Today’s overall message in the general session was industry solutions, dynamic infrastructure, smarter planet and green.

Al Zollar opened the show with the news that Michael Phelps had suddenly backed out of his speaking appearance last evening. The replacement speaker was later revealed to be Magic Johnson. Magic’s light, lively and energizing speech rallied the some 4000 people in the arena with discussions of his NBA career and extremely successful business enterprise today. Magic took control of the facility, left the stage and interacted with the audience. I’ve posted my recording of Magic’s speech here.

The core theme and demo for the day was “green” from the stage lighting to the tie of Chris O’Connor. Maureen Buckley drove the demo that featured dynamic energy management from the server level, PDU level and overall datacenter level energy efficiency metrics. The demo included ITM for Energy Management and ultimately incorporated a TBSM dashboard with aggregate operations and business dashboards.

Industry framework solutions are a key to helping clients achieve rapid transformational change for a smarter planet, dynamic infrastructure or “greener” business. Think of these as the sum of IBM’s best practices from each business unit within IBM. The consultative components, software solutions and implementation services needed to stand up or revolutionize various industries such as banking or retail. Think of it this way, these are the solutions that drive Business Service Management (BSM) to a whole new level for those clients who adopt them. Take a look at this Redmonk videocast on them.

There were three great BSM sessions today that I was able to attend and record. The first was Ed Glenning’s presentation on BSM at the Bank of America. This is near and dear to me as I was heavily involved in their BSM project.

The second BSM session was with Michael Kluett of T-Systems. Michael spent time talking about their experiences migrating from TBSM v3.1 to TBSM v4.1.x and ultimately their plans for migrating to TBSM v4.2.

The last BSM session I attended was with Forrester Analyst Evelyn Hubbert. A typical analyst session, Evelyn shared the opinions of Forrester Research based on their dialog with clients on how IT Management needs to evolve to align with and support the business.

Check out my “real time” thoughts as I send tweets on Twitter throughout the day. You’ll be amazed at what you can communicate in 140 characters.

There was plenty of other exciting announcements yesterday and today in the cloud computing space. For the best down to earth information on this emerging area I suggest tuning into the folks at Redmonk or John Willis.

The highlight of the night was famous band Smash Mouth in the arena. Lots of “drunken geeks” enjoying the night’s activities.

Track me down for a sticker, take a picture next to something that is BSM to you and we’ll vote to give away a pocket HD video camera.

We often talk about aligning IT with Business is a key aspect and that BSM is a very powerful and unique solution to achieve this objective. But what about BSM itself, how do we ensure that BSM is aligned with value proposition that it is supposed to offer? What capabilities & resources do we need to be successful in BSM space? After spending years of finding an answer to this question,  I have found a framework which solves this problem.  Strategic Capability Network is a framework to explicitly associate resources to scenarios, allowing formulation of a strategic plan that dynamically controls investment in resources as new scenarios are forecast and visited. It is essentially a framework that provides assessment of the costs of supporting resources and the value of strategic positions, and the propagation of costs to supported capabilities and strategic positions, and the propagation of value to supporting capabilities and resources.

This framework allows us to do some retrospection of how WE associate the “Value” that we claim to offer with BSM, with the “Capabilities” that WE have, and “Resources”  that WE need. If you are a BSM/SQM offering organization or planning to have BSM as a value proposition,  I strongly recommend looking at this framework. If you are an executive evaluating what resources/cultural changes you require, I urge you to leverage this framework.

To anchor the understanding with an example, I have taken some of the commonly claimed value propositions of BSM, associated them to the capabilities and resources in the below diagram based on my experience. You might have a different philosophy to the values and association to capabilities and resources (and you should; thats what makes companies different),  but I think this is one of the only framworks which provides this amount of detailed specification on how you trace every asset back to the value you are offering.

Using this framework, every BSM offering organization can create its own unique values and associate them to the capabilities and resources, to align themselves first. I hope this is useful and as they say “Alignment  begins at home!!”