One of the things that I like about working at IBM (specifically, ISST or Tivoli Lab Services) is their transparency. What I mean by that is much like the open source community that lives by their openness within code, development, documentation and support, IBM is very open in terms of its documentation and best practices.

When I’m surfing the net looking to learn about company X, Y or Z and their approaches towards technology, products and solutions such as Business Service Management, I always look for their user groups, documentation, best practices and other useful information that may show how they’re doing things. Do you know how successful I am? Not very! Why? I don’t know, but the general lack of transparency that other vendors has when compared to IBM does concern me.

Tivoli’s documentation, best practices and implementation guides (Redbooks), support, and user groups are pretty much wide open for the world to see. Also consider alphaWorks, developerWorks and OPAL!!

Transparent? Yes! Competitive differentiator? Yes! Like Open Source? Yes! Well, sort of. 🙂

I don’t know what’s cooler, that the President of FireScope went to the Van Halen concert or that he compared Business Service Management (BSM) to Van Halen’s innovative approach to going on the road with Eddie Van Halen’s son Wolfgang.

What can I draw from this? I think that the next generation of BSM will require out-of-the box thinking and new innovative ways to address the challenges of IT and business alignment. The next generation of BSM will take a different approach. It will find a new way of doing the things that the incumbents continue to do. It will find the diamonds in the rough like making BSM easier to implement and maintain, quicker time to value and powerful visualizations that get the point across in less than 10 seconds.

BSM compared to Van Halen and the President of an emerging BSM company who made the analogy…priceless!