring company hooks up with HP, CA – End-user performance monitoring company Knoa is working with Hewlett-Packard and CA on a project that could let IT managers get a more complete picture of application performance.
Knoa is one of a handful of companies in the end-user monitoring area, although other larger vendors such as IBM, HP and CA are incorporating end-user evaluation features into their back-end application management products. Knoa is now working with HP and CA on such a project, said Lori Wizdo, Knoa's vice president for marketing, in an interview last week.
Orb Data – ITM 6 Host Type Codes –
Orb Data – Configuring Process Control – Process Control executes external procedures specified in automations and manages local and remote processes such as ObjectServers, probes and gateways. The scripts can be installed on UNIX based platforms to allow the process agent to start automatically when the system boots.
Orb Data – Tivoli Common Reporter and BIRT – # ITM 6.1 SOAP Reporting with BIRT: The Basics
Introduction to using BIRT to create reports from the ITM 6.1 SOAP interface
# ITM 6.1 SOAP Reporting with BIRT: Parameters and Batching
Generating ITM 6 reports with BIRT using report parameters and the API.
# Alternate Row Highlighting
This tip shows how to highlight alternate rows in a table in BIRT.
Democratizing IT Service Management – This new social model for managing information collection and dissemination based on communities is a radical but interesting idea. The visionaries will see many other opportunities for this model, while others may consider it to be no more than a gimmick and point out many of the problems that its use raises.
However, this approach provides an opportunity for IT to break down the barriers that have previously existed between IT and its customers, and by using a community-based approach it can make IT more realistic to the end user in terms of cost and value.
Measure What Matters… Critique of the RFM Model – Like the Pharisees who would keep scripture-filled boxes around their arms at all times, us Marketers need to stay focused on ACTIONABLE analysis only. Whether it be customer survey data, customer behavior data, industry trend data, competitive analysis, or any other analysis activity, let us keep this question on our minds, “How will this information help me market MORE accurately and effectively.
I put the emphasis on “MORE” because you can waste your time tracking metrics that tell you something you already know from an ACTIONABILITY (<–new word) standpoint. Even if some new insight into your customers can enhance your marketing efforts, it needs to be approached from a cost/benefit perspective. In other words, “Will the changes I make to my marketing program from this new insight produce enough ADDED profit to justify the resources (time, energy, money) it takes to retrieve that insight?”
It’s All About RELEVANCE— A Broad Introduction to KPIs – To achieve your goals in the Age of Information, there are few principles more vital than that of Relevance.
For our purposes, Relevance is: the ability to sift out the circumstances, variables, possibilities, and data that do not give insight into the progress of your goals, in order to make a decision that will achieve those goals based on what matters, and nothing else.

A Key Performance Indicator is a super-concentrated piece of information that delivers maximum insight into the progress of your goals. In other words, Key Performance Indicators are the most Relevant factors in your decision making progress. If you have specific and clear goals for your business, then Key Performance Indicators do exist for those goals, whether you’ve been using them or not.
"We've Found the Killer App … and It Is Voice." – "In the investment banking world," Reidy said, "there's something called a Ready for Business check. At 6am every morning, the brokerage goes through a checklist—sort of like a jet at the airport before takeoff. They go through a checklist before saying, 'OK, we're ready for business today.' So, throughout the day, that brokerage's Ready for Business check is confirming that it's continually ready for business. Even this call we're on, there's a constant check to confirm that the call is satisfactory. It's taking the equivalent of a Mean Opinion Score (MOS) score through several metrics every 8 seconds, looking for peaks and lows, and packet loss and jitter, then combining all those metrics into a database for comparison, trending, and troubleshooting. We're constantly testing and monitoring networks."
** What are you doing to check that your critical business services, applications, transactions, processes and activities are "Ready for Business"? **
Mainframe confidence growing, survey says | IT PRO – Almost two thirds (63 per cent) currently operating separate mainframe and distributed systems said having shared tools and applications across both platforms was very important and something they plan to implement. While broad business service management (BSM) disciplines including service desk, change management and IT service management were seen as particularly important tool set features.
IBM SJ 47-3 | SOMA: A method for developing service-oriented solutions – Service-oriented modeling and architecture (SOMA) has been used to conduct projects of varying scope in multiple industries worldwide for the past five years. We report on the usage and structure of the method used to effectively analyze, design, implement, and deploy service-oriented architecture (SOA) projects as part of a fractal model of software development. We also assert that the construct of a service and service modeling, although introduced by SOA, is a software engineering best practice for which an SOA method aids both SOA usage and adoption.
More on the IBM/ILOG Relationship » Smart (Enough) Systems, the blog – IBM was getting focused on events, rules and policies – they talked about Points of Agility, points in a business where variability is critical to success. Rules, analytics, business events and policies were all identified. While today’s briefing could not cover any future plans, I did get an overview of IBM’s current relationship with ILOG.

0 comments

Interesting Links for August 11th

by delicious on August 12, 2008

in General

Links that I have found interesting for August 11th:

Real ITSM | Making IT real – Idealised models such as ITIL®, COBIT and ISO20000 are all very well for theoretical discussions, but more and more people are discovering these models just don't fit the way we do things in the real world.
Join the movement that is sweeping the ITSM community. Find out about Real ITSM, as it is done in the real world.

Making IT Real. Get Real.

Real ITSM is created by The IT Skeptic.
Dorado Software Announces Redcell(TM) OpsCenter for Automated, Converged Network, Systems and Storage Management – with Redcell OpsCenter, multiple vendor and technology devices can be proactively monitored in a single platform allowing administrators to identify the root cause of problems within minutes, versus hours, or days. Its multi-technology coverage includes routers, switches, wireless gear, security appliances, servers, PCs, storage devices and networked printers.

0 comments

Next Posts Previous Posts