Recently in IT Strategy Category

For those of you who live on another planet, e.g. Venus, or in another country, which has no interest in what goes on here in the UK, e.g. most of you, we are going to have a General Election soon. This means we get to choose who is going to make a complete hash of running the place for the next five years, whilst they line their pockets with our hard-earned cash. (If you think that's cynical, you should have seen my initial version!)

I recently had the pleasure of interviewing Robert Urwiler, the SVP and CIO at Vail Resorts Inc.  Yes, this is the Vail ski resport in Colorado. They also own and manage 5 other mountains, resort hotels and more. It is rougly a $1 billion business. As a side note, I would highly recommend visiting a few of their websites for the experience alone -- I wouldn't be surprised if they win a few design awards. In particular, drop by the Keystone Resort site and check out the immersive video of Prospector run.

I wanted to share a project that was driven by IT initially which resulted in a BSM initiative that has become a significant differentiator for their highly competitive business. The approach landed Vail Reports on the list of CIO's 22nd annual CIO Awards and resulted with Robert on the cover of CIO Magazine.

Tactically Vail Inc. needed to replace an old fleet of bar code scanners that are used to validate guests at lift gates on the mountain. RFID was the natural replacement technology for bar codes and had been used successfully in Europe. It would have been easy to just use what others had already done. But the leadership at Vail wanted to differentiate the guest experience and learn more about guest patterns on the mountain.

The CIO made the case for investing in UHF RFID, which was higher risk and more costly, but met the requirements of the business. What looked like a tactical move to replace older technology resulted in a strategic decision for the business. This is a great example of how BSM principles lead to strategic business advantage. 

Utilizing UHF RFID and Wi-Fi infrastructure, Vail has been able to deliver a unique guest experience at the lift gate and can track guest patterns across the mountain which was not possible before. Knowing where the guests are skiing allows them to execute highly targeted marketing programs to promote offers on and off the mountain. 

For the details on the story see the article in the RFID Journal. 

Register for our monthly newsletter, and download "Creating Strategic Differentiation with Information Technology" - a diagnostic for IT executives - by John Hagel III.

Here's what John says to frame the discussion:

IT alone cannot create strategic differentiation - it is only an enabler. IT creates options that must be effectively exploited through focused business initiatives.

Nick Carr is right: competitors can copy virtually any individual business initiative leveraging information technology. This has three implications:

1. Companies must aggressively measure return on IT investment - companies often over-estimate the differentiation available from IT investment and under-estimate the investment
required

2. Building institutional capability for continued initiatives is the only real source of sustainable advantage

3. Since individual initiatives provide only fleeting advantage at best, it is helpful to define a longer-term strategic direction that can provide a context for waves of initiatives that reinforce each other and accelerate movement towards longer-term areas of opportunity

The document is made up of diagnostic questions in four key sections, to help you think through how to create strategic differentiation with IT:

I. Do you know where you are going?

II. Are you achieving as much impact as possible?

III. How do you define success?

IV. What is required to move even faster?

Don't just sit there - sign up for our newsletter, and download your copy now. >>

By Bill Keyworth and Annie Shum

A fantastic BSM article appeared last week (1/18) in InfoWorld entitled "Run IT As a Business - Why That's a Train Wreck Waiting to Happen."  The author, Bob Lewis, identified the futility of IT organizations continuing down the same broken path that is not connecting IT with their business counterparts ...yet he sees too few IT executives who are willing to initiate the necessary BSM changes.  One of Bob's central messages to IT is that "no one inside your company is your customer."  Fairly basic principle ...but highly compelling to initiate change in the way IT performs their labors.

Bob provides some outstanding examples of IT executives that struggle with providing the "same old ...same old" IT services to business people who can't see the benefit of paying what they perceive as premium prices for products and services that they see advertised elsewhere for a fraction of the cost; or who fixate on short term deliverables that are "good enough" but don't address the company's strategic business opportunity for the longer term; or who won't document requirements in a way that ensures IT can deliver on expectations.   In these cases, IT consistently finds itself in a defeatist catch-up mode.

The article provides some common-sense advocacy that running "IT as a business" ensures that IT doesn't satisfy corporate business needs.  It's an interesting twist to the dichotomy of how BSM is perceived by IT versus how BSM should be positioned and executed by IT.  Bob concludes with a vision on what an IT organization actually does and looks like when it is integral to the business community, and not an add-on cost center that depletes profits.  Again... great BSM article!

I am sure you have all been watching the Climate Change thing in Copenhagen. It actually reminded me of Ken's blog entry about Government IT - how to take an enormous amount of people, time and money and achieve very little.

• Now, do I believe that the world is getting warmer? Think so, although it's bloody cold here, the garden is covered in snow, and we've had more snow in the last two years than I can remember for a long time.
• Is the warming caused by man (and woman)? Probably helping to push it along.
• Does it matter? No idea, as everyone seems to have a convincing scientific argument proving it one way or the other.
  

What really annoys me about all this Climate Change stuff is that our government here in the UK simply sees it as an excuse to push their own agenda (desperate need for money to pay off their enormous reckless debt mountain) and slap a "green" tax on us. I would have no hang-ups about paying extra for use of energy, if the money actually went towards trying to find a working alternative energy source rather than being wasted on illegal wars and politicians' ludicrous expenses. (By the way,I can heartily recommend reading this. IMHO, this appears to be sane summary of what the world is doing with its finite oil resources and what we should be doing about it. And if you are looking for a late Christmas present, try this, which is a thriller I wrote based on a device that solves the world's energy problems - ignore the totally inaccurate review on Amazon by B.Callahan, I can only assume I met him once and upset him/her! Unfortunately, I have no way of contacting him/her to find out why as I am an Amazon UK customer and not an Amazon US customer, and Amazon won't pass on my question!!)

So what has all of that got to do with IT and BSM? The answer is that all too often in IT I see people pushing their own agenda based on a frightening lack of facts rather than actually getting down to the fundamental issues. The vendors obviously do this for reasons of trying to sell you something, and it is all too easy to get sucked up in new trends and ideas. I am not asking you all to become Luddites - just healthy cynics, who ask for proof of something before blindly accepting it as the universal panacea. (Just think, if we'd all done that years ago, WINDOWS would probably have never got out the door, and we night have ended up with a robust, secure operating system!)

The good news - BSM (done right) works. I've seen it, touched it, used it and seen the reduction in TCO it can bring at customers.

With the British economy haemorrhaging £180 billion this year, mostly caused by the banking bailout, but not just the Banks are causing the problem. The National Health Service (NHS), the 3rd largest employer on the planet and an annual spend of £100 billion (that is 100 thousand million pounds to you and I, or £1,666 per Man, women and child in the UK per annum !). Just to add to this budget the UK government decided back in 2002 (and it's not due to complete until 2014) to create a "central spine" of IT for the entire NHS for:

• Patients' records to be electronically available to any GP or hospital in England, thereby replacing local NHS computer systems
• Other services include electronic prescriptions, an e-mail and directory service for all NHS staff, computer accessible X-rays and a facility for patients to book outpatient appointments online
• It is the largest single IT investment in UK - costs are expected to hit £12.4bn over 10 years to 2013-14
  

Can you a) believe the costs involved here, and b) believe that the 3rd largest employer on the planet does not have email services across all its employees?

I'm sure Microsoft or Google would have provided a stand-alone secure service to them if they'd asked! Tell me one other major business that does not have their employees reachable via Email? No wonder changes in policy and efficiencies are rare if they cannot quickly communicate to their staff. But just this week they have announced that because of the budget deficit they will need to cut this £12.4 billion budget down by £600 million.

My view is that no commercial business could afford this kind of project and more importantly if they did, it would have to be delivered well within 12 years. Now the saying goes that a week is a long time in politics, but 12 years is a really long time for an IT project, especially considering how quickly this industry evolves and progresses. I imagine that if this plan were to be considered today, cloud computing would be considered, which, again in my opinion, would speed the roll out and connectivity of all the major suppliers and NHS divisions.
 
Whilst I agree all this access to connected data across the NH Service makes sense to avoid the slow paper trial and minimise errors in typing and re-tying, it also raises the issue of privacy of data. Abuse of this information could be rife, with pharmaceutical companies willing to pay vast sums to access the data for analysis to determine which drugs they sell should be targeted at what audience. Insurance companies wanting access to determine risk and exclusions whereas today most people are entitled to medical insurance without even a check-up.

Would the Police Service  gain access for DNA matching, thus circumventing the debate over a central Police DNA database? The list goes on.

Some "selling" of the data if approved by the NHS client (the public) could actually go some way to recovering the cost of the project, a business (nasty word in Government circles!) plan.

Now, I believe, that we in the IT Service industry should get involved in these debates, perhaps through bodies like the ITSMF, British Computer Society etc . we have a lot to offer in terms of experience and insight. These large multi-year projects need to be reviewed and revised annually to ensure that they keep up with technological advances and prevent the completed project being outdated and almost inoperable.  IBM's market capitisation today on the Nasdaq is around $166billion, approximately the size of the NHS annual budget and with less employees. Perhaps they could provide infrastructure and service advise based on their own internal connectivity and I'm sure they did not spend 12years to obtain it at a cost of £12.4 billion!

Government really do live in a world of their own with no concept of business acumen or reality, if only they were held accountable by the people to the same extent that shareholders hold businesses accountable, we may actually achieve value for money, in a timely, cost effective manner. Look out America, if you go for Health reforms, consider who will run it, and those hidden costs and data debates!

Is your company’s IT department passionate about their work?

If not, then perhaps you’re not letting them solve problems…  Passionate IT solves problems - not just for IT, but for the business.

More from John Hagel on pursuing passion »

Some years ago I wrote a book about making our lives easier, and I am glad to see that a lot of the ideas in there are now appearing as apps on the iPhone. Then when I worked for BMC I wrote a popular blog, which urged people to adopt a Service Mentality, and things seemed to be getting better round the world (not entirely due to me - my timing was just good!). Unfortunately we then entered a nasty recession and things have gone severely downhill as companies strive to save money and hence cut down on service.

I live in the UK, a country which appears to be run by a group of greedy incompetent people, and that means that we probably will probably de drowned by melting polar ice caps before we come out of recession. So I was not at all surprised to see an article in one of our Daily newspapers (Daily Mail) asking:

Infuriating call centres, feeble excuses - who gets YOUR wooden spoon for rotten service? 

The categories where they have asked for nominations are:

1. Overall worst customer service
2. Most irritating call centre
3. Longest time to solve a simple problem
4. Biggest incorrect bill
5. Most pathetic excuse for failing to solve a problem

Anyone care to share a nomination or two?

IMHO there is little point in spending lots of money on IT systems if you treat your customers like dirt, which is why I have always said that BSM is not a set of products or systems - it's a mindset.

 

I don't generally tell people that a report from a vendor is a "must read," but in this case it is. 

I'm referring to IBM's The New Voice of the CIO report, a global study of 2,598 Chief Information Officers (CIOs) released back in September of this year. 

The report (registration required) highlights the somewhat schizophrenic roles that CIOs the world over are under pressure to take on, depending, of course, on the nature of the burning issue at hand.  The report identifies six distinct roles that CIOs must learn in order to keep up with the requirements of the job:



The bright side of the report:

The voice of the CIO is being heard in new ways--as CIOs are increasingly recognized as full-fledged members of the senior executive team. Successful CIOs are much more actively engaged in setting strategy, enabling flexibility and change, and solving business problems, not just IT problems.

Today's CIOs spend an impressive 55 percent of their time on activities that spur innovation. These activities include generating buy-in for innovative plans, implementing new technologies and managing non-technology business issues. The remaining 45 percent is spent on essential, more traditional CIO tasks related to managing the ongoing technology environment. This includes reducing IT costs, mitigating enterprise risks and leveraging automation to lower costs elsewhere in the business.

These may not be the latest and greatest, but we found two more depictions of maturity models related to Business Service Management from HP and IBM. 

I'm sure they have others, but this is what we found (scroll down to the end of the post).

Stay tuned for more.

Business Service Management, Six Sigma and your IT Compliance Program
by Chrisan Herrod
Institutionalizing a culture of continuous monitoring as an essential part of IT compliance management can be achieved using the best practices of the Six Sigma methodology.  IT compliance should be treated as a critical corporate program and to that end Six Sigma can be used to assist organizations in implementing a robust and effective information technology compliance program and culture. »

Business Service Leadership: The Time is Now! [Part 1]
by Peter J. McGarahan
Business Service leadership is about doing the right thing for the right reasons and making fact-based decisions. It's about challenging conventional wisdom and having the moral backbone to stand up for doing the right thing for your customers and the people that serve them. »

I've just been reading about the interview with HP CEO Mark Hurd at the Gartner Symposium. He said that when he hears top executives tell him that their IT is bad, his first reaction is that the real problem is probably a bad CEO. He was actually answering a broad question about the interplay between IT and business processes, and whether HP should be aiming its messages at CEOs focused on business outcomes or IT leaders focused (according to the question) on technology. An interesting question, and as the audience was predominantly CIOs, I can understand the inclination to push the blame elsewhere, but I feel the Bad IT = Bad CEO answer is way too simplistic.

Where I feel the answer actually lies is Bad IT = Bad Communication. By that I mean that  IT will never be good if the fundamental communication has not happened at a senior level to define what the company actually wants from IT, and how much they are prepared to pay for it.

Many years ago I read a book called The Myth of Excellence: Why Great Companies Never Try To Be The Best At Everything.  Apart from some very sensible stuff about what consumers really want - Consumers are fed up with all the fuss about "world-class performance" and "excellence", what they are aggressively demanding is recognition, respect, trust, fairness, and honesty - they also recommend that companies be excellent at one thing, e.g. service, differentiating on a second, e.g. availability, and be average on the rest, e.g. price, quality etc.

Now, for me that makes perfect sense for companies and for IT. If you wander into McDonalds you do not expect gourmet food, but you do expect it to be quick and cheap. If you go to buy a Rolls-Royce, you expect to be treated like royalty and you know it is going to cost you an arm and a leg. The problem I find in many companies is that the CEO asks for "Roll-Royce" IT, but is only prepared to pay "McDonalds" prices.

So, for me the starting point is actuallly agreeing just what this company's strategy is, which systems are vital to its survival, prioiritising the others, and making all of those work at the correct service levels. For this to work, the CIO must be reporting directly to the CEO, and must be able to hold conversations with finance, sales, marketing etc. to understand what their business requirements truly are, and communicate these to his/her people in IT. Everyone he/she talks to in the business will say they require 24x7 systems with instantaneous response. Not true. Ask why, and ask some brutal questions like:

• If this system is down, is anyone's life or safety threatened?
• If this sytem is down, how much money are we losing?
• If  this system is down, is there an alternative, and how long can we run with it?
• Do you truly need your people/customers to be online at 3am?
• How much is this sytem worth to you?
• Why is your system more important than anybody else's?
  

I was visiting an IT Manager in Germany some years back, who was being asked to provide 3 or 4 hours extra online service every day (the batch housekeeping cycle had grown so much over the years that it was taking too long). I asked him much those 3-4 hours were worth and he told me he didn't know, so I told him not  to bother as the business would perceive no benefit in his providing the solution, and hence would not sign off for the software he needed to buy. He left the room to ask his boss what the solution was worth and came back 15 minutes later. The bad news, his boss didn't know either; the good news, they were going to run a task force next week to find out. We returned at the end of that week to be told that the 3-4 hours were worth €20M a year. I grinned at him and said, "Great, the software only costs €19M!", which fortunatley he realised was a joke. It was actually way less than €1M and was signed off very rapidly as the business now could see the cost and the benefit.

That is what I mean by communication.  

Here's a free Cloud Storage Toolkit for Service Providers to help them answer the question: "Should we enter the Cloud Storage marketspace?"

We should do one for Business Service Management - a toolkit like this for the CFO and CIO!

One of our unstated goals at BSMReview.com is to create a maturity model for Business Service Management and beyond. Of course, this maturity model may differ slightly by industry, but the idea is to create a model which is good enough to create a "common roadmap" for IT and its business partners (yes, we will include cloud services).

To start the discussion, I've brought together some of the traditional thinking from IT 1.0, and some "edge insights" from people like JSB.

To start, let's look at Gartner's IT Management Process Maturity Model from 2005. Looks familiar, doesn't it? What should Level 5 and Level 6 look like? 

Goodbye ITIL v2.

The OGC has announced the date and time of the end:

OGC has considered these findings alongside its own requirements for the maintenance of the ITIL product set, and agreed that:

a. Withdrawal will be product based, with all language variants for individual qualifications and publications being removed at the same time.
b. Removal of version2 will complete on 30 June 2011. Specific product withdrawal will be as follows:

• V2 Foundation to cease 30 June 2010
• V2 Manager to cease 31 August 2010
• V2 Practitioner to cease 31 Dec 2010 
• Foundation Bridge to cease 31 Dec 2010

I wonder if they followed the ITIL v3 guidelines for a Service Lifecycle, specifically the part about Service Transition:




They must not have read Bill's Mitigating Risk for End-of-Life Technology.

Business Service Management (BSM) is a process, a mindset, not a product (as Peter Armstrong would say) so it is not a technology in the first place.  It is strategic, however, so let's take a quick look at each of Gartner's choices and ask:

"What has this got to do with BSM?"

Gartner's Top 10 Strategic Technologies for 2010

Cloud Computing. Cloud computing is a style of computing that characterizes a model in which providers deliver a variety of IT-enabled capabilities to consumers. Cloud-based services can be exploited in a variety of ways to develop an application or a solution. Using cloud resources does not eliminate the costs of IT solutions, but does re-arrange some and reduce others. In addition, consuming cloud services enterprises will increasingly act as cloud providers and deliver application, information or business process services to customers and business partners.

My two cents: Managing cloud services demands that companies must have a BSM strategy which can monitor and manage the physical datacenter, virtualization, and the cloud - whether it be public, private, or hybrid. We need ITIL in the Cloud and robust Cloud Service SLAs.

Advanced Analytics. Optimization and simulation is using analytical tools and models to maximize business process and decision effectiveness by examining alternative outcomes and scenarios, before, during and after process implementation and execution. This can be viewed as a third step in supporting operational business decisions. Fixed rules and prepared policies gave way to more informed decisions powered by the right information delivered at the right time, whether through customer relationship management (CRM) or enterprise resource planning (ERP) or other applications. The new step is to provide simulation, prediction, optimization and other analytics, not simply information, to empower even more decision flexibility at the time and place of every business process action. The new step looks into the future, predicting what can or will happen.

My two cents: OK, so now we know how to compete on analytics. But the decision-making process is much more complex than most people expected. Analytics are fine, but what we need is refined insight and critical understanding.  The Big Shift Index tells us about what we haven't thought about measuring yet! Where's BSM in all of this? Well, if your CRM and yoru ERP systems are mission-critical, then BSM ensures they deliver on their promise when you need it.

Client Computing. Virtualization is bringing new ways of packaging client computing applications and capabilities. As a result, the choice of a particular PC hardware platform, and eventually the OS platform, becomes less critical. Enterprises should proactively build a five to eight year strategic client computing roadmap outlining an approach to device standards, ownership and support; operating system and application selection, deployment and update; and management and security plans to manage diversity.

My two cents: Anytime, anywhere, on any device. BSM must be an integral part of managing virtualization to avoid virtual sprawl, if nothing else. Of course there's the end-user experience that needs monitoring as well.

IT for Green. IT can enable many green initiatives. The use of IT, particularly among the white collar staff, can greatly enhance an enterprise's green credentials. Common green initiatives include the use of e-documents, reducing travel and teleworking. IT can also provide the analytic tools that others in the enterprise may use to reduce energy consumption in the transportation of goods or other carbon management activities.

My two cents: Virtualization and Cloud computing will help IT become greener faster, by reducing the datacenter footprint.  And virtual collaboration can reduce carbon emissions. Isn't optimizing asset usage a BSM function?

Reshaping the Data Center. In the past, design principles for data centers were simple: Figure out what you have, estimate growth for 15 to 20 years, then build to suit. Newly-built data centers often opened with huge areas of white floor space, fully powered and backed by a uninterruptible power supply (UPS), water-and air-cooled and mostly empty. However, costs are actually lower if enterprises adopt a pod-based approach to data center construction and expansion. If 9,000 square feet is expected to be needed during the life of a data center, then design the site to support it, but only build what's needed for five to seven years. Cutting operating expenses, which are a nontrivial part of the overall IT spend for most clients, frees up money to apply to other projects or investments either in IT or in the business itself.

My two cents: See previous two cents <<

Social Computing. Workers do not want two distinct environments to support their work - one for their own work products (whether personal or group) and another for accessing "external" information. Enterprises must focus both on use of social software and social media in the enterprise and participation and integration with externally facing enterprise-sponsored and public communities. Do not ignore the role of the social profile to bring communities together.

My two cents: Have you noticed that Twitter is having availability issues lately?  I wonder if they use ITIL or BSM?  Same story on Facebook. Maybe they use ITIL-Lite.  There are unfortunately, some documented productivity issues with social computing, but we have an effective solution for improving knowledge-worker productivity.

Security - Activity Monitoring. Traditionally, security has focused on putting up a perimeter fence to keep others out, but it has evolved to monitoring activities and identifying patterns that would have been missed before. Information security professionals face the challenge of detecting malicious activity in a constant stream of discrete events that are usually associated with an authorized user and are generated from multiple network, system and application sources. At the same time, security departments are facing increasing demands for ever-greater log analysis and reporting to support audit requirements. A variety of complimentary (and sometimes overlapping) monitoring and analysis tools help enterprises better detect and investigate suspicious activity - often with real-time alerting or transaction intervention. By understanding the strengths and weaknesses of these tools, enterprises can better understand how to use them to defend the enterprise and meet audit requirements.

My two cents: See this survey on security management best practices.

Flash Memory. Flash memory is not new, but it is moving up to a new tier in the storage echelon. Flash memory is a semiconductor memory device, familiar from its use in USB memory sticks and digital camera cards. It is much faster than rotating disk, but considerably more expensive, however this differential is shrinking. At the rate of price declines, the technology will enjoy more than a 100 percent compound annual growth rate during the new few years and become strategic in many IT areas including consumer devices, entertainment equipment and other embedded IT systems. In addition, it offers a new layer of the storage hierarchy in servers and client computers that has key advantages including space, heat, performance and ruggedness.

My two cents: Wrong? We're going to see cloud storage take over this area, and it may or may not use flash memory.

Virtualization for Availability. Virtualization has been on the list of top strategic technologies in previous years. It is on the list this year because Gartner emphases new elements such as live migration for availability that have longer term implications. Live migration is the movement of a running virtual machine (VM), while its operating system and other software continue to execute as if they remained on the original physical server. This takes place by replicating the state of physical memory between the source and destination VMs, then, at some instant in time, one instruction finishes execution on the source machine and the next instruction begins on the destination machine.

However, if replication of memory continues indefinitely, but execution of instructions remains on the source VM, and then the source VM fails the next instruction would now place on the destination machine. If the destination VM were to fail, just pick a new destination to start the indefinite migration, thus making very high availability possible. 

The key value proposition is to displace a variety of separate mechanisms with a single "dial" that can be set to any level of availability from baseline to fault tolerance, all using a common mechanism and permitting the settings to be changed rapidly as needed. Expensive high-reliability hardware, with fail-over cluster software and perhaps even fault-tolerant hardware could be dispensed with, but still meet availability needs. This is key to cutting costs, lowering complexity, as well as increasing agility as needs shift.

My two cents: Now this is a BSM play if there ever was one!

Mobile Applications. By year-end 2010, 1.2 billion people will carry handsets capable of rich, mobile commerce providing a rich environment for the convergence of mobility and the Web. There are already many thousands of applications for platforms such as the Apple iPhone, in spite of the limited market and need for unique coding. It may take a newer version that is designed to flexibly operate on both full PC and miniature systems, but if the operating system interface and processor architecture were identical, that enabling factor would create a huge turn upwards in mobile application availability.

My two cents: Anytime, anywhere, on any device.  Didn't I write about that a few seconds ago? And don't we need our CMDB to track all these diverse devices and apps?

As you can see, I've attached Business Service Management (BSM) as an enabling IT strategy for just about all ten of Gartner's Strategic Technologies for 2010. And of course if it's a service provided by IT or even an external service provider, we're still going to need a Service Catalog for 2010. More on that in a later post.

Israel, where do agile practices fit into this? Just about everywhere as well?

If you are of the same generation as myself, then you probably think this is an article about Pink Floyd - sorry, it's not. It is, in fact, the title of a book I read recently, which investigates what it cost to put a man on the moon. Now I happen to be related to Neil Armstrong (we are both descended from the same notorious Scottish cattle thief - please see this for details), and this year was the 40th anniversary of the moon landing, so the book was of great interest to me.

The cost of putting my relation on the moon was $35 billion, and the question which the book raises is the very valid one: Was it worth it?

In my opinion, and the book's, the answer is no.

This does not mean that I think the whole space programme is a waste of time and money, I happen to think the unmanned space programme has been extremely beneficial. Just think of some of the information or services, which we take for granted nowadays - the first communications satellite was launched in 1958, the first TV satellite in 1962, the first weather satellite on 1st April 1960 and the first navigation satellite 12 days later. However, when I challenge people to tell me what the manned space programme brought us, I get answers like:

•    We (the US) had to prove our superiority to the Russians and it raised morale throughout the country. I agree with the latter, not the former (as that way of thinking tends to lead to conflict or war), and why does the US now want to go to Mars - what will that bring?

•    Teflon - untrue,  PTFE was accidentally invented in 1938, patented in 1941, and Teflon was trademarked in1944

•    Velcro  - untrue, invented by a Swiss engineer in 1941 by looking at the hooks on the burdock (arctium lappa) plant. Velcro is actually short for velours crochet, which means velvet hook.

•    The upside-down biro. You don't actually need an upside-down biro in space, as there is no gravity. There is a great story that the Russians saved millions by using pencils, but I don't believe this is true as broken bits of pencil / pencil shavings floating round in a spaceship would be liable to get into all sorts of places they shouldn't and could lead to a plethora of problems.

And this for me raises the fundamental questions, which have to be asked at the beginning of any project, especially in these times of limited financial resource:

•    Why are we doing this?

•    What is it worth?

If these questions cannot be answered, then IMHO the whole project should be shelved.

Just because something is technically possible, does not in any way mean that it is justified from a business point of view. There is, of course, a counter argument that this will stifle innovation and creativity and that sometimes the great ideas come out of something that looks like it is a total waste of time at the outset. True, and if possible a budget should be set aside for blue-sky thinking and experimentation, but my point is that investing huge quantities of money in something with no justification is a luxury, which we currently cannot afford.

Hence, I would like to see the same principles applied to IT projects. Every project should be presented in business terms, not in some boring technical jargon, which no-one understands and which no-one cares about. For this to happen, IT strategy and business strategy need to be joined at the hip. I have seen, far too often, the IT department which decides what its strategy should be and presents it to the business as a fait accompli; I see IT reporting into a CFO, who can only see the bottom line and nothing beyond, and I see too many businesses, which decide a business strategy, don't bother to tell IT what it is and then complain that IT doesn't deliver what they wanted.

What the current financial crisis has brought home for me, and I hope for lots of others, is the painful truth that you can't have everything today. Good stuff costs hard work and money, and if you haven't got enough money then you need to prioritise your requirements. Too many people say "I need", when they really mean "I want" or "I would like".

The same thing applies to IT. As a bedrock, I require sound business policies and a strategy that lays out the requirements and the priorities. If I don't have that, then I have a system that will collapse under pressure.
 
It is very easy to run things efficiently in IT - there are loads of tools for people to play with and tune stuff for hours - all of which is a total waste of time and money if they are working on the wrong thing.

The first step is to be effective. Then you run what matters efficiently.

In today's (and any) economic climate it is imperative that IT delivers what the business needs, and this can only be achieved with an open dialogue between the business and IT, where the two parties are equals, explain what they truly need, how much it will cost and what it is worth.

Chrisan's friends over at the Enterprise Strategy Group shared this security best practices report with us. Let us know what you think.

Malcolm Fry does a nice job with his parable of the “Keeper of the Forms.” It starts off a bit slowly, but really picks up around the 3:40 mark. And, as usual, with everything Malcolm says, there’s a real lesson to be learned for IT:

Reminds us of Peter McGarahan’s post just a few hours ago, doesn’t it? >>

More from Malcolm: How to Improve Productivity by 40%

It's not rocket science.

Service and Support organizations that deliver exceptional customer service and business value have, at their core, something in common:  Leadership.

But what does leadership look like?  It's business-focused people who approach their responsibilities with energy, passion, and intelligence.  They never forget where they came from and what it took for them to get to where they are.  They take with them the lessons they learned and the people that influenced them along the way. They are resourceful and thoughtful.  They are unafraid to seek advice, direction, and support.

Most importantly, they share the most important characteristic of all - they are servant leaders. They never let their egos convince them that they are the smartest people in the room. And they never let arrogance stand in the way of being a good listener and a continuous learner.

Servant leadership is about doing the right thing and making fact-based decisions. It's about challenging conventional wisdom and having the moral backbone to stand up for doing the right thing for the customers and employees who serve them well. Servant leaders continuously look for innovative ways to leverage industry best practices, technology, and people. They treat every customer like they were their only customer.

I challenge all service leaders to become servant leaders.  Set the bar high for your team, constantly measure your progress, and continuously improve. Create a rewarding and healthy service culture that is driven by your daily examples of your servant leadership.

Its strange how history repeats itself, fashions go in cycles, and every generation comes to them for the first time thinking these things are new, innovative and revolutionary. I guess it's because we're still human and we still need to learn the same lessons over and over again. We want to listen to advice, but can't, we want to learn from the past, but don't, we all want something that's called "common" but is far from it - sense!

May years ago now the company I worked for at the time brought a new concept to the marketplace. The analysts jumped onto it and made it their own and the market hype was all over it, it was the direction all business had to get to. Eight or more years on and we're still moving in that direction, the buzz died down, but the capabilities slowed and the term used changed from IRM to BSM.  However BSM was actually only a subset of what IRM aimed to achieve. With the complexities we find ourselves in today, with Virtualisation and Cloud computing the issues are still the same only in some cases magnified and the responsibility of ownership is moving. More and more the Business is, and will continue to, relinquishing ownership of the delivery of services to the employee (who make up the business) and allow suppliers to take over. It's something that has happened for centuries now. We moved from self-sufficiency to being reliant on others. Once, we all had wells in the garden to provide water for the household, now it's all provided through piped services. Once, we had to make our own small generators for the electrification of the Home, Farm or estate, now it's all provided through piped services. The list goes on, and so it is and will continue to be within the IT environment. Hence the need for Service Management to ensure we all have the disciplines, controls, standards and processes in place, controlled and managed to ensure delivery as required by the customers, whomever they may be.  Why did we move this way? Well for various reasons, economies of scale, cost savings, and to allow us to focus on our core competency without being dragged down by day to day necessities of life.

A slide on my website shows what is required to support the employee, who is at the centre of the business, and how these are more and more being delivered via services as depicted around the circumference of the sphere.  This slide goes back 8 years or more, so not new, but it appears it was rather a vision of the future, and more and more I can see it being fulfilled. Whether we use the same term or not is irrelevant, what matters is the end goal. Something that Geoffrey Moore of Crossing the Chasm fame predicted at roughly the same time.

Check out the slide and let me know if you see it being slowly fulfilled: