Business Service Management Hub

I would agree that IT is commoditizing and the role of IT leaders is evolving much like my good friend Siki indicates where commodity services can be done elsewhere and which then frees the evolved IT resources to sit at the table as Diane describes to apply technology to business choices. This is the practices of business service management in action.

I read this post by a friend of mine and I couldn’t agree more wholeheartedly. Cloud computing by the nature of it screams heterogeneous environment versus a single vendor framework homogeneous environment. I also screams requirements for an integration platform and business service management practice to manage the services consuming the technology.

For the folks that know me best, they are snickering at how this pains me to write and not only post once, but twice about Texas Stadium. My featured post on Friday was also about Texas Stadium and the Super Bowl and the Business Service Management opportunity facing those companies buying 30 second ads at $3M each. I believe the might Pug stole the show!

This headline caught my eye as I will be the first to debate that IT is not a profit center. However, this is a prime example of IT realizing and classifying based upon Service Value and Business Service Management practices. In an effort to first cut support costs from old systems, right sourcing decisions and partnerships were established for industry must haves.

Business service management, service levels and management of the cloud from the experts at IDC – Mary Johnston Turner.

The author points out great security points in making the leap to the cloud and part of those warts not mentioned is the management of those VMs in the cloud from an end-to-end business service management perspective to manage against the risk he points to. How risky is it to have that VM in the cloud? How secure should you make the data and management of the VM? What business services are at risk?

This article inspired me to write a full blown feature on the subject of vendor management, service level measurement/management/communication and basic business service management practices. The net of it, IT you own it – no shifting blame to others and no government intervention to set up terms and conditions. This is outsourcing, plain and simple – manage your provider.

Today is the topic of integration in Business Service Management land. The nature of taking advantage of cloud and dynamic resources will require open connectivity. The subscriber maintains the responsibility for overall management of services to their customers. This in and of itself screams of open systems and integration platforms.

I feel like changing things up here in Business Service Management land today. This blog caught my attention as it describes the leap of going from an independent software vendor (ISV) to aSaaS offering. It has challenges in how the software is architected so that it can then later be hosted and ultimately used by many customers in a single, multi-tenant environment to take full advantage of the economies of scale. The fact is most are run in dedicated environments to short cut this challenge.

The Hub Commentary_ This week there has been significant buzz around this acquisition and I’ve held off posting and referring to any of the articles.  Lydia of Gartner sums it up well with her blog of yesterday.  One in debt without a sales team and the other in need of data center footprints and a […]

In my post today, Getting to Service Value, the principles I described regarding Business Service Management are put into action here with this CEO and CIO combination. The business is/was changing and technology was/is being re-thought and deployed to change the business.

As the writer mentions, a lot of ink has covered cloud computing – I might suggest a lot of that ink has been about the commoditization of IT. As I posted yesterday with the 2×2 grid of service classification, most of what falls into the Cost quadrant are services that could be considered commodity. Applying business service management practices and taking a top down view as my friend Siki suggests in the article, is the first step in identifying services, where they should run and how they should be managed for that end-to-end view as she also mentions.

Business Service Management practices need to be baked into the workloads as they are configured and deployed just as you would instrument applications and hardware as it is deployed into production environments. The difference in this situation is that the workloads are a bit more dynamic and potentially paid for with a subscription on outside infrastructure. Management to decommission workloads is as important as deploying additional resources during peak periods to monitor costs appropriately.

This article has some extreme points, however, I too believe this is the year for radical change for data centers and IT. Service value and Business Service Management practices are an imperative. The catalyst for change is the explosion of service providers and cloud options, frustration with internal IT lethargic behavior and a promise for increased spending in technology that guarantees to grow the business.

The first question should really be “Do you know the value in managing consumer devices on your network.” Good Business Service Management practices would start with an evaluation of the cost to manage a new device and the value it provides to the business over doing something else that would drive revenue growth. This goes to a post from last week on the very same topic.

Applying a social interface to IT may sound crazy to the technologists, however, if you move past the initial reaction and think about many of the initiatives from IT and the response from the business, it may just be the interface that drives acceptance. We have all been exposed and most (even I must admit to it) have used, adopted and/or totally embrace the social media explosion. Business Service Management is practice and part of that practice is the interactions with our customers and how they want to interact with IT.

I cannot escape the cloud discussion today and must say that I agree with Don and his article this week in contrast to the other I just posted today. Business Service Management practices, Service Level measuring and management of the service regardless of where it runs is the responsibility of the service provider – IT.

All the news these days seems to be about the cloud. This is a nice summary of things to consider, however, leaves out the usual after thought that makes or breaks new technology deployment – management of it. Business Service Management practices and instrumenting for management and measuring performance should be a factor to consider when planning a movement to the cloud.

In another article earlier this week regarding Business Service Management practices and turning the tables on the discussion from cost of IT services to value provided to the business, there was a similar discussion. Not all services are created equal and costs can be moved from one service to another based upon the value provided to the business. However, first we must be able to cost the services to drive to the value discussion.

The lack of clarity and transparency of IT services as consumed by the business is a catalyst for many of the service providers and as-a-Service offerings. The service providers are in business to grow and drive revenue as should IT organizations. Business Service Management practices and knowing your services is first step in achieving this transparency in measuring services both for quality and cost.