Turning IT inside out and the trouble with ITSM and BSM
The other day Martin Atherton over at our partner Freeform Dynamics
got me thinking again about the IT service management (ITSM) / application management / business service management (BSM) hoopla we've long been saddled with in the IT industry.
I can absolutely see why vendors would want to try and avoid being seen as "just" providers of ITSM tools and make themselves look more "businessy". It's another example of the stack race phenomenon you see in so many areas - development tools, middleware, etc - and the simple idea is that if you can make your offering look and sound as if it can help customers talk more effectively to businesspeople, it's better than an offering that is a bit oily under the fingernails.
And I absolutely believe there's a place for tools that can help customers explain the value of IT investments in a way that makes sense to the people who pay the bills.
The problem is that the vast majority of the technology and practice out there does nothing of the sort - at least not without the expenditure of a lot of blood, sweat and tears. To characterise the ITSM/app management/BSM "stack" probably crassly unfairly, all that happens as you move higher up the stack is that events and alerts are correlated at ever more abstract levels. Events from routers, servers and switches are aggregated to give higher-level views of health and performance of infrastructure; infrastructure events are correlated with stats from DBMS instances, application servers, web servers and more to give higher-level views of health and performance of "applications"; and information at the application level can sometimes be aggregated further.
But fundamentally all we're doing is reporting on more chunky technology outcomes. The outcomes we're reporting on are still technology outcomes. The insight is about performance, uptime, security, and so on. There is no business context.
I could argue that we do have technology that can help provide business context to ITSM, app management and BSM - business activity monitoring (BAM). But to focus first on technology is missing the point.
The real underlying point is that do really manage services that make sense in a business context, the whole mindset of the IT organisation has to be turned inside out. IT organisations have to stop focusing so much on internal perspectives of process improvement and efficiency (are we doing things right?), and start focusing a bit more on a more external perspective (are we doing the right things?)
To pursue this idea of "inside out IT" into the software development realm, let's not forget - as I said to an audience of CIOs last night: you can be at CMMi level x and still not guarantee that the things you do will drive business value; instead you *can* turn out irrelevant systems, but in a very predictable way.
Labels: BSM, inside-out IT, ITSM, methods, tools
Microsoft server and tools is now part of the business division
The ever-vigilant Redmond watcher Mary Jo Foley
over at ZDNet reports that Microsoft's Server and Tools unit (but not the P&L - Microsoft will still report server and tools financials), which is responsible for Microsoft Windows Server, SQL Server, Visual Studio, System Center management products and Forefront security products, is now part of the Business Division, the home of Office and Dynamics.
Mary Jo finds this move 'curious' but I can see the logic. It's hinted at (if you get past the marketing speak) in the company's official statement that it made the move to:
sharpen leadership focus on the company?s top priorities and align its organization for innovation, ultimately enabling it to deliver even more value to its customers.I think this is all about making it easier for Microsoft to articulate propositions which resonate with the key concerns of senior business and IT people. The reality is that key strategic business and IT initiatives - SOA, BPM, compliance ... - increasingly depend on multiple technologies and associated competencies, which cross traditional stovepipes.
Big SOA, for example, is about managing IT work across the entire service lifecycle and so touches project and portfolio management, software development and integration, IT service management. BPM,
as the other Neil pointed out, is about Office as much as it is BizTalk and Workflow Foundation.
In the past, the way that Microsoft has been organised has worked against the articulation of such joined-up propositions (that's in part why it took the company so long
to talk about SOA). Customers would get different answers to the same cross-cutting requirement depending on which Microsoft stovepipe they were talking to: you need BizTalk and SQL Server; you need OBA and SharePoint. [As an aside, I said much of this in an interview with Microsoft PR earlier in the week].
Obviously, shifting branches of the org chart is comparatively easy (even it is very big). The hard part is going to be changing behaviour, joining up the marketing etc. The creation of the Connected Systems Division back in 2005 shows that the company can pull this sort of thing off (albeit on a smaller scale in the Server and Tools Business as was) and Jeff Raikes, who now owns the combined entity, has the influence and power to drive things through at this larger scale.
I am off to a Server and Tools Business analyst event in just over a week so I will hopefully learn more then.
Labels: BPM, compliance, ITSM, Microsoft, SOA
MMS 2007: Microsoft begins to deliver on DSI; provides some IT-business alignment pointers
I spent the beginning of last week in San Diego at the Microsoft Management Summit (MMS), the company's annual conference focused on all things systems management. With time to kill on the 15-hour return journey, I began to draft my thoughts only for
this post from Coté over at RedMonk to pop into my feed reader. As well as providing excellent summaries of IT management, Microsoft's Dynamic Systems Initiative (DSI) and the company's System Center product family, Coté provides his impressions of MMS and Microsoft's approach to systems management. Since my impressions were much the same:
- Significant focus on delivery with System Center Operations Manager, Configuration Manager and Essentials, Virtual Machine Manager and Service Manager (although the latter is still a year away)
- Emphasis on modeling - Service Modeling Language, Common Modeling Language (adding the management semantics to SML), CMDB, Management Packs
- Raising the ITIL flag - Microsoft Operations Framework (which Microsoft has until recently failed to exploit despite a long-standing ITIL foundation); System Center Service Manager and CMDB
- Plugging some notable gaps - OEM relationship with EMC for network-aware management but support for a heterogeneous environment requires more work.
I won't repeat them in detail here.
Instead, I thought I would call out something which I felt was largely absent from the two days of briefings and meetings with the Windows Enterprise Management Division team: how they help organisations align what they do from a systems management perspective with business objectives and priorities. Ultimately, as Microsoft
claims, that's what DSI is really all about:
A dynamic system is Microsoft's vision for what an agile business looks like?where IT works closely with business in order to meet the demands of a rapidly changing and adaptable environment. The Dynamic Systems Initiative (DSI) is Microsoft's technology strategy for products and solutions that help businesses enhance the dynamic capability of its people, process, and IT infrastructure using technologyMicrosoft has done a pretty good job with its
Infrastructure Optimization (IO) Model of outlining a roadmap to dynamic systems nirvana, as well as assessment tools to help organisations understand where they are on that path. The company has also gathered a significant amount of data from its customers which should help IT organisations to justify IO investment to the business.
However, the company hasn't really explained how it can help them to maintain the dialogue with the business once the investment has been secured - understanding and capturing business expectations; providing business-meaningful monitoring and metrics; correlating IT security management (as an aside, Microsoft needs to tighten the linkage between its System Center and security - Forefront,
Identity Lifecyle Manager - offerings) with business risk management etc. Microsoft needs to address this, not least because all of its enterprise systems management competitors are claiming such capabilities, be it Business Service Management from BMC, Business Service Optimization from CA, Business Technology Optimization from HP, Service Management from IBM.
There were signs, admittedly subtle ones that were obscured by the focus on new System Center products, in Bob Muglia's Tuesday morning keynote that Microsoft recognises this need:
- Plans to extend Design For Operations to a 'business analyst' audience
- The use of SML (presumably in BizTalk) for business process and key performance indicator modeling
- 2007 Office System (Project Server for portfolio management?) as a component of Microsoft's management offerings
- DSI is "ERP for IT"
Fortunately the timings of my meetings meant that I had a chance to quiz Kirill Tatarinov, Corporate Vice President, Windows Enterprise Management Division, about these small but important aspects of the keynote. He confirmed my interpretations of Muglia's comments in light of aligning IT operations with the business. He wasn't able to go into too much detail but I fully expect to see Microsoft begin to talk about these aspects of its management strategy in the not too distant future.
With Microsoft now four years into its ten-year management initiative it's good to see it delivering the first generation of DSI-era management tools. It's equally encouraging to see that the company recognises that it's not just an IT proposition. The company certainly has many of the assets required to help IT engage with a business audience but Microsoft is already coming from behind when it comes to IT management. There may be another six years of DSI but that's a LONG time in the IT industry, so it has to act quickly if its not to be forever trying to catch up with its competitors.
Labels: EMC, ITIL, ITSM, Microsoft
