Eating our own dog food, or sipping our own champagne

Eating your own dog food. The phrase comes from the early television advertising genre when people would ask, but will the dog eat the food? Today it's categorized as a computer jargon phrase, well-documented in a Wikipedia entry, describing how software companies and other industries try out their own products, putting themselves in their customers' shoes. I assure you that at BMC, our IT group often pops open cans of our dog food, or sips our own champagne, as Thomas Siebel prefers to call it.

My favorite essay on the topic has to be Joel Spolsky's "What is the work of dogs in this country?" essay from 2001. Read both the Wikipedia link and the essay for all the nuances and pros and cons of eating one's own dog food. I especially like Joel's example of how the Juno executive wanted six pop-up ads until he experienced it himself and then backed off to two pop-up ads.

Similarly, I have heard people ask over and over again, this BSM stuff sounds great, but are you really doing it internally, BMC? That type of question is the heart of eating one's own dog food. "Sounds great, but have you put it into practice? Show me."

In the spirit of documenting how we eat our own dog food, I recently completed a white paper, "Implementing Resource Management Using Business Service Management Principles." It's about how our research and development lab schedules server resources for testing. This scheduling is no small task, especially in an Agile development environment with iterations that might go for 2 weeks or 4 weeks. The products we test also may need to be tested on 14 different platforms. I think the team used a half dozen BMC products and intend to use even more in the future, such as the advanced discovery and provisioning tools we have available. Products consumed so far, with more on the way:

• BMC Performance Manager for Databases
• BMC Performance Manager for Servers
• BMC Performance Manager Portal
• BMC Remedy Action Request System
• BMC Remedy Asset Management
• BMC Remedy Change Management

So take a look at the paper - no registration is required - and let us know what you think. This IT group, including talk.bmc's own Steve Carl, is constantly looking forward to make their processes even more business service centered.