I’m recovering from my whirlwind trip to Hong Kong today. I figure I’d better post something this morning before I enter a zombie state later on this afternoon. I presented on the Tivoli Netcool BSM story and enabling products this week in Hong Kong for our Asia Pacific group. The presentation was a success and my conversations with my peers in this region even better. There are numerous BSM opportunities in flight across the region now and over time I’m positive they’ll prosper with the expanded product family and capabilities.
As I give this talk on BSM, I’m always interested in learning more about how well we’re doing with our BSM story. I asked a lot of questions about what BSM means in this part of the world and if our clients are ready to start their BSM journey. One thought I’m interested in exploring is with such a focus on quality (TQM, Six Sigma, supply chain, manufacturing, etc.) in this part of the world if that enables them to be better prepared for BSM? They certainy have gone through the exercises to know how to measure and monitor their environments, but does this make it easier to align those business activities and services to the underlying IT environment?
I enjoyed meeting some of the folks who’ve discovered my blog while in Hong Kong. It was a pleasure to meet Sunil, Pabs, Mani and discussing the ins and outs of BSM, ITSM and opportunities in AP. Hopefully they’ll join in the conversations here and share things from their part of the world!
We’re looking for beta testers for our upcoming release of ITUP – the IBM Tivoli Unified Process tool. I’ve posted a few times on this and what value it can bring to those considering or implementing IT best practices and aligning their people, processes and information with them.
Stroll over to the ITSM blog here and sign up by May 19th. (or kindly ask afterwords if you’ve got a lot of interest)
I received a lot of positive feedback from my presentation yesterday (and my other AAG peer’s prezos) on the Netcool BSM story and enabling products. The audience was made up of Tivoli Services, Support and Education (all part of ISST group) engineers and architects and a few GTS (the former IGS) architects.
I think the overview of what exactly BSM is and isn’t and how it relates to our ITSM story was helpful as well as the engagement tips in advance of my best practices document were also well received. I wish I had more comparable content on how Netcool/RAD relates to Tivoli Business Systems Manager (TBSM). Netcool/Impact stood on its own and they all seemed interested in the real world scenarios I covered from my past, especially the instrumenting, managing and visualizing of ITIL Change Management process (and maintenance windows) using Netcool/Impact, Netcool/Webtop and Netcool/RAD.
I did get to spend a lot of time talking to my peers working with TADDM (application discovery and dependency mapping) which will become the core discovery foundation for our CMDB. I hope to write some about this and our CCMDB (including Process Managers) soon in the blog.
I’m off to Hong Kong on Saturday afternoon to give a similar presentation at the Asia Pacific Tivoli/Netcool sales kick off. I’m excited about sharing the BSM story and talking about our solutions – but I’m worried about going crazy on a plane for 21 hours from ATL to ICN (Korea). I hope the combination of my laptop, iPod and books/magazines keep me sane. Any tips on long distance travel appreciated!
