BSM

The problem is well known and stated over and over again throughout the last decade. Most IT organizations are structured around functional silos of expertise and too focused on technology, hence there is a gap between IT organizations and the business. It is mostly agreed that IT organizations need to move toward service management, but there are different schools of thought on how to get there.

My personal journey in this realm started over a decade ago when I worked for a very large system integrator/outsourcing company that was organized in very distinct, geographically dispersed silos.  read more »

IT infrastructure needs to be managed holistically. Its a given. How do we do that? It's been a painful
journey.

First there was the “frameworks” (Tivoli/CA). The idea of building all management tools on a common
framework so that they would all be integrated, have common user interface, etc. was very appealing. But the execution did not match the promise.

A single framework to manage the entire IT infrastructure turned up to be a pipe dream. Too costly, too difficult and too painful to buy, implement, and maintain. After spending hundreds (millions?) of thousands of dollars, many IT organizations abandoned the framework projects or significantly scaled them down. Most people who worked on framework implementation projects can still feel the bad taste left in their mouth.  read more »

Can we have a single unified model to describe all IT "assets", everything IT cares about? The idea is certainly appealing, and excites any IT management geek, this one included. Cote has a post where he articulates the advantages of having one standard model to model everything in IT and argues one of the big 4 open sourcing their CMDB solution may be the fastest way to get there. Can this happen? Stranger things did happen but I'd put likelyhood of this one as very low. It would certainly shake things up if a major CMDB became open source and if (this is a big if as well) the model used by it gained traction. One can only hope, not much more we can do.  read more »

I'm excited to announce that iFountain has decided to go down the road not so less traveled and embrace the open source model. Being open has always been in our DNA, and we've agreed that embracing the open source model is the best manifestation of this objective.

As part of being open and transparent, I'll try to journal the road to open source for us. We'll try to get this done right. No doubt that it would not be difficult to post all the source code somewhere, stick on the GPL license, make a press release and declare the mission accomplished. But outcome of that alone would be no good for anyone. It takes more than declaring a license to turn closed source products into useful open source projects. Based on lessons learned from other projects, here is what we intend to do:

Open development infrastructure  read more »

John Willis asks whether ITIL still matter in the world of Amazon and Google (what I had referred as "best in class infrastructure providers"). ITIL skepticism is not new; there has been skeptics since the beginning for variety of reasons; some more valid than others. John is raising the issue from a different perspective. He stipulates that ITIL may not be required if majority of the services are provided by external giant service providers.  read more »

IT services more and more consist of services provided by external providers. Significant portions of the infrastructure are not directly managed by the IT departments. The latest trends in the enterprise space, Shared services, SaaS, SOA, outsourcing, etc. suggest that this is not a temporary phenomena.
IT organizations (as well as IT management vendors) need to adjust to the new requirements introduced with this new landscape.

So the question is: how can you do end to end management of a service when the infrastructure for the service depends on combination of multiple internal and external service providers?  read more »

Last month, I've read a post by James Governor of RedMonk (an analyst firm specialized enough to actually know what they are talking about :) where James talked about the “best practices” vs “best infrastructure” inquiring whether SMBs would be better off using infrastructure provided by large service providers like Google, Yahoo, Amazon, etc. and if SMBs do choose to use these services more and more what would be the impact of this in the industry.

In the comments, I had pointed out the differences between the “best infrastructure” and “best service (support)”. I keep running into this theme so I wanted to write more about it, if for no other reason to clarify my own thinking.  read more »

Doug McClure has an insightful post where he describes the landscape most of us face when trying to implement a BSM solution.  read more »