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(Co-authored with Jasmine Noel) Cloud computing makes CA's acquisition of Oblicore interesting because cloud services without serious level contracts (....or a BSM orientation) are an enterprise disaster waiting to happen. Cloud Service providers (be they public, private or hybrid) will need business service management solutions capable of delivering against business-oriented SLAs. Cloud service users will need such solutions to help them make a wise choices from a confusing array of options.

The problem is two-fold, first Cloud implementations transform monolithic IT service delivery into a dynamic supply-chain with volatile interdependencies, interactions and impacts between each link. SLAs will be required that can identify, track, measure and report on each segment of the chain. CA has been working on this aspect of the problem under the Spectrum Service Assurance moniker.

Second, there is the translation of business oriented contract terms and requirements into a meaningful and measurable metrics that apply in a Cloud-environment. It will require a combination of creative modeling, impact analysis and metric identification and definition that relate business needs to infrastructure implementation...or a BSM type bridge between the business and IT gap. Oblicore focused its efforts on this aspect of the problem.

If CA can integrate Oblicore's technology with its Service Assurance efforts with minimal fuss then the results should be a very interesting BSM solution to these Cloud services problems.

Read the full commentary at http://ptaknoel.com/research-analysis/commentaries/ca-acquires-oblicore/

Apologies for the lack of blogging recently, but a combination of practising for a couple of Christmas gigs (I play keyboards and guitar) and being laid low by one of those tedious stomach bugs means that I have been somewhat occupied. Anyway, I am now out  of bed and the next practice isn't till later this evening, so I thought I would try and start a conversation on this whole cloud thing - makes a change from talking about Tiger Woods!

The title above is not the one I was going to use originally - I am more of the "Hey, you, get off of my cloud" generation (Rolling Stones for the youth readership). However, the song title, which Google tells me is from Oasis (grossly overrated IMHO) seemed very apt as:

1.Everyone has a different opinion as to what "Cloud" is, so
2.Every vendor has it, and hence
3.It is, like all new things in computing, the solution to all known problems, and therefore
4.It is also not the solution to all known problems, and will introduce a whole new raft of issues and problems.

For those who think that is a tad cynical, I have been in computing for 38 years - enough said.
Having said all that, "Cloud" will happen in some way or another and the data centre of the future will by definition be a selectively outsourced beast with e.g. one company running the network, another the desktop apps etc.

Hence, what I would like to throw open to debate is how do you set, measure and report SLAs in that environment? Who owns the service? Who reports to whom? Who knows how to react to a problem? Is it critical to them as a provider or critical to you as their customer? What does an outsourcing contract look like in a "Cloud" world"? etc. etc. 

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.

Continuing my thoughts on Bad IT = Bad Communication, I would like to give you an analogy.

Imagine you are a doctor and you have 3 patients and you have to decide (rapidly) which one to "work on" first - like the beginning of MASH when the helicopters come in.

The first patient has a blinding headache, the second one has stomach pains and indigestion, and the third one has a knife stuck in his arm. I am sure your immediate reaction is that you would treat the man with the knife first?

OK, now some more background. The first patient is the CFO, who pays your salary. The second is the VP of Sales, who won't get off the 'phone and is driving everyone mad,  and the third one is the boss of HR, who is currently selecting people for redundancy. Who goes first now?

Some more. The CFO says he must get the latest sales figures to the CEO immediately, the Sales VP is trying to launch a new sales campaign and has a TV interview lined up, and the boss of HR has just fainted. Changed your mind yet?

Now, you happen to know (because you are on the board) that the sales figures were printed last night and they probably haven't changed significantly today as we haven't got near the end of quarter yet, the HR man is not bleeding as your nurse is applying pressure and tending him, but your TV campaign was signed off last week and if you miss this slot the company has just wasted half a million dollars. Which one comes first now?

And people expect IT to make the right decisions without the facts?
 

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.  

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? 

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?

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:

BMC Software announced yesterday the acquisition of Tideway Systems Limited, a UK-based, privately-held IT discovery solution.  As outlined in the press release, there is always goodness in IT delivering greater value to their business community through improved understanding of what IT assets are owned, what constitutes their relationships and inter-dependencies, where they are located and who owns them.  Tideway's contribution to that value is unquestioned.  (See Israel Gat's story on the acquisition announcement). 
 
BMC indicated that "the new offering supports the complete set of discovery requirements for BSM and features deep integration with BMC's Atrium Configuration Management Database (CMDB)." The yet-to-be fulfilled promise deals with the deeper integration of Tideway's IT discovery and BMC's Atrium Configuration Management Database (CMDB).  I'm assuming deeper integration as a result of the acquisition, else why the need to buy out their premier IT discovery partner ...except to remove that premiere offering from the grasp of BMC's competitors? 

Unknown is the impact to Tideway's existing partners such as Oracle and ASG Software Solutions.  What about the other 60+ Tideway partners and those customers who are dependent upon Tideway technologies?

We're also wary of any tool that promises to support the "complete set of discovery requirements for BSM" ...when true Business Service Management (BSM) requires discovery and mapping of most business oriented assets.  For example, does this mean that BMC is promising to support all types of business assets, including communication assets, manufacturing assets, inventory assets and transportation assets ...all of which include embedded IT components leveraged by commercial applications?  That would truly be impressive.

Finally, as IT management becomes more of a gating factor for the successful implementation of cloud computing, the BMC recognition that "visibility into the data center" and the need to "model, manage and maintain applications and services" is critical for cloud environments is welcomed. We believe the Tideway acquisition puts BMC in a stronger position to build a cloud-based CMDB which could become a core competence within BMC's solution suite, should they decide to pursue this value proposition. 

Discussion around Business Service Management (BSM) has been ongoing for years ...and years ...and years. Yet it remains a fairly immature dialogue as vendors scope BSM to capitalize on their respective product offerings; as IT organizations struggle to articulate the desired end state; and as industry analysts deliver unique perspectives for purposes of differentiation.

Fortunately, the purpose of BSM is so fundamental, so basic, and so obvious ...that vendors, IT organizations, business managers, analysts and editors intuitively "get it" ...dwindling the confusion that so frequently accompanies newer technology concepts. This website is dedicated to the BSM dialogue by whoever wishes to participate. There is no fee to join ...no content that requires a subscription ...and no censorship of reasonable ideas and questions.

IT has been, is and will continue to be hammered for being disconnected from the business needs of the customer that IT serves. Sometimes the IT organization is adequately connected to the business entity, with the value simply unrecognized. More often, IT is guilty of diversionary focus on technology silos that business doesn't care about. BSM is the discipline that aligns the deliverables of IT to the enterprise's business goals.

That discipline comes in the forms of activities, technologies, tools, metrics, processes, best practices and people. BSM creates a laser focus on those deliverables generated by IT into something that is meaningful to the business community. If the IT deliverable is of no importance to the business function, then IT should eliminate or repackage it into a service that carries appropriate business value. BSM success is entirely dependent upon the willingness and skill of both IT and business to have an effective two way conversation ...one party without the other is doomed to failure.

Read my complete introduction: The Why & What of Business Service Management