by delicious
on October 19, 2009
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.
by doug
on October 19, 2009
I’ve stumbled across yet another community initiative for BSM today called BSM Review over at BSMReview.com. At first glance, this community effort appears to be heavily influenced by current/former analysts and BMC employees so the content focus may initially appear to be heavily in alignment with what their backgrounds are. If participation and true community evolves, hopefully this can become a long lived resource for “next practices” in BSM.
A quick search on LinkedIn shows many other BSM Community efforts. Heck, I even have mine structured but not released. Being able to span the “reality divide” and take solid concepts and get them into the hands of practitioners on the ground is the hard part and what’s really needed. I know I wasn’t asked to contribute/participate nor do I see any of the others who speak about BSM in the community regularly on board yet. Time will tell I suppose.
Emerging vendors in the BSM space are making this a reality by just taking the K.I.S.S. approach and incorporating the concepts, goals and objectives of BSM right into their technology. This is the right start approach for green field or brown field environments and maturing into the broader “process based” BSM over time is best. The Time to Value (TTV) barrier is what the BSM industry needs to smash through quickly so all the more communities, vendors, technologies, techniques or “next practices” are welcomed.
Welcome to the BSMReview.com gang and best of luck with your initiative!
by delicious
on October 15, 2009
Links that I have found interesting for October 14th:
- Software » Service Management • Workshop –
- Try these beans: Business Service Management – The thing is, tools exist out there which claim to be able to help IT shops do this. They might not all be marketed as ‘BSM’ but they are aimed at helping you ‘manage business services’. We have no axe to grind about which tools you find are any good, but what we do want to hear about is how you, or those more senior to you are going about trying to improve things in this area
- Alignment to the Core – Let’s start by being very clear. For any business everything must ultimately align to the success of that business, period. That being said we can now focus on how all of the various pieces that make up that business must align with each other. At a high level, it is obvious that all business activities must support each other for the business to be successful. However, what I have observed over the years is that alignment is easy to get lost in the multitude of daily pressing details that we must deal with.
- Internal IT must extend reach beyond ITSM – When I think about the various IT Service Management, or ITSM, frameworks I am concerned that they are very heavy on a contractual mindset and very light on a relationship mindset. I am not saying that we don’t need service level agreements or any form of commitment from IT to their customers. I am saying that if a contract is all you have for a relationship with a customer that relationship is destined to become adversarial very quickly. I am saying that IT must have an informed consultant relationship with all of their customers. To do that a number of things must happen.
- The Psychology of IT Service Management: Taylorism and ITSM’s Obsession With Process – ndeed in a large well known technology PLC, managers recently instigated a time-and-motion study of some of their ITSM procedures which felt a bit like being in a time warp. Also Taylor was an engineer. Like many of his IT antecedents he believed that applying epistemologies that have been successful in the sciences of the inanimate, to the animate (i.e. people) would yield great results for organisations. The flaws in Taylor’s approach signpost the failings of the obsession with process in the ITSM industry. Furthermore many companies in the post-modern era that have departed form the Tayloristic method have seen great success (e.g. Google, GoreTex, Semco). I am firmly of the belief that this is where differentiation and competitive advantage within the ITSM domain now lies. Companies that are brave enough to move beyond the accepted script and to implement a new paradigm may experience a quantum leap of progress over their rivals
