Links that I have found interesting for February 26th:

• BMCDN: Announcing BMC Atrium Orchestrator… – It’s official, BMC Atrium Orchestrator 7.5.00 has (finally) achieved GA!
  here are some quick highlights of the release:

  * New Runbook for Virtualization Management – automates change tracking, provisioning, event triage and remediation for virtual machines; detects VMotion events
  * Significant usability improvements in workflow design, including a new Basic Transform Editor that provides for XML-free data manipulation and transformation
  * A new Integration Mapping Wizard that dynamically queries BMC Remedy system schemas and forms to allow for easy data mappings in minutes
  * Additional usability improvements such as auto-fill capabilities, custom icons, or date-time conversion functions that save hours on workflow development
  * An enhanced Operator Control Panel that enables Level 1 and 2 operators to launch pre-populated workflows from external systems and step through the details of sub-processes

• Web monitoring tools gain ground against Big Four – "We looked at traditional commercial monitoring software, but making changes is hard with those tools. Plus, IBM and BMC Software are pushing professional services and it drives up the cost and implementation time," Bailey said. "If you're looking at Tivoli, you'll have limited documentation, pay a huge amount of money, and they won't answer your questions.

  Our company is more focused on things that generate revenue rather than … spending time … on this.
  Ed Bailey,
  Unix team lead, a credit reporting agency

  "There is a 1,000% profit margin on enterprise event management software like IBM Tivoli NetCool and HP OpenView, but they are tremendously crappy products," Bailey continued. "We like looking at companies like Hyperic because of the rapid improvement of the tool. These smaller companies are aggressive and the tool will keep improving."

• Enhancing the IBM Tivoli Netcool/OMNIbus Mttrapd probe – This article will describe how to enhance the IBM® Tivoli® Netcool®/OMNIbus™ Mttrapd probe to allow for processing of custom/new management information base (MIB) files for systems communicating status using the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP). The solution will make use of the IBM Tivoli Netcool/OMNIbus Knowledge Library and the IBM provided MIB2Rules (m2r) utility. An example MIB file is supplied and used to illustrate key points.
• EHI Internetwork and Systems Management Inc. – EHI stands for: Excellence, Honesty/Honor; and, Integrity.
  Our Mission: to remove chaos for all our clients, and we only promise one thing: Excellence!
• FireScope BSM 3.0 Release – Easier, Faster, Better

  "One of the biggest technological hurdles to a successful BSM deployment is getting access to the key business metrics that are hiding in the ERP systems, accounting applications or proprietary systems that the business relies on," says Lynd. "What we've done is radically simplify the gathering of data from anything and everything on your network, normalizing it into a single source and enabling real-time correlation of business impact."

Creating the BSM Strategy Draft

I’ve talked over the past few weeks on why you need to establish a BSM Strategy. Now is the time for all good techies, managers or business folks to put pen to paper. Over the next several weeks I’ll highlight some of the best practices, thoughts and ideas I have around writing the BSM Strategy document. All of this will lead up to an example BSM Strategy document.

One of the first points of wisdom that I can offer as you begin is to take the K.I.S.S. approach. The focus of the BSM Strategy document should be kept at a higher level with a very focused effort to keep lower level details out. We don’t want to turn the BSM Strategy document into something that takes a PhD to understand or a secret decoder ring to translate all of the TLA’s that are generally thrown about these days in most companies.

How do you do this? One way is to rise above your day job and find more senior IT or business (financial) folks responsible for capital budgeting requests and business case/plan development for those key IT or business initiatives we talked about previously. These folks are usually masters of getting to the point with very simplistic use of words, concepts or discussion. You could also review the companies annual report or other financial documents particularly in the “Management Discussion” section. The K.I.S.S. concepts are often applied here to get the data or information across as clearly as possible, minimizing the chance for confusion or questions (or SEC fines!).

It may help to reach back to your college days and apply some of those nifty techniques such as mind mapping to help organize your key points, thoughts, supporting arguments, cause & effect, initiatives, etc. Organize or rank things where you know you can K.I.S.S. and get the points across while highlighting others where you’ll need help. Ask for help. Reach out to your boss or those who may have a more simplistic, less technical, less “toolsey”, applications or architectural focus. You may be surprised by how others can rationalize technology into value proposition and simple “no-brainer” descriptions.

The K.I.S.S. approach also needs to be applied to the overall length of the BSM Strategy. Most executives have a very short attention span and generally want to consume enough key information to be able to make a “go, no-go” decision in less than a few minutes, hence the “Executive Summary” concept. The folks down the chain will want more content to be able to think about and analyze, but they’re not going to read a 20 page document in most cases. Get to the point in the first few paragraphs. Paint the picture of value, return on effort and investment and answer the “who, what, when, where, why or how” questions you’ve already anticipated in advance. You’ll likely be more successful and have the BSM Strategy document considered “Executive Ready” when you’ve put this kind of effort into creating it and thinking things through.