There's a lot of activity in the marketplace around IT automation, the automation of a wide variety of IT activities.  Unfortunately not all of it is helpful.  Many vendors and not a few IT organizations are assuming that, if automation in general is a good thing, then any automation is better than no automation and automation in any form is good.  So they end up automating IT processes and activities in a relatively undisciplined way, and without any clear or objective sense of what they hope to achieve other than to "lower cost" and "reduce the amount of manual effort involved." 

While these are clearly good objectives, I'm hearing from the more mature IT organizations a much better and more discplined way to think about this.

First, it all starts with process.  IT organizations who are thinking seriously about automation must first think seriously about process.  Identify those key IT processes, document them, train people on how to follow them, and then put measurement mechanisms in place to capture a number of key performance indicators to track how well people are following these processes and how well these processes are working.  Also identify process owners, because this is what they do.  This is Process 101, and any decent process engineer can help you set this up.  This initial set of processes should be good processes (or "good practice") but don't try to make them perfect; we'll get to that in a moment.

As an aside here, you can even use some process tools (either generic process tools or IT-specific process tools) built for this purpose.  There are some good ones available, they have the ability to collect the essential key metrics already built-in, and many come with good IT processes out-of-the-box.  Some also have the ability to support the automation of elements of these processes, and that's a clear bonus; more on this in a moment.

Second, start using the metrics collected to do two essential things:

1. Determine where the processes are not working and fix the process.

2. Determine where people are not following the process and fix the people.

Let the organization run a bit, and then do the second step again, and again, and again, and don't ever stop.  This second step is called "Continuous Process Improvement," and it's at the heart of what Dr. Deming tried to teach us so many years ago.  You may also find you're not collecting the right metrics, so you can fix that along the way as well.

Now, several things should be clear from this description.  The first is that Deming was right: good practice is what you can get from others (in books, in software, in tools, etc); best practice is what a process-mature IT organization gets after plugging good practice into the above CPI algorithm.

The second is why you shouldn't spend too much time trying to fine-tune the processes in their initial implementation.  Let your CPI program do that for you.  Overwhelming experience teaches us that.

The third is that automating good practice (i.e. automation purchased out-of-the-box) isn't nearly as effective in the long run as automating best practice.  So we get the real payoff when we add a third step to the CPI activity above:

3. Using these same all-important key metrics, identify those processes or process steps that can be automated and that are expensive (time, money, people), error-prone (lots of human error), or both, and automate them.  With this approach, it's now possible to approach the automation of most IT activity in a disciplined, thoughful, and goal-oriented way.

So, what we learn is that buying automation out-of-the-box may have short-term benefits, but is ultimately short-sighted, since you've traded off best practice for good practice where automation is concerned.  Second, automation isn't something you buy but something you do when paired with the right approach, the right metrics, and plugged into a larger process improvement paradigm.  Third, the IT industry is still in its infancy at learning how to do this correctly, but we have the benefit of seeing how others industries did this, and there are many of them.  More on this in a future post.

If your company isn’t using an IT and business dashboard, they should consider it. Executive dashboards, which we refer to as BSM dashboards, can help different parts of an IT organization and different lines of business, who are the business stakeholders in IT, make better, more informed decisions. It can give them a set of views that break down the barriers, not only within IT, but between IT and the business. But not any dashboard will do. It should be based on ITIL processes. One of the benefits is that it can provide a much more mature IT process view for IT based on ITIL best practices. Think of the dashboard as the vehicle by which both IT and business stakeholders can, through using subsets of data that come out of the CMDB, get a consistent view of what's happening in IT across all the various stakeholders.

What a difference the right dashboard can make…what a view.

Several major factors are driving the emerging industry trend of “greening” the data center. First, many IT organizations have reached — or are approaching — the power and cooling capacity limits of their data centers. As a result, it’s difficult to accommodate or expand the IT infrastructure. They still have to respond to continually increasing demands for business services that require more servers, more storage, and more network elements. Another concern is that energy costs are high and rising to the point where power and cooling now account for a significant portion of IT operations costs. Finally, organizations are coming under increasing pressure to become good corporate citizens by reducing their power consumption to conserve energy.

Over-provisioning is a major contributor to excessive power consumption in the data center is. Organizations have created dedicated, siloed environments for individual application loads, resulting in extremely low utilization rates. The result is that data centers are spending a lot of money powering and cooling many machines that individually aren’t doing much useful work. Some are even sitting idle. The business benefit of “greening” the data center through consolidation and virtualization is optimizing power efficiency to gain maximum work output per watt consumed. This will help reduce operations costs. It will also permit organizations to continue to expand services to meet increasing business demands without requiring additional power and cooling. This is particularly important to organizations that have already reached the power and cooling limits of their data centers.

What makes people successful? Early in my career, I was given the guidance to make listening to customers a priority. I think listening has a lot to do with being more effective. For me, learning how to listen to customers, and really understand the customers’ problems, has helped make it possible to solve them. It’s critical that I spend as much time, or even more time, in an active listening mode, and hear about the challenges our customers face and learn about some of the things they're trying to accomplish. By actively listening, I can make sure that what we're doing for them as a company remains business relevant, and continues to deliver value. Really listening can also help you in areas well beyond your job, and a make a difference in the way you relate to people who are important to you. If you don’t believe me, just ask my wife.

There is a lot of “ITIL® talk” and buzz about Business Service Management (BSM) on conference calls and in boardrooms these days. It’s not like the dot-com bubble. This is real.  But what are the CIO and their teams doing about it? They should be asking “What do we need to do to get the full value from our Business Service Management initiatives? How do we streamline, link and optimize our IT and business functions?”

What’s in it for you? It amounts to huge efficiencies for your operation. Then come bonuses, career advancement, and glowing compliments from your team. (Okay, that was a stretch). Or how about, your competition may be implementing BSM right now? Does that do it for you?

Because having one place to go to get a “single version of truth” about the underlying configuration of your IT environment is rapidly evolving from a “nice to have” to a “must have” for all kinds of reasons.  I mean, imagine what the Internet would be like without having a set of top-level authoritative Name Servers (the Internet’s single version of truth).  Chaos, that’s what.

So, even without ITIL, a new CMDB can offer IT a much greater level of control over what’s happening in their organization. A well-configured CMDB can automatically monitor configuration items (CIs) — their location, status, and relationships to each other — and consolidate diverse data sets, while ensuring compliance. This capability ensures assets are used effectively (not overbuilt). That function alone greatly reduces costs.

Going even further, a BSM-oriented CMDB offers an accurate picture of available assets and their use, and serve as a true synchronization and coordination point for all IT processes. This capability ensures assets are used effectively (not overbuilt).

A recent Forrester Research report (April, 2006), titled ‘Implementing BSM,’ states “As 76 percent of the IT budget goes to operations, firms that implement BSM can potentially save 25 percent of their overall IT budget.” They went on, “Developing true BSM systems requires understanding the metrics business users employ to decide if IT is providing value, and linking these metrics and their associated business services to IT infrastructure components.”

Forrester predicts the number of large companies (with revenues over $1 billion) implementing BSM will triple over the next two years.

It’s connecting the dots

ITIL has a number of goals for configuration management.  Some of the most important ones are: account for all the IT assets and configurations within your organization and its services; provide accurate information on relationships and documentation to support all Business Service Management processes; build a sound basis for Incident Management, Problem Management, Change Management, and Release Management;  provide verification of the configuration records against the infrastructure, and correct any exceptions swiftly and easily.

If you build it, the benefits will come – right off the bat

CMDBs are available with ITIL-compatible, preconfigured tools that integrate easily with varied supporting applications. This capability greatly lowers the time and cost to deploy services. Next, identify your current IT data collection processes. Create a list of services that your IT group provides to end users. This is critical, because with it you go to key business areas to determine the services that the business department sees IT providing. Once you know what services IT is doing for your business units, you’ll have a good idea of what you are not currently providing and what you’ll need to add to populate your new CMDB. Without a CMDB, organizations run the risk of over-provisioning because they cannot track which assets are used for which purposes, or which are available for much more use. 

Here is a small real-world example: the service desk, help desk, or run-time monitoring tools capture events from a variety of different sources. Those events are filtered, standardized, and prioritized based on severity, scope, or impact on the business using information contained in the CMDB. This automatic action opens a trouble ticket that the support staff can further prioritize, based on the goals and priorities of the ITIL business processes used to filter events. The process is automated and much more repeatable, and eliminates the slow, manual burden typically used with prioritizing and filtering which can also bring in human error.

A good “training manual” is available to get you up to speed -- Innovation: Information Technology and Business – now available in PDF. It includes articles by each member of BMC’s Thought Leadership Council and covers a large selection of IT/business topics.

Let’s talk. Give me your comments.  Is your IT department on the right track with BSM? And let’s get together for some stories at BMCUserWorld in San Francisco, August 28 – September 1.

Remember the classic line by Humphrey Bogart in “Casablanca,” "Louie, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful symbiotic relationship."  Well, the line was “beautiful friendship,” but I’m making a point about open source technologies.

The point is that IT companies big and small “in all the world” exist in symbiosis with mutually satisfying relationships, whether we want to recognize it or not.

The smaller, newer, more agile, and perhaps more innovative vendors need the larger, more stable incumbents with their robust products and solutions applied to tried and true business functions, and the incumbents need the smaller, newer, startups for their new ideas. We each benefit from the other. Trying to spin this as survival of the fittest is faulty thinking and could very well stifle the innovations that will come from open source technologies.

What is BMC’s stance on open source engineering?

At BMC, we believe the open source approach is a critical and vital part of a high-tech, innovation-driven landscape.

We’re an active supporter of the open source community: We support and manage all the leading open source technologies, including Apache, JBOSS, and Linux, among others.

We’re a customer too. We use a large number of open source technologies within a number of our solutions.

We plan, on a regular basis, when to release parts or all of our solutions into the open source community, believing the open source players are one of a number of viable mechanisms for creating, extending, and strengthening the systems management solutions available to the market.

We look forward to the efforts of the Open Management Consortium being successful, and we look forward to exploring ways to engage with the member projects and companies in ways that benefit us all – beautiful friendships.

We will always have Paris by the bay. That is...if you come to BMCUSERWORLD in San Francisco, August 29 through September 1st, for five days of learning, networking and idea swapping. Visit http://www.bmc.com/userworld2006/ for details.

For more details on open source trends, including a snippet from a recent Forrester paper, visit http://open-management.com/2006/05/18/yes-bmc-agrees-that-we-exist-in-symbiosis/

Houston – BSM has landed

As Business Service Management (BSM) continues to attract new followers in Fortune 500 steel blue canyons and fresh, Bermuda green corporate campuses, BMC Software this week launched its second generation Atrium Configuration Management Database (CMDB) and Automated Discovery products from its Houston headquarters. These are the BSM foundation technologies that enable customers to implement a business/IT network.

BSM not only began here at the BMC Houston testing grounds, it has been ‘genetically altered’ the past 18 months. (In IT years, that is a lifetime).  It’s a full generation ahead in scope and function of other software solutions. I like to say it is pre-integrated, out-of-the-box software. BMC’s foundation technologies include proven, light-weight, customer-validated second generation software. BMC has the entire package. These are not buzz words about products on the horizon. These are working solutions, available now and succeeding now all over the world where we have implementations. We are activating business with the power of IT today. Our BMC marketing slogan is pure fact.

We took the BS out of BSM

Let me simplify, BSM is managing IT from the perspective of business.

And at BMC, we deliver BSM benefits to customers faster than any other software company. Many of the top IT companies, our competition, have found out the magnitude of importance of BSM. There ads are starting to sound a lot like BSM. In reality, they are still working on these areas in their labs, and their CMDBs are really just retrofitted monolithic databases and more versions of slow, top-heavy data barges.

At BMC, we understand what data should be in a CMDB, and what data shouldn’t be there. BMC labs know that customers want a robust, practical, fault-tolerant CMDB that won’t be a single point of risk in their datacenter like the ‘frameworks’ of 10 years ago. Working directly with customers, BMC knows organizations need a single, consolidated view of an IT infrastructure from a single graphical dashboard. With BSM, you will reduce service and help desk costs, lower the risk of business shut downs, and gain an IT infrastructure built to support your business growth and flexibility.

Here is the closest I get to a marketing pitch

The cornerstone of our new BSM products is BMC Atrium CMDB 2.0. It unifies the sharing of IT configuration and business priority information. BMC Automated Discovery works with BMC Atrium CMDB 2.0 to model all IT-supporting elements – the technology to business processes to the people, managers, staff, partners and customers, and – delivers a single, unified, business-focused view into the IT environment. Taken together, these foundation technologies deliver a detailed, clear insight into how IT supports the business that is not available from any other vendor. As a result, customers can make more educated and calculated IT decisions in support of business goals, which is the essence of BSM. This week’s launch is the first of some 60 new BMC products and solutions taking off this year.

Meet me at BMCUSERWORLD in San Francisco, August 29 through September 1st for five days of learning, networking and idea swapping. Visit http://www.bmc.com/userworld2006/  for details.

I was interviewed a while back by BMC’s E-Business Director, Mike Smith. He helped me dig up some of the reasons I dove into the computer software field and I remembered some important lessons from early in my career that have stuck with me.

My high school in Hampton Virginia actually had a computer on the campus which was rare in those days, the early ‘70s. I developed a date matching program on FORTRAN for a fundraiser and fell in love with computer science.

I enrolled at Cornell and the first day I looked for a professor in the engineering school and told him “I want a computer science degree.” Few schools had that kind of specialization then, but Cornell had a college scholar curriculum where I worked with an academic sponsor to combine some engineering classes with computer programming classes.  I was among the first to graduate with a computer science degree. A guy in my fraternity designed course work in agriculture, botany and some chemistry and ended up with one of the first degrees in winemaking.

I graduated with a BA and a “checked box Master’s degree”. That was the consolation prize for those who didn’t perform a dissertation for a Doctorate. That was fine with me. I enjoyed all the esoteric theories of computer science, but I wanted to apply the systems in the real world. A Bell recruiter who was one of my professors looked me up and, of course I was blown away (late ‘70s speak) and was hired on the spot.

The first task I was given at Bell Labs was to develop a patch in a running C program. At Bell, you could never take the switch down. If you take the switch down, no phone calls will occur in that neighborhood, “not gonna happen” (‘80s lingo).

It took us a couple of months. We modified the operating system, modified the micro system, the stacks. It was a perfect problem, it covered multi-disciplines. I had to look across the whole set technical areas, how the compiler works, how assemblers work, how linkage editors work, how the process image sits in the memory during run time.

We got our solution patented in record time, just 18 months. The Bell attorney said it was the fastest patent he’d every worked on. It was my first patent, and one I’m still proud of. I worked at Bell for a total of 12 years. I thought I’d be a 35-year employee, and I’d never leave, I loved the management solutions we created.  About six years into my career, divestiture hit. We were split up. We had to search for other business models. Bell/AT&T next went into the computer business.

Western Electric did all the manufacturing in phenomenal facilities in Okalahoma City. Engineers from across around the world would study the plant. Bell designed things well, with Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) in mind.  We designed equipment to last 15, 20, even 30 years. That extra engineering would improve the TCO with a dramatic drop in service and recall issues downstream. For example, our engineers would use 100 mil gold coating on switches. That type of quality helped build Bell into the world’s best telephone system, but this was a new world. Computers have a 3- to 5-year life span, so gold plating standards are 10 mil. Meanwhile, back at the OK ranch, the top engineers wouldn’t budge. They had the power to say “We use 100 mil plating and that’s it!

It was part of the organization’s DNA.

We did the market research to find out what we could sell our computers for and found that we would lose more than $100 on each unit. Our products couldn’t compete.  The economics had changed. So the state-of-the-art Oklahoma plant was shut down. The very values that created the mighty company became fatal.

That has stuck with me. Be mindful of the DNA of your organization. I have a filter now running a program in my head. Among the first things I’ve looked into here at BMC was to ask, “What are the givens? And why?” Be very mindful of your company’s answers. Do those values and mission statements still serve us or do they harm us?

If you have a few minutes, visit TalkBMC and listen the “Hidden Podcasts”, Part 1 and Part 2. I think you’ll enjoy them and get something out of them. Let me know what you think.

Each layer in your company’s software stack delivers a particular kind of value to your operation, but you have to be careful when tying one layer into a different layer in that ever-growing stack.  It seems like a strange concept at first glance. Open source evolved from the fact that there are very well-run business models that operate faster and more efficiently when a certain piece of software isn’t tied to whether the source is available or not.  It may be very hard to get your head around that idea.  But there are a lot of very successful companies out there who are operating on the Open Source model.  The nice thing about it is that it gives the IT industry more options.

To me, this is all part of a larger set of dynamics that I think economists would understand very well.  It’s called fluidity.

This is going to sound like a strange comparison, but let’s talk about the stock market.  What the stock market does more than anything, is it has become a very efficient mechanism for determining what a particular share of stock of a company is worth with up-to-the-second updates.

Think about it. What is a stock worth today at 10:a.m.?  How about, what is my product worth today? What is its value and how can I enhance its value in ways that ultimately deliver something of value to a consumer?  All of capitalism and economics in many respects revolve around the efficiency of markets and fluidity of value.

The notion of open source is nothing more than a continuation of the idea that says, ‘We as an industry have the choice to offer disintermediated products or not.’  The buzz word means to cut out the middleman or other intermediate hurdles. For example, “I have to go back to Sun to get a feature added or get a patch fixed, so we won’t be ready by Q-3.’ That represents a form of inefficiency that slows down an enterprise.   If I can take that source and open it up to a larger community, if I see there is value in adding a feature or fixing a bug, then I can do it more efficiently from an economic perspective because the overhead of going from identifying the problem to delivering a solution is now much more rapid and can be delivered at a much lower cost.  So the overall market becomes more efficient and more fluid. Not only does that business progress and evolve the entire industry benefits.

BMC’s position is very straightforward on this.  We use a large amount of open source components on our products.  I met with a group just the other day talking about wanting to solidify the relationship between JBOS and BMC.  We thought we could elevate the relationship and do it in a more integrated and comprehensive fashion with open source in mind.

Going back to my previous comment about efficiency and fluidity, does having me involved in that discussion make it more efficient or less efficient?

We can talk about that question later, but I think there is a widely held belief that there is a tremendous use and interest within BMC that open source is a part of,  or used as a tool to build some of our solutions.  So, that’s point No. 1.  Point No. 2 is to overcome some long-held beliefs about the notion of keeping the source proprietary rather than to open the source up and what the overall economic advantages or disadvantages of that might be.  I think that is a question being discussed at many other companies that are in a conversation like we are going through at BMC.

If you are a CIO, you and your team should be asking the same question, "What do we need to do to get the full business value from our Service Management initiatives?"  I recently wrote an article that helps you not only answer this question, but provides you with steps to follow.

Please see this article published in Enterprise Leadership called ITIL and the CMDB:  Better Service Management Equals Greater Business Value.