Application Management : Business Service Management

Announcing a New BSM Solution Offering for Virtualization

Michael_Procopio — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 18:02:00 GMT

by Michael Procopio

The new offerings include enhancements to HP Server Automation, HP Client Automation, HP Storage Essentials, HP Network Automation, and HP Operations Manager software.

According to a recent report from Gartner⁽¹⁾, "Virtualization’s impact on the overall IT industry has been dramatic, and virtualization will continue to be the leading catalyst for infrastructure and operations software change through 2013. Organizations are looking at ways to cut costs, better utilize assets, and reduce implementation and management time and complexity."

Although virtualization is often adopted to help reduce capital expenditures, it can trigger increased management expenses and lead to more pronounced organizational silos. The new HP offerings bridge all the physical and virtual data center silos through management and automation. This reduces complexity and ultimately management costs.

"HP business service automation software helps us eliminate manual, error-prone tasks by automating server lifecycle management, including provisioning multiple operating systems, software installation, deployment of patches, configuration management and audits," said Ron Cotten, senior manager IT OSS Engineering, Level 3 Communications, a leading international provider of voice, video, and data communications services. "With HP Server Automation, we are able to patch over 1800 servers in 24 hours, which helps us reduce scheduled downtime."

The updated HP business service offerings help you:

· Increase administrator effectiveness with HP Operations Manager for virtualization by monitoring the availability and performance of all virtual and physical assets through a common dashboard.

· Reduce the risk of downtime with HP Network Automation, which for the first time gives the network administrator control of the VMware vSwitch in addition to the physical network environments.

· Provision the right amount of storage to keep applications performing properly without overspending on excess storage with HP Server Automation, the first solution in the industry that gives server administrators this capability.

· Reduce problem resolution times with HP Storage Essentials Performance Edition by quickly identifying, troubleshooting and reporting performance metric related trends in physical and virtual environments.

“To make virtualization cost effective, customers must minimize operating expenses and have seamless management of infrastructure silos,” said Erik Frieberg, vice president of Product Marketing, Software & Solutions, HP. “Our newly enhanced HP business service offerings help customers manage all aspects of the physical and virtual application infrastructure to unlock the true promise of virtualization.”

HP Software Professional Services provides solution consulting services to accelerate the value of business service automation and business service management software investments.

HP Server Automation, HP Client Automation, HP Storage Essentials and HP Network Automation are available now. HP Operations Manager Virtualization Smart Plug-In will be available next month.

Business and IT closer but still not on the same page

Michael_Procopio — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 20:51:00 GMT

by Michael Procopio

Network World editor Denise Dubie assessed a report by the analyst firm Aberdeen Group in her recent article Application performance management: Keeping an eye on the end-user prize. Her comments mirrored many of those I have spoken with recently who have said their top priorities this are year are revenue and removing any distractions from making revenue.

What was pleasant to see was data showing the end user performance is still important. More frustrating to see was that business and IT managers still differ in their priority of what needs to be measured, according to the article. As you might guess, business folks are more concerned with business processes while IT folks are more concerned with the infrastructure. One-step down from that the article covers the specifics of how each group prioritized how to do application performance monitoring.

Both end user and infrastructure monitoring are critical. Recently, at HP Software Universe in a talk I gave with a customer he showed this picture.

This does a good job of making the point that end user monitoring is critical. Since there are multiple pieces to the IT part of the puzzle, cumulative effect is important.

This customer said when he took his job there was a Severity 1 (highest priority) problem meeting everyday with typically greater than 10 "Sev 1" items. Today he has no meetings and approximately one Sev 1 per week.

How did he get here, monitoring the infrastructure. He said when they tracked down the source of the problem they put in a new infrastructure monitor for the item that failed, so he got early warning. But even in his current state he commented that end user monitoring is important because things change, whether it is a new version of the application or a change in the infrastructure that create a situation where something can go wrong that isn't currently being monitored.

For the Business Availability Center, Michael Procopio

BSM is dead (???)

adsey007 — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 07:50:00 GMT

By Peter Spielvogel (Operations Center product marketing)

I had the pleasure of moderating one of the customer roundtable discussions. The topic was Consolidated Event and Performance Management. Ten customers joined three HP product experts for a guided discussion about their concerns. The goal of these discussions is to provide a forum for customers to share best practices about how they are using HP products.

We started the session by listing all the topics that people wanted to discuss. My expectation was that we would spend our time discussing Operations Manager, given the track. To my surprise, we spend less than half the time on Operations Manager. The majority of the time we discussed CMDB and discovery, monitoring applications with Business Availability Center, agentless monitoring with SiteScope, integrating events from Network Node Manager, and of course managing virtualization.

Interestingly, not once did anyone mention Business Service Management or BSM. What does this mean? My interpretation is that customers don’t buy BSM, they buy solutions for monitoring infrastructure, applications, or networks. But, vendors of these types of solutions better have ways to integrate all these events together and provide a unified view of the entire infrastructure and how they impact business services. Fortunately, HP provides such solutions, and based on the demos I observed, people are very impressed.

HP Software Universe - day 1

Michael_Procopio — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 02:11:00 GMT

by Michael Procopio

Today was the first day of Software Universe. I had customer meetings all day today. Here are some interesting items from my conversations.

Most said budgets were down in 2009 and will be flat to down in 2010. But a few who were related to government stimulus said theirs will be up.
Co-sourcing and outsourcing continue as ways to reduce costs
A few were focusing on asset management with the express purpose of getting rid of things in the environment they don’t need anymore. They know they are out there but they need to find them first.
Most customers I spoke to said they keep aggregated performance data for 2 years the range was 18 months to 5 years.
There was an interesting discussion about the definition of a business service versus an IT service. The point being made was a business service by definition involves more than IT. While I agree this is a good point, I think the IT industry has focused on business service as a way to say - “I’m thinking about this IT service in the context the business thinks about it not just from my own IT based perspective”
A number of customers have or are about to implement NNMi. If this is something you are interested in check out the NNMi Portal
Many customers are moving to virtualized environment highest percentage I heard was 70%. Another customer forces all internal developers to deliver software as a virtual image.
Another topic was how to monitor out tasked items. For example, some part of what you offer is delivered by a third party - how do you make sure they are living up to your standards. Two methods I heard were 1/ use HP Business Process Monitor 2/ get the 3rd party to send you alerts from their monitoring system.
On the question does your manager of managers send back data to sync the original tools 1 did, 1 didn’t. For the one who did it was part of a closed loop process.
- Monitor tool finds problem send alert to MOM (Manager of managers).
- MOM send event ID to monitoring tool
- Subject matter expert uses monitoring tools to diagnose problem
- Once diagnosed updates monitoring tool which updates MOM

A very productive day for me. I hope some of this is useful information to you.

For additional coverage my blogger buddy Pete Spielvogel is also here and beat me to the first post. You can read his posts at the ITOps Blog.

There are a variety of Twitter accounts you can follow as well as the hashtag #HPSU09

HPITOps – Covers BSM, Operations and Network Management

HPSU09 – show logistics and other information

HPSoftwareCTO

informationCTO

HPSoftware

BTOCMO – HP BTO Chief Marketing Officer

For HP BSM, Michael Procopio

BSM at HP Software Universe

Michael_Procopio — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 04:44:00 GMT

by Michael Procopio

HP Software Universe is next week, 16-18 June, in Las Vegas. Business Service Management (BSM) will be well represented.

In the Business Transaction Management area there are 13 sessions. Most of them are lead by customers. The sessions are listed below.

In the Network Management track Aruna Ravichandran is speaking in three sessions, you can see information on those at her post HPSoftware Universe/HP Technology Forum (HPTF) - Network Management sessions. The rest of the track is listed in the post Network Management at HP Software Universe.

Amy Feldman, Dennis Corning and Peter Spielvogel the ITOps bloggers has covered a number of the sessions in the Consolidated event and performance management. Here are a list of the posts:

Business Transaction Management Track

Session ID	Title	Presenting company
1114	Confessions of a product manager: get the real scoop on the latest HP Business Availability Center	HP
1165	The MITRE Corporation: higher operational effectiveness at lower cost through automated alert management	MITRE Corporation, AlarmPoint
1233	Key decisions and practical techniques in configuring business transaction management
1236	Real User Management: know how your TCP/IP applications perform for your users	HP
1267	Using HP Business Availability Center to analyze and triage application and infrastructure anomalies and problems	BCBS of Florida

1303	Sodexo: partnering with HP Software-as-a-Service to ensure critical e-business application performance and availability	Sodexo

1342	Wrigley: HP Business Availability Center deployed on Software-as-a-Service yields big improvements in IT monitoring without increasing staff	Wrigley


1360	Lockheed Martin: deploying HP Business Availability Center in a virtual environment and forwarding alerts through an iPhone Twitter-based application	Lockheed Martin


1363	DIRECTV: an HP Business Availability Center and HP operations implementation	DIRECTV
1401	Liberty Life: taking the fast track to implementing HP Business Availability Center and gaining business value in 6 months	Liberty Life
1425	Sentara Healthcare: improving the availability of critical business services and fixing IT problems before they impact customers	Sentara Healthcare
1436	Lockheed Martin: practical advice for configuring and operating HP End User Management solutions	Lockheed Martin
1452	Vale: deploying HP Business Availability Center solutions to monitor applications and systems and to help ensure availability and performance	Vale

You can get the details of all the BSM sessions at the HP Software Universe Track Session Catalog.

I hope to see you there, but if you can’t make it we will be doing follow-up posts. You can also follow on Twitter, the hashtag is #HPSU09. There are already a number of Tweets and the show hasn’t started yet. The Twitter account for the show is HPSU09, if you’d like to follow us. Or visit the HP Software Universe Facebook page.

For the Business Availability Center, Michael Procopio

BSM Evolution: The Role of IT in the Business (part 2)

adsey007 — Tue, 12 May 2009 12:55:00 GMT

By Bryan Dean: BSM Research

In part 1 of this post I introduced some research conducted a couple years ago where we explored the IT professional’s perception of the role that their IT played in the business.

I think the bottom line is whether you are an IT Executive, Director, vendor, or analyst… do not fall into the “monolithic trap” of prescribing one-size-fits-all BSM evolution roadmaps. Clearly establishing and recognizing IT’s role in the business, AND getting all parties on the same page up front is imperative and will save a ton of time, money, and anguish.

You will want to revisit part 1 to get the full discussion, but here is a thumbnail of the core research results, followed by some observations.

The Research Revealed Three Major Segments:

Segment A: “Business Innovation Partner”

Business & IT equal partners in business process design, measurement, analysis and optimization
High IT investment to revenue ratio
Actively transforming IT to interrelate IT services to business processes
Utilize real-time, automated IT & business measurement; with dynamic capacity adjustment
~20% of IT Execs put themselves in this bucket; less than 5% of IT Directors

Segment B: “Business / IT Service Providers”

Business leaders drive business process design, analysis and optimization; IT partners with business to measure and advise on optimization
Medium to high IT investment to revenue ratio
Actively transforming IT service management processes and tools
Provide IT dashboards & regular service level / business impact reports; respond relatively quickly to adjust capacity
~50% of IT Execs put themselves in this bucket; ~ 35% of IT Directors

Segment C: “Operate IT Supporting Business”

Business drives all aspects of business process design, measurement, analysis and optimization; IT’s job is to run IT well, thus supporting the business
Low-medium IT investment to revenue ratio
Targeted improvements in IT process and toolset
Provide IT performance and availability metrics; adjust capacity via periodic projects
~30% IT Execs put themselves in this bucket; ~60% of IT Directors

Observations on Results

Business or IT Perception:

One of the most common responses by our IT Executives and Directors in this research was, “Do you want us to talk about IT’s role in the business from our IT perspective, or from our business leader’s perspective?”

In general, IT believed their contribution to business process design, analysis and optimization was much more significant than their business counterparts believed. When I was in IT (about a century ago), we didn’t have to walk in the snow up hill, both directions… but we did have significant issues with business credibility, and being recognized for our contribution. A million blogs have been written on this subject and how to improve IT’s standing, but the research continues to reflect a difficult reality.

The Spread:

There is a relatively small percentage of IT that put themselves in the “Business Innovation” category, and a surprisingly high number of IT continue to put themselves into the “Operate IT Supporting the Business” category. The percentage of IT that identifies themselves in each different segment may have changed significantly in the last two years, but I doubt it.

The IT Executive - Director Gap:

I wrote a previous BSM blog post on this perception gap, but here is more evidence that IT Executives and the lower level IT operations staff are not on the same page. 60% of the IT Directors put themselves into the “Operate IT Supporting Business” bucket, compared with only 30% of the Executives.

Most of the executives in the research freely admitted that one of their biggest challenges was to change the culture in IT, and get IT operations out of their technology comfort zone. One the other hand, many Directors said they would like to focus on the business, but it wasn’t practical with their workload, staffing, and budget… and the limited hours in the day.

ITSM/BSM Tool & Process Maturity

There was a strong correlation between IT’s identified role in the business, and the progress they had achieved in their ITSM/BSM journey. The “Business Innovation Partners” were consistently early adopters for advanced IT management software tools, very strong at dynamically managing and monitoring end-to-end business/IT services real time, and were interrelating IT performance to business impact. They were also advanced on IT process maturity, but not as noticeably as with their technology.

The “Business / IT Service Providers” were very IT process savvy, and had invested significant budget to in their words, “Get our IT house in order”, so that they could build business trust and operate in a very consistent, cost effective manner. IT software management tools also received significant investment, but aimed more at automating IT processes than interrelating to real time business performance. Although clearly demonstrating Service Levels and IT’s value to business was strong.

The “Operate IT Supporting Business” consistently struggled to prove the business ROI for process and tool investments, so they targeted new spending very carefully, and their progress reflects this investment profile.

The Monolithic Trap

One recommendation, don’t fall into it! Start by assuming everyone is not on the same page, and that everyone does not have the same assumptions about IT’s role in the business... and then you will be ready to make progress on that BSM evolution roadmap.

Advanced analytics reduces downtime costs – isolation

Michael_Procopio — Fri, 08 May 2009 15:40:00 GMT

by Michael Procopio, Product Manager, BAC

In the world of advanced analytics, two areas that are of interest to the IT management world are: detection of a problem and isolation of a problem. Previously I wrote Advanced analytics reduces downtime costs – detection; in this post I’ll cover isolation.

In the previous post, I covered how advanced analytics finds an anomaly, potentially before a threshold is crossed.

Problem Isolation is the process of determining which component in the infrastructure is causing the problem* or incident* that we found. We will presume we are monitoring the service that is having the issue.

If one had no management tools (amazingly I have spoken to customers in this situation) the method of trying to find a problem is to login to each system, router, switch and potentially application (ex: Oracle) look at the items with whatever tools are available (ex: Windows Perfmon)and hopefully you find it. If you are interested in advanced analytics, this is probably not your situation.

The more typical case is you have multiple management tools, network, system, virtualization, database and perhaps others. So if you know the domain the problem exists in you have a good place to start. I’ve listened to podcasts / read reports which bring up few problems with this: (if you know of any good IT podcasts please send them along)

~80% of problems are sent to the network team with only ~20% being network issues
~60% of problems take >10 experts to resolve
~80% of the time to restore service is spent isolating the problem

Here is an analogy I use with my non IT friends on why this area is needed. You are monitoring the speed of a car going across the country (pick your favorite country). You are separately monitoring the infrastructure, all:

roads
bridges
ferries to take cars across the water

What you don’t know is where the car is (old car, no GPS). You are getting many alerts from the roads, bridges and ferries. Which one is affecting the car? Since you don’t know what road the car is on you don’t know if any given alert is the one affecting your car.

This is where the CDMB comes into the isolation process. The CMDB has the route the car is taking or, in our case, the items in the IT infrastructure that make up the service that has the problem.

Part one of the isolation process is to restrict what we are looking at to the relevant IT items. This greatly reduces the computational power required. For example, one customer I recently visited told me he has 2000+ servers. If we can reduce that to a few app servers and a few database servers (isn’t SOA wonderful for we operations types) that is a factor of ~200 reduction.

Part two of the isolation is the heavy math from HP Labs, with more patent filings. It is a form of regression analysis, where application or end user response time monitoring is the dependent variable and all the infrastructure metrics are independent variables. In plain terms, if end user response gets worse find the infrastructure metrics that get worse. When end user response gets better find the metrics that get better. The more closely an infrastructure metric tracks the end user response the more likely it is to be the cause.

Again, while the math is interesting, pictures work better for me.

The thick grey line is the end user response, the red-purple line is the most closely correlated metric -- in this case a database metric. Just so you don’t have to strain your eyes we provide a table like this (from a different problem) showing the weighted correlations score.

Isolation part 3 is to include non-time series data. In the screen capture below you see planned changes and incident details (think alerts) on the timeline. Unplanned changes can also be displayed. Changes are pulled from the CMDB and incidents can come from any management system that can send alerts. And since we know that most problems occur from changes that is an important component. Finally tickets from the helpdesk are included on the timeline, for the case where users are doing the monitoring.

All together this automates a number of things the operations teams already do and some math help isolating problems.

*Incident and problem are ITIL terms. There may be many incidents that are symptoms of an underlying problem.

tweet this!

Fuel Efficient IT Operations

adsey007 — Wed, 06 May 2009 13:16:00 GMT

Mike Shaw, BSM Product Marketing.

My wife just bought a BMW 118D. The 118D won the "Green Car of the Year" award in 2008 at the New York Auto Show. It does an amazing number of miles to the gallon (km to the litre / miles to the US gallon). Her old car (also a BMW) did about 26 miles per gallon. The 118D does 63 miles per gallon. Now, the new car is slightly smaller, so we're not comparing apples to apples. However, you get the point -- car manufacturers are pushing fuel economy to new limits. At the cost of acceleration? Not that I've noticed - when you put to the floor in the 118D, it most certainly accelerates.

I think there are parallels between fuel economy and IT operations. During a down-turn, because there is less activity, there is less pressure on IT operations (fewer events, fewer system overloads, etc). This is like a car that is only required to go at 30 miles per hour and accelerate slowly because that's what everyone else on the road is doing. In an attempt to cut the costs of motoring, one might be tempted to adjust the fuel injector so that a smaller amount of fuel is available. This will cut fuel costs during this recessionary period.

BUT, when we come out of recession (some time in 2010??), acceleration will be required. Actually, our competitors will be accelerating - it's up to us whether or not we match them. If we've chosen to create a fuel efficient car (like the BMW 118D), then we can match the required acceleration and have fuel efficiency. If we've decided to simply cut the fuel that goes into the car without any consideration for fuel efficiency, our competitors will accelerate away from us come the upturn.

During a down-turn, we are under pressure to cut IT operations costs. In fact, in a recent IDC study performed for HP Europe, 40% of customers surveyed said they were very likely to cut IT operating costs while 74% said it was likely they would cut IT ops costs.

We have two choices in how we behave in response to this pressure to cut costs. We can take a simple "let's cut people and that's it" path, or do we take the "fuel efficiency" path and create an IT operations to match the BMW 118D. If we just cut people, we'll drown in IT operations stuff when the upturn comes. If we create a fuel efficient IT ops engine, we'll be able to embrace the acceleration when the upturn comes.

This sentiment is echoed by recent comments make by HP's CEO, Mark Hurd (I'm sure Mark will be greatly comforted to know that he and I are in snych on this one). Mark said he didn't want to simply cut heads because when the upturn comes, he won't have the "people muscle" required to handle the upturn. HP's IT department is taking the BMW 118D approach - data centre consolidation, network operations efficiency, centralized event management, pro-active user experience management, constrained self-serve of IT product, etc.

So, how do we create a fuel efficient IT operations? I'm not an expert across the whole IT operations stack, so I'll talk to the area I know about - availability and performance management. And in the interests of keeping these blog posts to a manageable size, I'll do that in the next post.

(Footnote: I'm sure all car manufacturers are producing more fuel efficient cars. My wife just happens to like BMWs, and she only looked at BMW! I'll bet the average HP sales rep wished their customers were so loyal (naive ??))

BSM Evolution: The Role of IT in the Business (part 1)

adsey007 — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 08:59:00 GMT

By Bryan Dean: BSM Research.

One of the benefits of performing blind, unbiased research (if there is such a thing) is hearing the meek voice of IT’s huddled masses… versus the boisterous song of the advanced early adopters. When concentrating solely on early adopters, one might believe that IT organizations are failing if they are not quickly advancing toward BSM/ITSM nirvana. If you have been following this series of “BSM Evolution” posts, you have seen me describe several organizations aggressively advancing their IT capabilities. A research project we did a couple years ago, however, gave me an appreciation for how hard it can be for some IT to elevate their investment profile to reach the loftier BSM/ITSM goals. The fact is, many businesses simply have lower goals and expectations for the role that IT plays in the business. Granted, many business leaders are not intuitively aware of IT’s potential value; and part of IT’s job is to build trust and market the potential return on IT investments. But, there comes a point at which IT must come to terms with the reality of their expected role in the business and the associated investment profile. I will outline the research and some of the key findings in part 1 of this post, and follow up with some observations in part 2.

The Research:

To call this researched unbiased would be inaccurate. We actively recruited IT professionals who met these and additional criteria:

· Medium-large private enterprises currently investing to improve IT

· IT supports business critical applications and infrastructure

· IT service down-time or degradation has measurable business impact

· Demonstrable investment in IT process and management tools

· Individuals were direct decision makers and influencers of IT budget priorities

The participants generally fell into one of two subgroups:

A. “IT Executives” (CIO’s, CTO’s, SR VP of IT, etc.)

B. “IT Directors” (IT Operations, Service Management, Application Development, etc.)

The research covered many topics including understanding the role that IT played in the business, and the related implications. The information gathered was from IT’s perspective, so that bias must also be taken into account.

The Results:

This is a gross simplification of the results, but based on responses to many questions and discussion, the participants could be segmented into three major buckets that indicate their IT’s current role in the business:

Segment A: “Business Innovation Partner”

· Business and IT are equal partners in business process design, measurement, analysis and optimization

· High IT investment to revenue ratio

· Actively transforming IT to interrelate IT services to business processes

· Utilize real-time, automated IT & business measurement; with dynamic capacity adjustment

· ~20% of IT Execs put themselves in this bucket; less than 5% of IT Directors

Segment B: “Business / IT Service Providers”

· Business leaders drive business process design, analysis and optimization; IT partners with business to measure and advise on optimization

· Medium to high IT investment to revenue ratio

· Actively transforming IT service management processes and tools

· Provide IT dashboards & regular service level / business impact reports; respond relatively quickly to adjust capacity

· ~50% of IT Execs put themselves in this bucket; ~ 35% of IT Directors

Segment C: “Operate IT Supporting Business”

· Business drives all aspects of business process design, measurement, analysis and optimization; IT’s job is to run IT well, thus supporting the business

· Low-medium IT investment to revenue ratio

· Targeted improvements in IT process and toolset

· Provide IT performance and availability metrics; adjust capacity via periodic projects

· ~30% IT Execs put themselves in this bucket; ~60% of IT Directors

Observations on Results

So as not to bludgeon the reader with too many words (as is my habit), I will save my detailed observations for part 2 of this post. I’ll examine the following:

· The percentage spread across the segments leading directly to different goals and investment levels

· There is a fairly predictable evolution of management software capabilities and requirements associated with the segments

· Notice the perception gap between IT Execs and IT Directors

· Many participants struggled to categorizie themselves because of the gap at their company between business perception and IT perception

The "BSM Beam me UP" or déjà vu and Thoughts on Wittman’s “IT Laments Lack Of Guidance”

adsey007 — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 08:25:00 GMT

By Ian Bromehead – BSM Product Marketing, HP Software

Had déjà vu lately? Can be terrifying and exciting at the same time can’t it. Well it gripped me today, and so strong that I felt compelled to drown the screen with virtual ink.

It came when I was reading an Art Wittman’s “buzz” on the wire. He wrote” .. IT pros don't think they have the guidance or support from business leaders to effectively do their jobs. And yet despite not having that guidance, on we plod, making a valiant attempt to run systems we hope serve the needs of businesses” . [Ed. You’ll find his article here ]

Wooosh, I felt like Scottie had beamed me back 5 years. But you know I didn’t have a feeling 5 years ago that we were boldly going where no man had been before. Seemed a lot like common sense, yet Wittman is clearly indicating that in IT many still have not reached that final frontier.

Sure, the road to BSM is probably longer than we initially thought, and now many BSM unknowns are discovered. Sure many are turning back to the requirement to get the basic foundation of BSM right. But Wittman’s indication (which he is poised to talk more about at a Microsoft Tech Ed in May), echoes earlier rendering of the BSM value proposition, you know the bit that says “run systems we hope serve the needs of businesses”.

So as the déjà vu faded, I asked myself, has so little happened then since we started our starry trekking on the BSM back in 2004?

To take an example, one trek I remember was actually with a partner back in 2005. He used a HP BSM solution based on a combination of OVO and BPI to manage his sales pipeline. Yep, it started on the back of a beer mat (not sure if I can remember much – ahem), of the sales VP indicating that he had too many lost projects, stale projects or whatever, and he’d really love to have an end to end view of them, and in particular be able to focus in on why certain projects where stuck for weeks. Even better see how much each was worth and focus resources on them. In a jiff we had beamed a BSM solution, which had the VP goggle eyed as if we were talking Klingon to him.

Another starry trek started when an architect at a semi-conductor manufacturing company told us of the shop floor production staff’s woes with a quick view of the status at each stage, and in particular, zoom key information to the operators eyes in a whisk. Previously this was something that otherwise could only be easily gathered by interrogating numerous logfiles and surmising the problem. Given the $thousands implied in the case of stoppages or critical errors, every second lost is expensive. The final BSM solution not only brought information on the production steps at the hover of a mouse, but also surveyed the setup of the next production shift .

Similar treks followed including solutions for stock and shares tradings, payments, customer service management. Those treks took us to each industry “planet”.

But the best of our treks concerned a Telco. In this case, we worked with an IT Service Manager. He built views using OVSN, and modeled an activation process that allowed his IT service staff to determine why some brokers sometimes had very long activations of customer cellphones. I mean, if it took an hour to activate a cellphone at the shop, would you stay or walk out and buy from somewhere else?

The BSM solution he built, not only alerts when the contract activation is too long, but also allowed the business steam to optimize the resources required to handle abnormally high numbers of exceptions. This service manager was a BSM evangelist, a true “BSM star trekker”. He travelled though the BU units in his country and brown bagged them with his story. Months later a BU business team remembered his presentation and came running to his team for help with a totally different BU solution they’d deployed which had issues. That’s what makes this one, the best of in my view, and brings me back to Wittman’s buzz. These stories are describing a similar theme, visibility is power.

A well built BSM solution provides broad and deep visibility that empowers IT to communicate with the business. As I carry on trekking, I hear about customers who don’t have such visibility all the time. Wittman is right, IT shouldn’t lament, if they were to implement BSM solutions like this IT service manager, they’d stand a good a chance of becoming a star in the businesses eyes.

Wittman says “If you're not getting enough input from business leaders, it could be because you've convinced them that it's not a priority”. I think he’s spot on.

If IT can’t and/or doesn’t communicate in terms the business can understand, showing IT value that helps the business to understand what can be done, how would the business ever know if IT truly is serving the business and how? Why, and why, would they prioritise IT?In fact our star treks are full of an essential ultimate BSM best practice, that of providing the visibility into IT’s value to positively impact the business outcome. It sounds like a marketing phrase, I know, but that’s what the service manager, the partner sales VP and the production staff in these few examples would agree with. The BSM solutions they built using HP Software, gave them all the visibility to make the right decision faster, with the right priority and demonstrate IT’s value to boot.Wittman’s article also says “we asked a more general IT audience what's expected of them. The vast majority--89%--said job one is keeping the network and servers running. Increasing revenue and finding new business opportunities were dead last on that list, 37% and 32%, respectively.There's nothing mystical about the solution to this dilemma. IT leaders hungry to be involved in the success of the business have to believe in the role they can play and demonstrate the contributions they can make.”

You know in those déjà-vu flashbacks, our HP BSM value proposition was pinned to end user/service monitoring (with HP OpenView Internet Services today delivered through BAC-End User Monitoring), business process to IT service mapping (with Business Process Insight and Service Navigator, today delivered with BAC-BPI and uCMDB), business and IT KPI measurement (delivered today with the SLM and myBSM dashboards). The integrations between our key software components have a brought our technologies a long way from the déjà vu-ed days I was beamed back to through his article.

Isn’t it interesting that today’s HP BSM solution actually delivers both the things he says IT thinks it is expected to do, as well as the solution Wittman outlines. Back to the future!

BSM Evolution: Small Enterprise Example

Michael_Procopio — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 04:31:00 GMT

My previous BSM evolution postings focused on mega-corporations and large IT organizations with a myriad of personas. In this post, I will contrast the experience of a relatively small IT shop of roughly 30 full time IT operations personnel.

Back when the economy was cooking along, an up and coming commercial construction company grew right out of their business model. Historically, they utilized a decentralized model, setting up and staffing a stand-alone onsite operation for each new project. This model was excellent at delivering customized project support, but lacked scalability and leverage; with remote site spin-up slow and error prone.

From an IT perspective, the CIO realized they needed to, in his words, "Consolidate and professionalize the IT operations", with the following goals:

1. Improve quality of service and experience for worksite users & applications
2. Contain IT costs and efficiently scale current IT personnel to meet growth
3. Improve speed, accuracy, and agility of spinning up new project worksites

Key Personas:

CIO

Many years of commercial construction experience
Personally drove IT consolidation / professionalization strategy and roadmap
Directly engaged in evaluating and selecting the solution vendor/consultant

VP of IT

"Co-pilot" for CIO on strategy, drove project deployment and vendor engagement

Subject Matter Experts (SME)

One for performance and availability tools / architecture
One for service management process workflow and automation (helpdesk)

Two Key Parallel Evolution Paths:

Path A: Performance, availability, and quality of experience monitoring

Step 1: -Deployed synthetic end-user / application monitors, agentless remote site infrastructure monitoring, and general WAN/LAN management

-Basic service experience reporting, and per-site performance dashboards

Step 2: -Enterprise infrastructure fault/performance (agent based system, OS, DB)

-Central "IT Command Center" event console with trouble ticket integration

Step 3: -In-depth application management modules (exchange, SAP)

-Advanced network services (route analytics, performance)

Path B: Service management process workflow and automation

Step 1: -Single call/request center organization established

-Incident management (utilized pre-packed ITIL module)

Step 2: -Knowledge management process, analytics and automation modules

Step 3: -Configuration and change management process/automation

-Service Level Management definition and basic reporting

An Uncommon Sequence of Evolution Steps

Notice the interesting order of the steps. The CIO dictated that the performance monitoring path start with remote site end-user / application experience monitoring. The original roadmap proposed by the system integrator recommended starting with basic data center tools, advancing through central event console, then application and database management, and finally end user experience. This is a traditional evolution path, but the CIO was adamant that, "what happens at the remote work-sites IS the business". So, he wanted an immediate awareness of remote site experience to drive the design of every step in the roadmap.

There was a similar "cultural" direction from the CIO on the service management workflow path. Again, the CIO insisted that Knowledge management be moved up in the evolution before configuration, change, and service level management. Typically, significant knowledge management execution is viewed as "icing on the cake" by most organizations, and only implemented after all the other core ITIL processes.

This CIO believed that analyzing and formalizing knowledge learned from successes and failures of spinning-up remote sites and dealing with issues was the best early investment. This approach immediately became part of the standard IT culture, and played a significant role in guiding change and configuration management process definition.

The CIO's Project-Based perspective

This CIO is indeed very ITIL savvy, but I think living and breathing the commercial construction business had a significant impact on his choice of system integrators. During the bidding process for the ITSM/BSM contract, it came down to three competitors in a direct "shoot-out". System integrator number one and two brought product and ITIL experts to the shoot-out, concentrated very heavily on features and functions, and gave a fixed-price bid of 200 deployment days.

System integrator number three brought a project manager to the shoot-out, and changed 75% of the discussion to, "here is how we will navigate the project and be successful". Can you guess who won? It shouldn't be news to anyone that a CIO's background alters the decision criteria, or the roadmap vision.... But it is always interesting to observe it in action. Maybe I will write a post about that someday

Conclusion

This IT organization is relatively small, so the decision making process and personas are greatly simplified compared with the large corporations previously analyzed. Despite the CIO's unique influence on approach and deployment sequence, in the end, the same fundamental truths of BSM/ITM evolution apply.... Just on a different scale, agility and timeframe.

Bryan Dean - BSM Research

Tweet this!

BSM Evolution: The CIO/Ops Perception Gap

adsey007 — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 10:31:00 GMT

There are many potential culprits for why IT organizations struggle to make substantive progress in evolving their ITSM/BSM effectiveness. A customer research project we did a few years ago offered an interesting insight into one particular issue that I rarely see the industry address. The research showed that most CIO’s simply had a different perception – when compared to their IT operations managers- of their IT organization’s fundamental service delivery maturity and capability. This seemingly benign situation often proved to be a powerful success inhibitor.

The Gap:

A substantial sample size of international, Global 2000 enterprise IT executives participated in the study. When asked to prioritize investment priorities on a broad range of IT capabilities, we saw a definite gap. IT Operations managers consistently ranked, “Investing to improve general IT service support and production IT operations” in their top 1 or 2 priorities, where CIO’s ranked this same capability much lower as a priority 6 or 7.

The Perception:

When pressed further, CIO’s believed that the IT service management basics of process and technology were already successfully completed, and the CIO’s had mentally moved on to other priorities such as rolling out new applications, IT financial management, or project and portfolio management.

Most of the CIO’s in the study could clearly recall spending thousands of dollars sending IT personnel to ITIL education, and thousands more purchasing helpdesk, network, and system management software. Apparently, these CIO’s thought of their investment in service operations as a onetime project, rather than an ongoing journey that requires multiple years of investment, evolution, reevaluation, and continuous improvement.

IT operations managers –on the other hand- clearly had a different view of the world. They were generally pleased with the initial progress from the service operations investments, but realized they were far from the desired end state. The Ops managers could plainly see the need to get proactive, to execute advanced IT processes and more sophisticated management tools, but could not drain the proverbial swamp while fighting off the alligators.

The Trap:

We probed deeper in the research, diligently questioning the IT operations managers on why they didn’t dispel the CIO’s inaccurate perception. In order to secure the substantial budget, these Ops managers had fallen into the trap of over-promising the initial service management project’s end-state, ROI and time to value. (I wouldn’t be surprised if they had been helped along by the process consultants and software management vendors!)

These Ops managers saw it as “a personal failure” to re-approach the CIO and ask for additional budget to continue improving the IT fundamentals. Worse yet, they had to continually reinforce the benefits from the original investment so the CIO didn’t think they had wasted the money. So, the IT operations staff enjoyed the result of reactively working nights and weekends to meet business’ expectations, and make sure everyone kept their jobs. Meanwhile, the CIO’s slept well at night thinking, “Hey, we are doing a pretty darn good job”, but faced the next day asking, “Why are my people burnt out?” A vicious cycle.

Recommendation through Observation:

I’m not wild about making recommendations since I merely research this stuff… not actually perform hands-on implementation. Instead, I will offer some observations of best practices from companies who appear to be breaking through on BSM, lowering costs, raising efficiency and improving IT quality of service.

Focus on Fundamentals: It is boring and basic, but absolutely critical to continually look for ways to improve the foundational service management elements of event, incident, problem, change, and configuration management. Successful IT organizations naturally assume that if they implemented these core processes more than 3 years ago, they likely need to update both technology and process. If FIFA World Cup Football clubs and Major League Baseball teams revisit their fundamental skills each and every year, why wouldn’t IT?

Assume a Journey: IT leaders who develop a step-wise, modular path of realistic projects that deliver a defined ROI at each step have the best track record of securing ongoing funding from the business. The danger here is defining modular steps that are so disconnected and silo’d, that IT never progresses toward an integrated BSM/ITSM process and technology architecture. This balance continues to be one of the most difficult to manage.

Empowered VP of IT Operations: The advantages of a CIO empowering a VP of IT operations and holding them accountable for end-to-end business service has been discussed in previous posts. The practice of having a strong VP of operations who has executive focus on service operations and continual service improvement, while having end-to-end service performance responsibility does appear to be a growing trend and success factor.

Focus on the Applications: In the same research study that showed the perception gap on, “Investing to improve general IT service support and production IT operations”, there was consistent agreement on, “Investing to improve business critical application performance and availability”. The CIO’s, Ops Managers and Business Relationship managers all ranked this capability as a top 1 or 2 priority.

Successful BSM implementations focus on the fundamentals of process and infrastructure management, but do so from a business service, or an application perspective. This approach not only enables an advantageous budget discussion with the business, but it also hones the scope and execution of projects.

It is difficult to assess the relative impact of this CIO/IT Ops perception gap, considering the wide variety of challenges that IT faces. But hopefully, this post gives you something to consider when assessing your own IT organization’s situation and evolution.

Let us know where your organization fits – please take our two question survey (two demographics questions also). We’ll publish the results on the blog.

Describe the perception of your IT's fundamental service delivery process
How often does your IT organization significantly evaluate and invest to update your fundamental IT process

Click Here to take survey

Bryan Dean – BSM Research

Monitoring your cloud computing as easy as calling an airport shuttle

Michael_Procopio — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 05:15:00 GMT

HP made an announcement about new cloud computing management capabilities today: HP Unveils "Cloud Assure" to Drive Business Adoption.

HP currently offers Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) for individual management applications such as HP Business Availability Center (BAC) and HP Service Manager primarily for intranet and extranet applications.

HP Cloud Assure helps customers validate:

Security – by scanning networks, operating systems, middleware layers and web applications. It also performs automated penetration testing to identify potential vulnerabilities. This provides customers with an accurate security-risk picture of cloud services to ensure that provider and consumer data are safe from unauthorized access.
Performance – by making sure cloud services meet end-user bandwidth and connectivity requirements and provide insight into end-user experiences. This helps validate that service-level agreements are being met and can improve service quality, end-user satisfaction and loyalty with the cloud service.
Availability – by monitoring cloud-based applications to isolate potential problems and identify root causes with end-user environments and business processes and to analyze performance issues. This allows for increased visibility, service uptime and performance.

HP Cloud Assure provides control over the three types of cloud service environments:

For Infrastructure as a Service, it helps ensure sufficient bandwidth ability and validates appropriate levels of network, operating system and middleware security to prevent intrusion and denial-of-service attacks.
For Platform as a Service, it helps ensure customers who build applications using a cloud platform are able to test and verify that they have securely and effectively built applications that can scale and meet the business needs.
For Software as a Service, it monitors end-user service levels on the cloud applications, loads tests from a business process perspective and tests for security penetration.

A diagram showing the differences in the services is at Cloud Computing Basics.

In the end it doesn't matter where the service is; you need to be sure it is available and performing to expectations. Cloud Assure provides the capability in a way that is very agile. You say "I need this service monitored" and it is monitored. Its just like calling for an airport shuttle -- you call, they show up.

For Business Availability Center Michael Procopio, product manager HP Problem Isolation.

OpEx versus CapEx

adsey007 — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 08:06:00 GMT

Forrester just posted on how the recession is hitting capital budgets (CapEx) and that you should consider using operating expenses (OpEx) to purchase software (http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=lcUS21765009).

About 18 months ago, we introduced one year term licenses on the Business Availability Center (application and business transaction management) software so that it is more likely to fit within OpEx budgets.

Mike Shaw.

BSM Evolution Paths: Financial Services Example

adsey007 — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 11:16:00 GMT

When two Fortune 500 companies merge the IT convergence can feel like two high speed trains on parallel tracks speeding toward a single-track tunnel. Not only is IT tasked with maintaining or increasing quality of service, but the CEO’s are quite impatient to quickly rationalize the IT operating expense equation of “1+1=1.25”. Maybe 1.50 if you have an extremely benevolent Board of Directors.

Unlike the Automotive Industry example posted earlier (BSM Evolution Paths: Auto Industry Sample), this Financial Services example has much less tops-down roadmap direction, and much more independent parallel paths. Let’s take a look at three of the key personas and evolutions within these parallel paths.

Data Center Operations Manager; Infrastructure Operations path:

The new Data Center Operations Manager (DCOM; reporting to VP of IT Ops) commissioned a tools architecture analysis. They inventoried their management tools and counted over 80 major “platforms” in the fault, performance and availability category alone!

The DCOM empowered a Global Software Management Architect to drive a “limited vendor” strategy to simplify and standardize the tool environment. Although there were many individual domain experts bent out of shape, this standardized environment limited the vendor touches, enabled renegotiated license/support contracts, concentrated tool expertise and resulted in improved quality of service.

The fault, performance and availability architecture was boiled down to three major vendors covering three broad categories (plus device specific element plug-ins):

System Infrastructure (Server, OS, Database, storage middleware, LAN feeds, etc.)
Network Services (WAN, LAN, advanced protocols, route analytics, etc.)
Enterprise Event (consolidated event console, correlation, filtering, root cause)

The DCOM could have pushed harder for a single vendor covering all three categories, but it was a matter of time-to-deploy pragmatism. A vendor could only be selected as category solution if the product was successfully deployed previously, and internal deployment expertise existed to lead the global implementation. This “survival of the fittest” approach did not necessarily drive the most elegant architecture, but it did speed deployment and limit risk.

Independent roadmaps and key integration capabilities were developed for each category to meet 6, 12, 18 and 24 month milestones.

CTO; Business Service Oversight path

Early on in the merger process, there was a power struggle to own the business service visibility and accountability solution. The VP of IT Operations wanted the tools, process and organizational power, but the Lines of Business insisted on a more independent group that would sit between IT Operations and the business-aligned Application Owners.

The Online Banking Group from one of the pre-merger divisions had successfully implemented a business service dashboard and Service Level Agreement reporting solution (based primarily on end-user experience monitoring). Using an “adopt and go” strategy, the CIO empowered the CTO to develop an end-to-end group and expand the solution to all six major business units.

This business unit expansion rolled out over 12-18 months and was successful, but limited to monitoring and reporting. Over the next 12 months, Application Owners, Line of Business CIO’s and VP of IT Operations all wanted to extend the business service monitoring to:

Problem isolation, application diagnostics, and incident resolution
In-depth transaction management of composite applications

Director Service Management; Enterprise CMDB path

The Director of Service Management, reporting to VP IT Ops, drove two major initiatives over the first 12 months of the merger.

Consolidate to a single, global, follow-the-sun service desk
Rationalize and standardize the request and incident management process

I could easily spend an entire blog post discussing the IT process convergence and standardization, but I refuse! Instead, I’ll focus on what happened in the 12 months following the service desk consolidation.

The Director of Service Management launched a CMDB RFP which was originally grounded in incident, problem and configuration management. The RFP touched off an enterprise-wide nerve, not to mention a flurry of vendor responses. The project quickly expanded, and changed focus to the “hotter” driver of change and (release) risk management, and how to drive all IT process from an enterprise service model.

Once the application owners got involved (from a change/release control perspective), and the infrastructure operations got involved (from a change and performance/availability perspective), and the CTO got involved (from a business service reporting and accountability rperspective) all of a sudden incident management took a back seat in the decision process.

In the end, a service discovery, dependency mapping and change/release management solution was selected that was a different vendor all together from the incumbent service desk solution.

An interesting journey… so far

The three paths described above are clearly a small subset of the overall work done for this corporate merger, but hopefully gives a glimpse into the BSM evolution dynamics. By all accounts, this company has been successful in their journey; you may be interested to know that this financial services company is not participating in the government bail-out program.

The lack of a tops-down “enterprise IT transformation” roadmap did not hinder their progress… in fact some will argue it enable their progress! You can observe, however, that at the end of each path there is a drive towards further integration and cross-IT dependence. It will be interesting to watch this company, and see how their approach evolves as they continue down the intersecting evolution paths.

Bryan Dean, BSM Research